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Drought in Europe

Flavour said:
crazy pictures of dried up italian rivers here
www.ildolomiti.it

Ondata di caldo e siccità, dal Brenta al Po (FOTO) i fiumi sono in secca: “L'Adige è sotto del 24%, dati allarmanti”. Dall'Adriatico "acqua salata già risalita di 21 chilometri"

TRENTO. Dal Po (ed i suoi affluenti) al Brenta, dal Tagliamento fino all'Adige: con la siccità estrema e l'ondata di caldo eccezionale che stanno interessando buona parte del Paese i fiumi nel Nord Italia sono in crisi. Le immagini raccolte e condivise sui social negli scorsi giorni parlano...
www.ildolomiti.it www.ildolomiti.it

the last para of the article says rain is 65% less than what it normally is in the Veneto region, and that it hasn't rained for 110 days consecutively. Agricultural losses will be between 50 and 100% of yield. The Adige river is 24% lower than normal, the Brenta 43%, the Bacchiglione 58% and the Po 47%.
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i imagine that there'll be some subsidence issues to come too
 
story said:
Yes.
As I said, it is already too late.


Jaysus, I’m not arguing to do nothing. We need to keep trying, of course we do. I’m not quite at the stage of helplessness.

But to repeat. Even if we turn everything off tonight and never turn any of it on again, it’s already too late to save the world we knew. In fact, turning everything off also destroys the world we have lived in, but in a different way.

Until and unless we grasp that the world we lived in, that we currently live in, is absolutely unsustainable and must end, regardless of anything we do to maintain the status quo, we can’t save the things we really want to. Like easy access to food and heat/cool on demand.

We can’t continue as we are.
The changes we must make must be drastic.
Whatever we do next, the world as we currently experience it is over.

It’s the reluctance to accept this that hampers our efforts to make the necessary changes.
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We need to stop waiting for everyone else and just do it ourselves.
 
campanula said:
KSR's writing trajectory has been consistently prophetic and illuminating since the 2004 trilogy comprising '40 signs of Rain;, '50 degrees below' and '60 days and counting'.
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I liked his Mars trilogy and Red Moon is awesome. Years of Rice and Salt is a fascinating premise but I thought the book was great, but flawed.
 
Drought Threatens Major Rivers in the U.S. and Europe
Maritime Executive. Jul 29, 2022
Romania is a major grains and sunflower exporter in EU with part of its farms depending on Danube River basin for irrigation. The government has already warned that this year it could export much less corn after drought battered harvests. Water storage have been an issue, with levels about half of the multiyear average this year.

Besides agriculture, Danube’s low water levels in Romania also put at risk the river’s transportation and the output of the power plant along the river basin.
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Meanwhile, the Rhine River has also been affected by the changing climatic regime. As one of Europe’s important inland waterways, its current low water levels is disconcerting, specifically in Germany.

“The Rhine is a crucial inland waterway, on which goods are shipped to and from the industrial heartlands of southern and western Germany. Low water levels mean that river barges will have to travel with reduced freight to limit their draft or even cease operating altogether,” Salomon Fiedler, an economist at Berenberg Bank, said in a note last week.
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Yesterday me and my mum went on a butterfly identification walk. We past a new luxury housing development which was only accessible by car and because of the position of the homes would have meant that it would have been impossible to walk into town. As long as stuff like this keeps being built it's going to be hard to change anything.
 
frogwoman said:
Yesterday me and my mum went on a butterfly identification walk. We past a new luxury housing development which was only accessible by car and because of the position of the homes would have meant that it would have been impossible to walk into town. As long as stuff like this keeps being built it's going to be hard to change anything.
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There's a similar thing around our way. Not a luxury development, but a bog standard one. The only pedestrian access is via a long flight of steps and a narrow, steep hill where the pavement disappears unless you cross the road. Everyone objected to it, including local councillors and planners, only to be overruled by central government. Short sighted ignorant bastards the lot of them.
 
My poplars have lost over 25% of their leaves in one week - the entire floor of the wood covered in crisped leaves (not even had chance for the anthocyanins to develop). I planted 100 or so saplings last autumn but couldn't get round to check cos I used brambles as nurse plants so I have no idea what percentage of them might have survived. Had to water a dawn redwood for the first time ever - spent several hours trickling 150ish litres of water (8 large buckets) over the root sphere. My neighbouring farmer has an extraction licence from the Yare so he set up an irrigation pipe to cover the west side of the wood (where the fruit trees are). Showed me the difference between irrigated and non-irrigated maize - the dry corn was just over 12inches while normal maize, at this time of year, is usually reaching 4foot tall. Sugar beet shrivelled in fields and all the angelica and hogweed umbellifers are skeletal, and I have lost all my milk-parsley colonies so could be a total disaster for swallowtails in the area - they are already barely hanging on in a tiny patch of Norfolk. Only hope now is to interbreed with European swallowtails which occasionally migrate across the channel...but have not yet been seen in East Anglia. Only had one brood this year in June with diminishing hopes for the survival of the caterpillars.
 
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campanula said:
My poplars have lost over 25% of their leaves in one week - the entire floor of the wood covered in crisped leaves (not even had chance for the anthocyanins to develop). I planted 100 or so saplings last autumn but couldn't get round to check cos I used brambles as nurse plants so I have no idea what percentage of them might have survived. Had to water a dawn redwood for the first time ever - spent several hours trickling 150ish litres of water (8 large buckets) over the root sphere. My neighbouring farmer has an extraction licence from the Yare so he set up an irrigation pipe to cover the west side of the wood (where the fruit trees are). Showed me the difference between irrigated and non-irrigated maize - the dry corn was just over 12inches while normal maize, at this time of year, is usually reaching 4foot tall. Sugar beet shrivelled in fields and all the angelica and hogweed umbellifers are skeletal.
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Yeah my last walk in Epping Forest was like autumn, waves of dry crispy leaves underfoot.

No rain forecast for fucking ages.
 
Flavour said:
Yeah I'm seeing quite big old trees visibily suffering this summer, don't remember seeing that before.
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:(

Are you wise in the ways of trees?

(I have a biology degree and know next to fuck all, so don’t take that as an attack)
 
My apple tree has desiccated leaves. I’ve been watering it intermittently (the grass around it is green) but the heat has fried the leaves and it’s dumping apples daily now.

And my little Japanese maple dropped all its leaves after that hot spell, even though it’s in the shade of the ash tree. It’s put out two hopeful replacements, so it is striving. Ash seems okay despite having early stages of H. fraxineus.

Basil rosemary thyme etc all thriving though.

Some days as I’m tending my garden I feel like the Little Prince tending his rose bush.




campanula That all sounds very alarming and upsetting. What on earth is to become of us.
 
Elpenor said:
I don’t think there’s been more than a few spots of rain (on just a couple of days) in my part of Devon since 30th June
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We've had some rain thankfully. Reservoirs in this region are about 60% full so not too bad, but hopefully we'll get more rain soon to top them up.
 
There has been no rain since March here in the east! However, I am not getting apocalyptic after 1 hot summer - just last year was rainy, blighty and disease ridden. Weather is by its very nature, unpredictable and climate does not turn over the course of a year. Trees which are struggling have their own ways of dealing with drought...any examination of a cross-section of trunk will reveal the differences from one year to the next. Those wide stretches between rings - evidence of a good summer with plentiful sunlight and water, interspersed with closely packed annual rings where summer growth was attenuated because of late frosts, dry winds, lack of rain, far-off tectonic events and so on. Dropping leaves is the first sign of drought and is basically a protective measure to slow transpiration. There will be deaths...but also opportunities. Birches may vanish from the southern lowlands but pines and laurels are quick to fill the gaps. Nature is nothing if not resilient and life is truly tenacious so, as a gardener, I am planning for a changing climate and acting accordingly.

story - we can still have roses...just not those water-sucking, large-leaved, centifolia types. Time to trawl the world of species, starting with the absolute delights of the little dune roses - the spinossissimas/burnet roses (often referred to as 'Scotch roses), Or the apple scented briars, the rampant musk roses - rosa brunonii, rosa bracteata, rose californicae, rosa cooperi. Early delights with the banksian roses, flowering in April. If you have space, look out for the gorgeous pale yellow 'Mermaid'...or Austrian copper, and then there are the true china tea roses - devoniensis, Lady Hillingdon, Sophie's Perpetual, rosa bengale and best of all, mutabilis, Or, all the small 5 petalled species such as r.hugonis, r.ecae, r.cantabridgiensis and the perfumed r.primula. I know you are a bit skint (like me) but sometime in November, look on Trevor Whites rose nursery website (Trevor Whites Old Fashioned Roses) and order at least 1 wildling. For the joys it will bring, money well spent.

Apols going off on garden stuff but we do notice climatic changes when immersed in seasonal growing cycles.
 
story said:
Until something is done about this kind of consumerist profligacy. not enough is being done.
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Ironically it's the energy companies working hardest to slow down the mass consumption economy by making sure nobody's got any money left after they've paid for electricity and fuel.
 
campanula said:
There has been no rain since March here in the east! However, I am not getting apocalyptic after 1 hot summer - just last year was rainy, blighty and disease ridden. Weather is by its very nature, unpredictable and climate does not turn over the course of a year. Trees which are struggling have their own ways of dealing with drought...any examination of a cross-section of trunk will reveal the differences from one year to the next. Those wide stretches between rings - evidence of a good summer with plentiful sunlight and water, interspersed with closely packed annual rings where summer growth was attenuated because of late frosts, dry winds, lack of rain, far-off tectonic events and so on. Dropping leaves is the first sign of drought and is basically a protective measure to slow transpiration. There will be deaths...but also opportunities. Birches may vanish from the southern lowlands but pines and laurels are quick to fill the gaps. Nature is nothing if not resilient and life is truly tenacious so, as a gardener, I am planning for a changing climate and acting accordingly.

story - we can still have roses...just not those water-sucking, large-leaved, centifolia types. Time to trawl the world of species, starting with the absolute delights of the little dune roses - the spinossissimas/burnet roses (often referred to as 'Scotch roses), Or the apple scented briars, the rampant musk roses - rosa brunonii, rosa bracteata, rose californicae, rosa cooperi. Early delights with the banksian roses, flowering in April. If you have space, look out for the gorgeous pale yellow 'Mermaid'...or Austrian copper, and then there are the true china tea roses - devoniensis, Lady Hillingdon, Sophie's Perpetual, rosa bengale and best of all, mutabilis, Or, all the small 5 petalled species such as r.hugonis, r.ecae, r.cantabridgiensis and the perfumed r.primula. I know you are a bit skint (like me) but sometime in November, look on Trevor Whites rose nursery website (Trevor Whites Old Fashioned Roses) and order at least 1 wildling. For the joys it will bring, money well spent.

Apols going off on garden stuff but we do notice climatic changes when immersed in seasonal growing cycles.
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Thank you for these lovely suggestions.
I was referring to the Little Princ’s rather futile but kind and loving and hopeful attention to his selfish rose in the face of inevitable purposelessness rather than lamenting roses myself. I have planted a R. cana alongside hawthorn, Viburnum opulus and Sambucus nigra, and I’ve inherited a lovely repeat blooming dark red rose, a rambling rose in hideous old hotel- pink and a rather pretty yellow rose, but none of them are scented, which seems a little pointless. I may take those out in time, or plant more scented and more suitable roses alongside them, to complement their habits and colours (maybe something bright orange or black against the pink one). I love the rosehip syrup I get from R. rugosa but not sure I have the space for that to be large enough for the fruit, and its easy enough to forage that elsewhere.

My sister has a special love for roses. She has a place in Norfolk so I’ll certainly be passing on your suggestions to her.


I take your point about nature being resilient and having good and bad years. It’s still upsetting to see things struggle though.

I was going to plant some birch (we had a little discussion about this elswhere on here a wee while ago) but I’m now tending towards olive and a pine of some kind. I’m thinking of the pine trees in Greece, with the really long needles and the wind sighing and singing through them like a long outward breath.

The magnolia seems fine too. I guess the species has been around for such a very long time that it’s learnt how to deal with dramatic climate change pretty well.

(as an aside, the rotten bloody slugs have eaten every last shred of my chicory. I’ll put a plastic bottle cloche over it tonight and every night in hopes of recovery from the root)
 
story said:
Thank you for these lovely suggestions.
I was referring to the Little Princ’s rather futile but kind and loving and hopeful attention to his selfish rose in the face of inevitable purposelessness rather than lamenting roses myself. I have planted a R. cana alongside hawthorn, Viburnum opulus and Sambucus nigra, and I’ve inherited a lovely repeat blooming dark red rose, a rambling rose in hideous old hotel- pink and a rather pretty yellow rose, but none of them are scented, which seems a little pointless. I may take those out in time, or plant more scented and more suitable roses alongside them, to complement their habits and colours (maybe something bright orange or black against the pink one). I love the rosehip syrup I get from R. rugosa but not sure I have the space for that to be large enough for the fruit, and its easy enough to forage that elsewhere.

My sister has a special love for roses. She has a place in Norfolk so I’ll certainly be passing on your suggestions to her.


I take your point about nature being resilient and having good and bad years. It’s still upsetting to see things struggle though.

I was going to plant some birch (we had a little discussion about this elswhere on here a wee while ago) but I’m now tending towards olive and a pine of some kind. I’m thinking of the pine trees in Greece, with the really long needles and the wind sighing and singing through them like a long outward breath.

The magnolia seems fine too. I guess the species has been around for such a very long time that it’s learnt how to deal with dramatic climate change pretty well.

(as an aside, the rotten bloody slugs have eaten every last shred of my chicory. I’ll put a plastic bottle cloche over it tonight and every night in hopes of recovery from the root)
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Yeah, I have something of a rose fetish but have generally always gone for the simple single wildlings rather than hybrid teas and floribundas. They all bloom in a 2month window then I get heps and haws for winter. My magnolias couldn't cope with the dry soil sadly. I agree that scented roses are lovely and have an especially joy for those with scented foliage - eglantines and r.primula which smells of incense
 
I keep noticing this thread about drought in Europe and thinking to myself that whoever decided to spell drought that way was particularly English.

It should be spelt "drowt" surely. At least if there is any justice in the world!
 
They are introducing water rationing here this month but not for domestic and farming - it’s primarily directed at the hotels and leisure .
 
not-bono-ever said:
unfortunately, capitalism is still based on the premise of digging stuff up and setting fire to it ultimately. we are fucked.
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Millenarianism, in either religious or secular forms, is based on the idea that ultimately we are fucked
 
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