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Climate Change Made Libya Flooding Up to 50 Times More Likely, 50% More Intense
"This devastating disaster shows how climate change-fueled extreme weather events are combining with human factors to create even bigger impacts," said the head of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center.
Sep 19, 2023
International scientists announced Tuesday that an event like the extreme rain that led to deadly flooding in Libya earlier this month "has become up to 50 times more likely and up to 50% more intense compared to a 1.2°C cooler climate," or the preindustrial world.
Those were among the findings of a World Weather Attribution (WWA) analysis of torrential rainfall in several countries across the Mediterranean during the first two weeks of September, conducted by researchers from Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
"The research is top notch and follows established... rapid attribution principles, grounded in peer-reviewed methods and data that pass highest quality standards," said Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the Leipzig University in Germany not involved with the analysis.
While the storm dubbed Daniel by Greek meteorologists impacted various countries, the African nation of Libya—which has been in chaos since 2011—was by far the worst affected, largely due to a pair of dams that failed and let floodwaters kill thousands in the city of Derna.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Saturday that at least 3,958 people were killed and over 9,000 more were still missing. Some groups have reported higher figures, such as the Libyan Red Crescent, which previously put the death toll at 11,300.
Haustein noted that in terms of the death and destruction in Libya, the WWA researchers "discuss a host of confounding factors (long-lasting armed conflict, political instability, potential design flaws and poor maintenance of dams) that have led to an extreme level of vulnerability and exposure. All independent of climate change."
"Accordingly, they do not speculate about the role of climate change regarding damage and fatalities," the scientist explained. "Rather they highlight that the lack of early warning action and disaster relief has played a critical role in worsening the destructive outcome. The implications as far as adaptation is concerned are crucially important nonetheless, especially in light of the drastically increased risk for an event like this to happen again within the coming decades (rather than twice a millennium)."
Julie Arrighi, interim director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, which had researchers working on the WWA report, said that
"this devastating disaster shows how climate change-fueled extreme weather events are combining with human factors to create even bigger impacts, as more people, assets, and infrastructure are exposed and vulnerable to flood risks."
"However, there are practical solutions that can help us prevent these disasters from becoming routine," Arrighi stressed, "such as strengthened emergency management, improved impact-based forecasts and warning systems, and infrastructure that is designed for the future climate."
The WWA team also found that for the region including Greece and parts of Bulgaria and Turkey, human-induced climate change made an extreme event up to 10 times more likely and up to 40% more intense. As the WWA report notes, the flooding led to at least 17 deaths in Greece, seven in Turkey, six in Spain, and four in Bulgaria.
"The worst-affected region in Greece, the Thessaly plain, accounts for over one-quarter of the country's agricultural production, the report says. "After more than 75,000 hectares were inundated, it is estimated that the agricultural sector in Thessaly will need five years to recover from the damages and for the lands to become fertile again."
Friederike Otto, a climatologist at the U.K.'s Imperial College London who worked on the WWA analysis, said Tuesday that "the Mediterranean is a hotspot of climate change-fueled hazards."
"After a summer of devastating heatwaves and wildfires with a very clear climate change fingerprint, quantifying the contribution of global warming to these floods proved more challenging," Otto added. "But there is absolutely no doubt that reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience to all types of extreme weather is paramount for saving lives in the future."
The analysis was released on the eve of the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit in New York City—which some world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, have decided to skip despite demands for bold action, particularly from rich nations that are largely responsible for the planetary emergency.
Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said Tuesday that "the disaster in Derna is yet another example of what climate change is already doing to our weather."
"Obviously multiple factors in Libya turned Storm Daniel into a human catastrophe; it wasn't climate change alone. But climate change did make the storm much more extreme and much more intense and that resulted in the loss of thousands of lives," Chapagain continued. "That should be a wake-up call for the world to fulfill the commitment on reducing emissions, to ensure climate adaptation funding, and tackle the issues of loss and damage."
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As US Sends Cluster Munitions to Ukraine, Three More Countries Destroy Stockpiles
Nobel laureate Mary Wareham admonished nonsignatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions to join "without delay" as Bulgaria, Slovakia, and South Africa said they have dismantled their arsenals.
Sep 15, 2023
As the U.S. gives cluster bombs to Ukraine—and as the Biden administration reportedly moves to send longer-range missiles armed with them to Kyiv—three nations this week said they've finished destroying their stockpiles of the internationally banned weapons amid renewed calls for more countries to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions.
The 11th meeting of parties to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), to which 112 nations are party, wrapped up Thursday in Geneva on a high note as Bulgaria, Slovakia, and South Africa announced that they have completed the destruction of a combined 9,582 bombs and 585,422 bomblets. South Africa is the only country that once possessed but gave up both nuclear weapons and cluster bombs.
"Countries that have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions have repeatedly demonstrated their commitment to destroy their stockpiles, clear remnants, and oppose the weapon's use," said Human Rights Watch acting arms director Mary Wareham, who played a key role in the CCM's success.
"The main concern remains with countries unwilling to ban the weapon that may continue to use them now or start using them in the future," added Wareham, who was also jointly awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, the refusal of countries including Russia, Ukraine, and the United States to end the use and transfer of cluster munitions caused nearly 1,000 civilian casualties last year.
"Countries that have not banned cluster munitions should heed the call of the United Nations secretary-general and join the convention without delay," Wareham asserted.
A youth contingent of the advocacy group Mine Action Fellows, members of which attended the Geneva meeting, said in a statement that "while we have much to celebrate, we cannot ignore the harm done by states not party and the escalation in deaths from cluster munitions."
"Producing, using, and transferring cluster munitions by any actor, under any circumstance is unacceptable," the group added. "We call for an immediate stop to the transfer and use of this indiscriminate weapon."
The remarks from Wareham and Mine Action Fellows came as the Biden administration is reportedly close to approving the shipment of longer-range ballistic missiles armed with cluster munitions to Ukrainian forces defending their country from a 19-month Russian invasion. This, after the U.S. began sending 155mm artillery shells to Kyiv earlier this summer. Russian and Ukrainian forces have both killed and wounded soldiers and civilians with cluster bombs during the war.
Earlier this month, the U.S. also started sending Ukraine depleted uranium munitions, which have been linked to birth defects, miscarriages, and cancers after their use by U.S. forces in Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Multiple congressional efforts to prohibit the export of U.S. cluster munitions to any country have failed to advance. Earlier this summer, the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee voted down a resolution proposed by Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), while backing a new one led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—whose controversial sponsorship doomed the measure.
The latest effort to thwart the transfer of cluster bombs is an amendment spearheaded by Jacobs and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), with Reps. Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Andrea Salinas (D-Ore.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) as co-sponsors.
"Sending cluster munitions anywhere in the world makes the United States complicit in the unavoidable and inevitable civilian harm that follows," Jacobs told The Intercept on Thursday. "No amount of guardrails or promised precautions are enough because these weapons are unpredictable and maim and kill indiscriminately—potentially years after their intended use."
Claiming that the U.S. "has a strong reputation for upholding human rights around the world," Jacobs added that "that message is muddied when we're willing to send these weapons that are infamous for the carnage they cause."
Since the end of the Vietnam War, unexploded cluster munitions—which can look like inviting toys to children who find them—have killed approximately 20,000 civilians in Laos, where the U.S. dropped more bombs than all sides in World War II combined. The U.S. dropped as many as 270 million cluster bombs on Laos, and less than 1% of the unexploded bomblets have been cleared since. They are still killing civilians to this day.
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'This Is Unprecedented': Record-Breaking Rain Brings Deadly Flooding to Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria
"I am afraid that the careless summers, as we knew them… will cease to exist," the Greek prime minister said.
Sep 06, 2023
Historic flooding in Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria has killed at least 11 people as rain followed heat and fire in a summer of extremes.
The storm knocked out bridges, swept cars out to sea, and made roads impassable, dumping more than two feet of rain on some parts of Greece within hours.
"This is the most extreme phenomenon in terms of the maximum amount of rain in a 24-hour period since records began in the country," Vassilis Kikilias, who acts as Greece's climate crisis and civil protection minister, said, as The Guardian reported.
The torrential rain follows deadly wildfires in the country that killed more than 20, including one megafire that scorched 81,000 hectares of forest, making it the largest in Europe since record-keeping began in 2000, as The Associated Press reported at the time.
Both fires and heavy rains are made more likely by the climate crisis caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. Hotter temperatures generate ideal fire conditions, and the atmosphere can hold around 7% more moisture per 1.8°F of warming. The floods come as the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service determined that summer 2023 was the hottest on record.
"I am afraid that the careless summers, as we knew them… will cease to exist and from now on the coming summers are likely to be ever more difficult," Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Tuesday, as The Guardian reported.
"We almost couldn't believe the forecast."
"Correct," Just Stop Oil responded on social media. "It's not getting better. It gets worse until we stop oil and gas."
The immediate cause of the rain was a system called Storm Daniel, as The New York Times reported. In the 13 hours between 12 am and 3 pm Tuesday, it dumped more than 25 inches of rain on the town of Pelion and its surroundings.
"We almost couldn't believe the forecast," Konstantinos Lagouvardos, the research director at the National Observatory of Athens, told The New York Times. "This is a number we've never seen before. It's unreal."
Another town in the Pelion region, Zagora, saw 21 inches in 10 hours Tuesday, with more predicted to fall.
"A historic flooding event is underway!" European Synchrotron Radiation Facility researcher Nahel Belgherze wrote on the site formerly known as Twitter.
One Pelion resident, Iro Proia, shared a dramatic video on Facebook of cars being pushed out to sea by floodwaters.
Another hard-hit area was the city of Volos, which received approximately 10 times its monthly rainfall in less than 14 hours, as CNN reported. There, the River Krafsidonas overflowed, destroying a bridge, according to The New York Times. One man was also killed in the city when a wall collapsed on top of him, The Guardian reported. Another woman died close to Pelion.
One resident who lives near Volos described the toll of back-to-back extreme weather events.
"Everything saved from the fire we had in July has been destroyed by this bad weather," 49-year-old Christos Kleftakis told Agence France-Presse. "This is unprecedented—these severe weather events, the strength of the rain, the wind. I've never seen anything like that before."
The death toll was even higher in Turkey, where two people died in Istanbul and four died in the city of Kirklareli, while two remain missing.
In another example of weather whiplash, Istanbul's reservoirs had been at their lowest in nine years before the floods. The storm flooded streets and homes in the capital, closing some subway stations and trapping about 12 people in a library, who were eventually rescued, Al Jazeera reported.
In Bulgaria, the usually dry Black Sea Coast saw its heaviest rainfall since 1994, according to AFP, entirely cutting off the area south of the city of Burgas and killing at least three people.
"It's a disaster," Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said, as AFP reported.
And it's predicted the situation could worsen in the coming days, as Storm Daniel potentially develops into a hurricane-like cyclone over the Mediterranean, also known as a "medicane," CBS News explained.
Such storms usually need sea temperatures of around 79°F to form, and meteorologists said that there was "more than enough warmth."
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