Europe is drying up from heat, not lack of rainfall - Scientists: Agriculture, water transport and energy production are being hit
Scientists say droughts in Europe are increasingly being caused by scorching heat rather than a lack of rain, with soil moisture disappearing much faster. The soaring temperatures are also causing problems for agriculture. France is set to have its worst corn harvest in almost 50 years, while Romania has lost more than 1 million hectares of crops. Rivers across the continent are flowing so slowly that waterways have been cut off and hydropower production is under pressure.
A study conducted by World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration of climate scientists, has found that record summer heat is exacerbating drought across Europe, evaporating water from the ground faster than it can be replaced by precipitation.
Scientists from 12 European countries have analyzed precipitation trends, agricultural drought or soil moisture, and "potential evaporation," which is a measure of the atmosphere's "thirst" or its ability to evaporate moisture, to understand how much of a role climate change is playing in this year's drought.
They concluded that while long-term rainfall trends across the continent are changing, it is extreme heat that is turning ordinary dry spells into more severe droughts. The study found that agricultural land droughts in Western Europe are now five times more likely to occur, due to climate change. In Eastern Europe, where dry conditions have already lasted for six months, land droughts are 11 times more likely to occur.
In Western Europe, climate change was not found to be the main cause of the lack of rain, but it is making once-rare heatwave conditions much more common, dramatically showing how thirsty the atmosphere has become. In western Europe, heatwaves capable of causing these intense evaporation conditions are about 80 times more likely to occur than in a world without climate change. In eastern Europe, they are about 40 times more likely.
The consequences are already being felt beyond farmers' fields. Low crop yields, shallow rivers and lower energy production are threatening to raise the price of household essentials, a burden that falls first on low-income families. With temperatures predicted to rise unless global-warming emissions are urgently reduced, drought conditions in Europe could rapidly worsen.
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