Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
Tue, September 19, 2023
Thousands of people died in a horrific flood in Libya earlier this month, a tragedy that was worsened by human-caused climate change, a study released Tuesday found.
In fact, the warming world made the Libyan disaster 50 times more likely, with "building in flood plains, poor dam maintenance and other local factors turning the extreme weather into a humanitarian disaster," the study said.
Julie Arrighi, director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said “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."
TOPSHOT - A boy pulls a suitcase past debris in a flash-flood damaged area in Derna, eastern Libya, on September 11, 2023. Flash floods in eastern Libya killed more than 2,300 people in the Mediterranean coastal city of Derna alone, the emergency services of the Tripoli-based government said on September 12. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images) ORIG FILE ID: AFP_33UV7CW.jpgMore
The study was prepared by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, which does quick analyses of weather and climate events to determine what, if any, role human-caused climate change may have had.
How storms led to disaster
In early September, a storm that affected Spain and a separate system named Storm Daniel, which formed in the eastern Mediterranean, brought "large amounts of rain over a 10-day period to several countries, including Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and Libya.
"The heavy rain led to massive floods across the region, killing four people in Bulgaria, five in Spain, seven in Turkey, and 17 in Greece." according to a statement from the WWA.
However, the greatest disaster occurred in Libya, where the floods caused the collapse of two dams. The exactnumber of casualties is still not clear as the death toll has varied, with government officials and aid agencies giving tallies ranging from about 4,000 to 11,000 dead.
Meteorologists say Storm Daniel was a particularly potent "medicane," which is shorthand for Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone.
The role of climate change
The scientists in the new study found that human-caused climate change made the disaster in Libya up to 50 times more likely to happen, with up to 50% more rain during the period, as a result of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists used established peer-reviewed methods to determine the contribution of climate change to the floods.
Overall, according to the WWA, the event is still "extremely unusual," and can only be expected to occur around once in 300-600 years, in the current climate.
In Libya, "a combination of several factors – including long-lasting armed conflict, political instability, potential design flaws and poor maintenance of dams – all contributed to the disaster." The interaction of these factors, and the very heavy rain that was worsened by climate change, created the extreme death and destruction, the study said.
'Bad luck' and how climate change is 'loading the dice'
According to Yale Climate Connections' meteorologist Jeff Masters, who was not part of the study but wrote about the connection between climate change and Libya last week, the "flood disaster was driven in part by the meteorological bad luck of Daniel coming ashore directly atop a compact zone of higher elevation.
"That’s only part of the story, though. Human-induced climate change is loading the dice, enhancing the ability of tropical cyclones and similar storms to produce extreme rain as they draw more water vapor out of oceans into a warming atmosphere."
Contributing: The Associated Press
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Climate change had huge role in Libya flooding, study says
Climate change made Libya flooding 50 times more likely: Report
JON HAWORTH
Tue, September 19, 2023
Climate change made Libya flooding 50 times more likely: Report
Climate change was one of the main factors that led to the catastrophic flooding in Libya, according to a new report.
World Weather Attribution (WWA), a collaboration of scientists from all over the globe, released a new report on Tuesday saying that human-caused climate change played a role in the devastating heavy rainfall event earlier this month in the Mediterranean.
“Human-caused warming made the heavy rainfall up to 10 times more likely in Greece, Bulgaria and Türkiye and up to 50 times more likely in Libya, with building in flood plains, poor dam maintenance and other local factors turning the extreme weather into ahumanitarian disaster,” the statement said.
While the WWA says that it is impossible to blame humans entirely as a direct cause of a natural disaster, it is emissions made and manufactured by humans and the warming of our planet that have increased the severity of these events.
“To quantify the effect of climate change on the heavy rain in the region, scientists analysed climate data and computer model simulations to compare the climate as it is today, after about 1.2°C of global warming since the late 1800s, with the climate of the past, following peer-reviewed methods,” the WWA said on Tuesday.
PHOTO: Rescuers and relatives of victims set up tents in front of collapsed buildings in Derna, Libya, Monday, Sept. 18, 2023. (Muhammad J. Elalwany/AP)
“For Greece, Bulgaria and Türkiye, the analysis showed that climate change made the heavy rain up to 10 times more likely to happen, with up to 40% more rain, as a result of human activities that have warmed the planet,” the report from the WWA concluded.
The report doesn’t place the blame squarely on climate change, however, and concluded that human error was another major element that contributed to the severity of the event.
Although the heavy rainfall in Libya is unusual and rare even factoring in climate change, the report highlighted poor dam maintenance, land use, armed conflict and political instability as factors that all played a significant role in the humanitarian disaster.
PHOTO: Rescuers and relatives of victims set up tents in front of collapsed buildings in Derna, Libya, Monday, Sept. 18, 2023. (Muhammad J. Elalwany/AP)
“The study also found that the destruction caused by the heavy rain was much greater due to factors that included construction in flood-prone areas, deforestation, and the consequences of the conflict in Libya,” the report said.
“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,” Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London, said. “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.”
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Alex Hall, director of UCLA Center for Climate Science, told ABC News that events like the one in Libya are much more likely to occur because of greenhouse gas emissions of the past 150 years and that “there is now about 10% more water vapor in the atmosphere,” Hall explained that this serves as extra fuel for storms and leads to more intense precipitation.
Said Julie Arrighi, Director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre: “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.”
Horrific Libya flooding made up to 50 times more likely by planet-warming pollution, scientists find
Laura Paddison, CNN
Tue, September 19, 2023 at 7:00 AM MDT·5 min read
The deadly rainfall which caused catastrophic flooding and destruction in Libya, as well as other parts of the Mediterranean, this month was made much more likely and worse by the human-caused climate crisis, in addition to other human factors, according to a new scientific analysis.
The World Weather Attribution initiative – a team of scientists that analyze the role of climate change in the aftermath of extreme weather events – found planet-warming pollution made the deadly rainfall in Libya up to 50 times more likely to occur and 50% worse. They also found the extreme rainfall that hit Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria was made up to 10 times more likely.
Destruction from the rainfall was worsened by a tangle of other factors, including inadequate infrastructure and building in flood-prone areas, according to the analysis published Tuesday.
Extreme rainfall has swept across large parts of the Mediterranean region since the start of the month.
On September 3, Spain saw huge amounts of rain over the course of just a few hours, leading to floods which killed at least six people. Then Storm Daniel formed, causing severe flooding over four days in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria.
A man carries a girl and a dog in the flooded village of Palamas near the city of Karditsa, central Greece, on September 8, 2023. - Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images
A collapsed bridge near the Pinios River Delta on the coast of Larissa, Greece, ten days after Storm Daniel, on September 14, 2023. - Konstantinos Tsakalidis/SOOC/AFP/Getty Images
At least 17 people died in Greece and large stretches of farmland in the central part of the country were left under water, causing damage experts say could take years to recover from. Storm Daniel also caused at least seven deaths in Turkey and four in Bulgaria.
By far the most catastrophic impacts, however, were in Libya.
Gaining energy from the unusually warm waters of the Mediterranean, Storm Daniel dumped record amounts of rainfall in parts of the country’s northeast, leading to the collapse of two dams and resulting in a 7-meter (23-foot) wave of water slamming into the city of Derna, sweeping people and buildings into the sea.
Official estimates suggest around 4,000 people were killed, while more than 10,000 remain missing.
To understand the impact of climate change on the likelihood and intensity of this heavy rainfall, WWA scientists analyzed climate data as well as climate models, which allow them to compare today’s climate – around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels – to a world without climate change.
They found in Libya, not only did climate change make the extreme rainfall up to 50 times more likely, it also made it up to 50% more intense.
An event as severe as the one the country experienced is unusual even in today’s warmer climate, the report found, and can be expected around once in every 600 years.
Destroyed houses in the city of Derna on September 16, 2023, after a powerful storm and heavy rainfall hit Libya. - Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
A car is submerged in mud in Derna, Libya, on September 16, 2023 - Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
For Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, climate change made the rainfall up to 10 times more likely and up to 40% heavier, the analysis found.
The kind of extreme rainfall this region experienced is likely to happen around once every 10 years, according to the report. Although for central Greece, which bore the brunt of the destruction between the three countries, it is only expected to happen around once in every 80 to 250 years.
The WWA scientists acknowledged that there remain uncertainties with the findings. It is not possible to definitively rule out the possibility the climate crisis had no impact on the floods, the report authors said. But, they added, there are “multiple reasons we can be confident that climate change did make the events more likely.”
Scientific research has long linked climate change to more intense rainfall. Studies have found that for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the air can hold around 7% more moisture.
What united many of the places the analysis focused on was the collision of the climate crisis and high levels of vulnerability, the report found. In central Greece, many communities live in flood-prone areas. In Libya, a lethal cocktail of aging, poorly-maintained infrastructure, a lack of warnings and deep political fractures turned a crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe.
“Through these events we are already seeing how climate change and human factors can combine to create compounding and cascading impacts,” Maja Vahlberg, of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and a report author, said on a call with reporters.
Steps can be taken to mitigate the risk, according to the report, including better early warning systems and evacuation plans.
“Reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience to all types of extreme weather is paramount for saving lives,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, at Imperial College London, said in a statement.
Karsten Haustein, a climate researcher at Leipzig University in Germany who was not involved in the study, said the findings show how rare these extreme rainfall events would have been in a world without climate change.
It’s “a remarkable result,” he told CNN.
Jasper Knight, a geoscientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, also not involved in the study, said that the results shine a light on how climate change is affecting extreme events in the Mediterranean, a region which tends not to receive much attention.
But, he told CNN, “we also need more in-depth analysis based on longer and more accurate records.”
Climate change, conflict made Libya deluge more likely: study
Kelly MACNAMARA
Tue, September 19, 2023
The Libyan city of Derna was struck by flooding after heavy rains on September 10 overwhelmed two dams (Mahmud Turkia)
Climate change made torrential rains that triggered deadly flooding in Libya up to 50 times more likely, new research said Tuesday, noting that conflict and poor dam maintenance turned extreme weather into a humanitarian disaster.
An enormous wave of water struck the city of Derna after heavy rains on September 10 overwhelmed two dams, washing whole buildings and untold numbers of inhabitants into the Mediterranean Sea.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group said a deluge of the magnitude seen in northeastern Libya was an event that occurred once every 300-600 years.
They found that the rains were both more likely and heavier as a result of human-caused global warming, with up to 50 percent more rain during the period.
In a report looking at floods linked to Storm Daniel that swept across large parts of the Mediterranean in early September, they found that climate change made the heavy rainfall up to 10 times more likely in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey and up to 50 times more likely in Libya.
But researchers stressed that other factors, including conflict and poor dam maintenance, turned the "extreme weather into a humanitarian disaster".
To unpick the potential role of global warming in amplifying extreme events, the WWA scientists use climate data and computer modelling to compare today's climate -- with roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius of heating since pre-industrial times -- to that of the past.
WWA scientists are normally able to give a more precise estimate of the role climate change has played -- or its absence -- in a given event.
But in this case they said the study was limited by a lack of observation weather station data, particularly in Libya, and because the events occurred over small areas, which are not as accurately represented in climate models.
That meant the findings have "large mathematical uncertainties", although the study said researchers were "confident that climate change did make the events more likely", because of factors including that current warming is linked to a 10-percent increase in rainfall intensity.
- 'Bigger impacts' -
"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," said Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.
"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."
Daniel, which scientists said was the deadliest and costliest storm over the Mediterranean and Africa on record, formed in the eastern Mediterranean, causing deadly flooding across the region for the first 10 days of September.
The study said the magnitude of the impacts was driven by the vulnerability and exposure of communities and infrastructure.
For example, in central Greece, the damage was increased because cities are located in flood-prone areas.
In Libya, where the death toll in Derna alone has exceeded 3,300 and is expected to rise, the authors noted that "long-lasting armed conflict, political instability, potential design flaws and poor maintenance of dams all contributed to the disaster".
"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," said Julie Arrighi, director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
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