From The Guardian

Picturesque towns across central Europe are inundated by dirty flood water after heavy weekend rains turned tranquil streams into raging rivers that wreaked havoc on infrastructure.

The floods have killed at least 15 people and destroyed buildings from Austria to Romania. The destruction comes after devastating floods around the world last week when entire villages were submerged in Myanmar and nearly 300 prisoners escape a collapsed jail in Nigeria, where floods have affected more than 1 million people.

Climate scientists say they are troubled by the damage but unsurprised by the intensity. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, of Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute.

She said the death and damage across Africa and Europe highlighted “how poorly prepared the world is for such floods”.

Scientists take care when attributing extreme rains to human influence because so many factors shape the water cycle. Although it is well established that hotter air can hold more moisture, whether violent downpours occur also depends on how much water is available to fall.

Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich, said immediate analyses of the central European floods suggested most of the water vapour came from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, both of which have grown hotter as a result of human-induced climate breakdown, resulting in more water evaporating into the air.

“On average, the intensity of heavy precipitation events increases by 7% for each degree of global warming,” she said. “We now have 1.2C of global warming, which means that on average heavy precipitation events are 8% more intense.”

Read the whole story – Climate scientists troubled by damage from floods ravaging central Europe