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German forests are on the verge of collapse. Europe dries up. Wildfires explode across Spain. [1]
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Date: 2023-03-27
A man carries a sheep on his back during the fire at Boa Vista, Portugal, 12 July 2022.
We are only at a 1.2 Celsius rise across the planet, but some regions are warming faster than others—one of the fastest-warming regions in Europe and North Africa.
Drought in parts of France is so dire that the country in some areas of the country has denied housing permits despite having a massive housing shortage. The reason? Europe is drying up, and new housing requires water. Water that is not available.
In Spain, an early wildfire season has been in the news where entire villages have been evacuated.
In Germany, forests, including spruce and hardwoods, have been weakened by climate change and are dying en masse. It all began in 2018 when heavy snowfall broke branches off forest trees where insects and fungi could enter the tree. Last year's drought was the final blow to the region's forests.
Wired noted the following:
It’s just one of many signs that Europe is running dry. “What we are looking at is something like a multiyear drought,” says Rohini Kumar of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. Unusually low rainfall and snowfall was recorded this winter not just in France but also in the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, and parts of Italy and Germany. The current predicament follows European droughts in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022.
Experts fear that we still do not know enough about the climate crisis and that the 2023 and 2024 summers could be historic in damaging property, agriculture, wildlife, and humans, particularly in the Mediterranean and Europe. The United Nations IPCC report asserts that we are flying blind into the storm much sooner than expected.
Monga Bay writes on the crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean:
In a February 2022 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that temperatures in the Mediterranean are rising about 20% faster than the global average. Regional averages are already 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) higher than preindustrial levels. Globally, the rise has been slower, to about 1.1-1.3°C (2-2.3°F). Even if humans were to turn off the greenhouse gas tap and scotch emissions soon, the Mediterranean will likely be 2-4°C (3.6-7.2°F) hotter than it was in the 19th century by 2100. Part of the regional rise is readily explainable, said Wolfgang Cramer, an environmental geographer and global ecologist at Aix-Marseille University in southern France. Three heat-hogging continents — Europe, Asia and Africa — bracket the region’s namesake sea. And continental land masses tend to warm faster than watery parts of Earth, Cramer explained. “It’s just pure physics,” he said. In that sense, the Mediterranean isn’t unique, Lionello said. “Most of the [terrestrial] regions of the world are warming faster than the global mean,” he added. “This doesn’t make the problem easier to manage.” In the century ahead, the region’s large and socioeconomically diverse human population of more than 540 million will need to grapple with this rapidly warming climate. They’ll also have to find ways to cope with the other problems converging here: threatened biodiversity, high pollution, surging aridity, and increasing land degradation, among them. Climatologists, social scientists and development professionals are already wrestling with this perplexing set of issues in hopes of finding solutions, or at the least figuring out a way for the cradle of civilization to endure.
x Climate change is real and it’s here. Just look at Somalia. If we don’t DO something, this will be Europe and the US next. It’s not too late to stop this.#ClimateActionNow pic.twitter.com/VMxxmr6uhF — Peter Ullrich (@PJUllrich) March 25, 2023
Spain
Walking through the charred remains of the forested hillsides of Sierra de la Culebra that were devastated by Spain's worst wildfire last year, Pablo Martin Pinto is blunt. "We are moving from the era of big forest fires to mega forest fires in Spain," says this wildfire expert from Valladolid University, warning that such vast blazes were "here to stay". Firefighters said such a blaze was more typical of summer than spring. "We have to learn as much as we can from what has happened," said Martin Pinto. If Spain experiences "another summer in which temperatures don't fall below 35C for 20 days and it doesn't rain for four months, the vegetation will be liable to go up in flames" with the first lightning bolt, he warned.
Germany
Germany's forests are undoubtedly suffering as a result of climate change, with millions of seedlings planted in the hope of diversifying and restoring forests dying, warns Ulrich Dohle, chairman of the 10,000-member Bunds Deutscher Forstleute (BDF) forestry trade union. "It's a catastrophe. German forests are close to collapsing," Dohle added in an interview with t-online, a online news portal of Germany's Ströer media group.
What Dohle of the forestry trade union termed "dramatic tree deaths" began with winter snow dumps in early 2018 which broke branches, weakening the trees' natural defenses and letting in fungal infections, "followed by drought and bark beetle infestation" that killed off European spruce trees. One million older trees have since died — not only heat susceptible spruces, but even Germany's prized European Red Beech which had been widely planted over the past decade in the hope of creating climate stable forests, Dohle added. Foresters are unable to remember such a dire situation. "We don't know where it will end," Michael Blaschke, spokesman for North Rhine-Westphalia's forestry commission, Wald und Holz NRW, told national public radio Deutschlandfunk.
France
The Northern Hemisphere
The “fingerprints” of climate change are all over the drought that threatened crops and disrupted power supply in the Northern Hemisphere this summer, scientists say. As record-breaking heat desiccated soils and dried up rivers across Europe, China and the United States, experts called it a glimpse of the new normal — a warning backed by scientists on Wednesday. New research by 21 scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) service found that climate change made this year's drought at least 20 times more likely.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/27/2160443/-German-forests-are-on-the-verge-of-collapse-Europe-dries-up-Wildfires-explode-across-Spain
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