alt Hacker NewsIt’s not really a common perspective, but I have a theory that the primary cause of especially this kind of drought has way more to do with Europe essentially draining itself through all of the river straightening projects of the 19th century. How could it not be.
Before all the industrial age river straightening that has gone on until even rather recently with damming and concrete encasement projects in I think even the 1990s, you not only prevented the river water, i.e., mountain glacial waters and evaporative rain waters from meandering and saturating the lowlands, but you even speed up the pace not to mention shortening the distance.
Sure, it wasn’t a fast process, but as anyone who has had a small water leak in their home can tell you, constant flow of water at even a small rate adds up over 24/7/365 and 200 years. You’ve literally not just been draining all your fresh water into the ocean, but you’ve been draining your water battery in the form of the saturated wetlands, soil and structures like the gravel aquifers of Central Europe of water. More people are befuddled why there is a drought after they drained the water cycle battery for 200 years, not to mention that the European population has almost quadrupled over that time and people used far less water in the past, not even to mention that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe.
Ironically and in seemingly typical contradictory and counterproductive manner, the EU seems to quietly and maybe even ignorantly agree with me based on several directives and regulations they’ve been passing to restore some wetlands, river flows, and floodplains. Unfortunately it’s very little and very late (as people may be noticing) the rule of thumb is that what was destroyed takes at least 6x the effort to restore.
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I don't think this view is especially controversial. Many past infrastructure and industry projects make the drought worse today - dams, channels, mines (especially open-pit). In my area (eastern Poland) single communist-era irigation project is responsible for destroying 73% of peat bogs, meadow marshes and wet meadows [1]. Restoring them to previous condition is completely infeasible.
That's a really good point. I've seen some work on retaining moisture in the desert, and if memory serves, the successful ones create small check dams to retard water flow down a watercourse, giving it time to soak into the ground and replenish groundwater.
It would be interesting to see whether one could apply that to European waterways as part of marshland regeneration.
> How could it not be.
Plenty of ways. That's what we have science for. For one, why choose 19th century projects when we did millenia of terraforming, mostly by doing away with forrests and wetlands, but also planting artifical forrests over dry sand areas (see the Cap Ferret fire) etc. etc.
but also, the heatwaves of this summer mostly consist of hot air from Sahara being driven to Europe and staying there.
> that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe
what
> not even to mention that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe
Interesting how lived perception of resource scarcity and socio-economic change will attribute it all to ... others.
Interesting theory and I can see how you get there.
But if drainage changes were the primary cause, we would've seen drought severity increasing across the time period where straightening/etc were happening... instead the drought severity increases begin _after_ that period, better aligned with temperature changes.
Additionally, your analogy to a water leak from a tank doesn't hold, because the water recharges over time...
Further, your complaints about immigrants also doesn't make sense, as water usage has been going down (and residential utilization is quite low, altogether).
As such, my theory is that you're just a right-wing crank who wants to find a reason to deny global warming, and to hate immigrants.