Study says climate change made Europe drought more severe

Human-caused climate change has intensified a drought across Europe, with extreme heat rather than low rainfall driving the exceptionally dry conditions, an international team of scientists said Thursday.

The source says Europe is facing a major drought, with countries from France to Romania dealing with dry rivers, water restrictions and severe wildfires after a historic heatwave in June. A new study found that the hotter climate today has sped up moisture loss from soils, lakes and rivers, increasing the chance of very dry conditions.

Mariam Zachariah, a co-author of the World Weather Attribution study from Imperial College London, said much of Europe had below-average spring rainfall, but climate-driven heat made the drought more severe. She said the drought was not mainly a story of low rainfall, but of a warmer atmosphere causing greater moisture deficits on land. She said drought risk can continue to rise even in regions where rainfall has changed little or is projected to increase seasonally.

Scientists cited in the source said a warmer atmosphere can hold about seven percent more water vapour for every 1C increase in temperature. The planet has warmed about 1.4C since 1850-1900, primarily because of the burning of coal, oil and gas.

Scientists also say climate change is making destructive events such as droughts, floods and heatwaves more frequent and intense, and that Europe is the world's fastest-warming continent. The Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the hottest June ever recorded in western Europe, with a severe heatwave causing thousands of excess deaths.

Study co-author Dominik Schumacher from ETH Zurich said even regions that had a relatively wet winter were baked dry months later. He said increasingly hot air dries out soils, which then become even drier and hotter. He added that this rapid drying also prepared the land for wildfires.

For the study, scientists from Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom used weather data and computer models to compare the drought in today's hotter world with a climate that was 1.4C cooler. They found that extremely dry soils are five times more likely today in western Europe than in a world without climate change, and 11 times more likely in eastern Europe. They also found that the exceptionally high evaporative demand observed between April and June in western Europe was about 80 times more likely.