A Drought in Germany Gets the Media Overexcited

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By Paul Homewood

h/t Tim Scott

There is a drought in Germany, and naturally the media has gone into hyperdrive to link it to global warming:

As Europe lives through a long, hot summer, one of the continent’s major rivers is getting drier – posing major problems for the people and businesses that rely on it.

Captain Andre Kimpel casts an experienced, but worried, eye across the river Rhine, where water levels have dropped significantly in recent days.

Several ferry services in and around the town of Kaub have been forced to a standstill, but he’s still carrying people and their cars across the water to the opposite bank – for now.

“It’s no joke,” he says as he navigates the water which sparkles in the summer sunshine. “We have 1.5m [5ft] of water and our boat sits 1.20m deep. So we have 30 centimetres of water left beneath us.”

It’s not unusual for water levels to drop here but, Captain Kimpel says, it’s happening more frequently. “We used to have a lot of floods. Now we have a lot of low waters.”

On the riverbank nearby, there’s an old measuring station. Any skipper wanting to enter the Upper Rhine will refer to the official water level recorded here.

The current level hasn’t yet fallen below the lowest figure ever recorded here, in October of 2018. The measurement then was 25cm (the measurement is taken from the same reference point in the water, not the deepest point on the river bed).

It’s currently 42cm – but is forecast to fall further in the coming days.

The government agency which monitors the levels say that the current low water may just be part of a normal pattern. But, they note, such events are becoming more intense as a result of climate change and they say the situation will worsen in the second half of this century.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62519683

This report is all over the media, and all with virtually the same wording, suggesting a carefully coordinated, manufactured story, almost certainly from one of the well funded, climate misinformation organisations.

The BBC headline is grossly misleading, as the 30cm is the water under the boat; As Captain Kempl comments, the river depth is actually 1.5m.

The river gauge measurement of 42cm at Kaub is also widely reported, but is equally misleading, as this measurement is taken near the river bank, rather than at the deepest part of the stream.

In none of the dozens of reports I have read is there any actual historical data to compare against this event, whether rainfall or water level data. We are told this is the lowest water level since 2018, as if this means anything at all. There is no evidence presented to show that this drought is in any way unprecedented, or that droughts are becoming more extreme; merely this claim that appears in most of the articles:

“HGK and other shipping companies are preparing for a “new normal” in which low water levels become more common as global warming makes droughts more severe, sapping water along the length of the Rhine from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea.

“There’s no denying climate change and the industry is adjusting to it,”

However, annual rainfall trends at Mainz, which is just upstream of Kalb, show that while recent years have been drier than the 1980s and 90s, they are no drier than the 1950s. We also see exactly the same trends with April to September rainfall: