Six months worth of rainfall in just 36 hours has devastated Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, leaving nearly 36,000 people unhoused and at least 14 people dead. The disaster affected roughly 100 cities. One of Italy’s more wealthy regions, Emilia-Romagna is home…
Climate change? Nah!
Obviously someone in Italy, after visiting Venice, made a wish as they were blowing out their birthday candles…
“I wish all Italy was like Venice”
not realizing the consequences…
The carbon footprint of Italians is only about a third that of Americans (5.5 vs. 16 tons), not even counting the higher embodied carbon from imports (about 4 tons per American vs. 2 tons for Italians). Having personally watched a couple of Alpine glacier retreats in the nearby Swiss alps, e.g. Tremorgio, over the decades, it seems a bit unfair that such long-stable cultures pay such a price for climate disruption. I wonder what Ron DeSantis, who is of Italian heritage, plans to do about it. He could, for example, propose to bring US carbon emissions per capita to an Italian level.
These types of disasters (all types, including landslides, flooding, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, excess heat, and yes, even cold) will become much more frequent in the coming years. Mother Earth is pushing the extremes to new levels.
This level of flooding is coming PDQ to Miami, and a host of other cities in his State. He’ll capitalize on the damage and misery and brand it as a tourist attraction, just like a new Venice.
Everyone worries about the humans, as do I, but those poor pigs drowning breaks my animal loving heart.
Maybe Ted Cruz and family should look into buying a piece of property in Cancun, instead of renting.
DeSantis will be out of office before the shit hits the fan in Miami. And if we keep excusing this Evangelical mode of thinking that it’s a part of God’s plan then it’s going cost more money to try and fix instead working now to start mitigating the coming shit show.
Just like that, people are homeless and eating in soup kitchens. Global warming is such an inconvenience.
Thanks to cookbook writers like Marcella Hazan and Lynne Rossetto Kasper, and to brief visits to this region of Italy (including one five or six years ago), I associate Emilia Romagna with fantastic food, extensive agriculture, and natural and human-wrought beauty beyond compare. But according to Wikipedia’s article on the region (cf. Tuscany), population growth (including an influx of people not native to the region), urbanization and esp. suburbanization, continued deforestation, and esp. the loss of agricultural land to suburbanization and the resulting soil compression have in themselves made flooding a problem. Add the effects of climate change and, well…
From the Wikipedia article:
Land use changes can have strong effects on ecological functions. Human interactions such as agriculture, forestation and deforestation affect soil function, e.g. food and other biomass production, storing, filtering and transformation, habitat and gene pool.[18]
In the Emilia-Romagna plain, which represents half of the region and where three quarters of the population of the region live, the agricultural land area has been reduced by 157 km2 while urban and industrial areas have increased to over 130 km2 between 2003 and 2008. The impact of land use and particularly of the urbanisation of the Emilia-Romagna plain during this period has had some strong consequences in the economical and ecological assessment of the region. The loss of arable land is equivalent to a permanent loss of the capacity to feed 440,000 persons per year from resources grown within the region. The increased water runoff due to soil sealing requires adaptation measures for river and irrigation canals such as the building of retention basins, at a total cost estimated in the order of billions of euros.[19]
In 2000 there were 103,700 farm holdings and in 2010 there were 73,470, or a -29.2% loss in holdings for the region. The total utilised agricultural area (UAA) was 1,114,590 hectares (2,754,200 acres) in 2000 and 1,064,210 hectares (2,629,700 acres) in 2014 for a loss of 4.5%, indicating a downturn of smaller farm ownership. During this same timeframe there was a 14.5% decrease in the farm labor workforce.[20]
As someone who lives in a flood-prone area – and experienced the deluge (Hurricane Harvey) where we got 33 trillion gallons .of rainfall in a few days – I can relate. This was two blocks from my house.
We’re used to really heavy rainfall in Houston – but this lasted a week. The psychological effects lasted quite a while… especially for those that had flooding in their house. (Thankfully, only my garage got water and a bit of water came back up through the drain in my laundry nook.) The clean-up took months. I don’t envy what these folks will be going through in the coming years.
Next generation home design will be on stilts, underground.
Charleston, South Carolina floods on even a medium rain. The streets in the Historic district and other parts of town are actually below sea level. It won’t take long before they’re in a world of hurt.
There’s only one remedy available to avoid a dystopian future in the next couple of decades. And that is a worldwide program of direct climate cooling by increasing albedo and reflecting sunlight back into space. It’s way too late for either emission reductions or carbon removal, each of which is essential, to make much of a difference for many years
Hopefully TPM will publish something about the impact Typhoon Mawar has on Guam.
I was watching that unfold during the Giro last week. The rain was absolutely torrential, but lots of these towns wanted the race to keep going because it brings in lots of revenue to smaller towns along the progression. You could see that this was going to be a problem last week. The week before it looked like things would be messy in Calabria too.
the images of the woman crying while holding her dog in the boat, and the woman crying at the table waiting for a meal are heartbreaking.
When we think of sea level rise it’s easy to think of the average water level getting higher. But it also means that the frequency with which particular tide heights occur changes. So an area that has seen a 12’ high tide once in 50 years might start to see it every couple of years. What used to be a once-a-year high tide becomes a monthly high, etc. and if those highs correspond with large precipitation events, well, now you’re in real trouble because there’s no where for the water to drain to.
This is an excellent collection of photos, gives us all a personal aspect on how these people cope. It is a sad situation for everyone caught up in it. Nature is giving us back all the suffering we invited by trashing the Earth so profitably.
We need to turn the global war machine into a global emergency response mechanism.
Who needs war? Let “them” profit from our suffering in better ways.
