On desiccated river beds

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Oh, huh, what do you know, it turns out that climate change is an actual thing, not just a threat from those mean poopy-heads who science.

Houseboats lie perched on desiccated riverbeds, receding water levels have left wide stretches of newly exposed riverbank and the shipping sector is bracing for trouble. The low-lying Netherlands is used to grappling with too much water; now it’s struggling with too little.

On Thursday, the country declared an official water shortage, raising its national drought response to Level 2. “Due to persistent drought, less water is entering our country via rain and rivers, while the demand for water is rising,” the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management said in a statement.

…

The situation “is alarming, and I do not say that lightly,” said Hannah Cloke, Regius professor of meteorology and climate science at the University of Reading, in the UK. “The calendar is what worries me most. The Netherlands has declared an actual water shortage in mid-July,” she added. There’s plenty of summer left to run, and the forecasts show little hope of relief for weeks.

This story is playing out across many parts of Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent. It is enduring a summer of rolling, brutal heat waves, drying up rivers and threatening water supplies. “This is not bad luck,” Cloke said. “The heat dries the soil, empties the rivers and drives up demand for water all at once. That is the fingerprint of a changing climate.”

And changing not in a good way.

It’s not just the Netherlands that’s suffering. The Rhine, a vital artery for European trade, also runs through Germany. Water levels in parts of the river have fallen so low that cargo ships have had to reduce their load and spread it across multiple vessels, increasing costs.

In July, low water levels caused a river cruise ship to run aground on the Rhine in the city of Bonn. It took several hours for a freighter to pull the ship into deeper water.

The Rhine’s water levels in Germany have risen over the past few days thanks to rain, but the danger isn’t over. “We have come back from the brink, with an improvement compared to the lowest water levels earlier this week, but much more rain is still needed,” one commodity trader told Reuters.

In Hungary last week, near record lows on the Danube Riverleft cruise ships stranded off Budapest, denting the country’s tourism sector. Meanwhile in Romania over the weekend, the Danube plunged to its lowest level in 30 years, according to Reuters, disrupting shipping and leading to restrictions on irrigation.

It’s almost as if the climate actually matters.

Comments

One response to “On desiccated river beds”

  1. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    The Rhine, a vital artery for European trade, also runs through Germany. Water levels in parts of the river have fallen so low that cargo ships have had to reduce their load and spread it across multiple vessels, increasing costs.

    “We have come back from the brink, with an improvement compared to the lowest water levels earlier this week, but much more rain is still needed,” one commodity trader told Reuters.

    And now we find that some “commodities” just can’t be traded. You can’t just put in an order for “more rain”. The world just doesn’t work that way, any more than it worked through sacrifices to the gods. We are not a self-made, self-supporting species. We still (and always have, always will) rely on the biogeophysical systems of our planet. They are the foundation we can’t escape. However much we degrade, erode, buy, sell, trade and supplant it with our products and our waste, its presense (or, if things go further south) its absense, will decide our fate. We might think we have free will, freedom of choice, and the ability to keep “developing” and “growing”, our choices have always been constrained, the physical limits on our actions have always been there. We’ve only begun to notice them on a global scale.

    Europe’s drought is not a local anomaly, but part of a much broader picture that we’ve only begun to grasp, however unwillingly and unevenly. There is no magic bullet, no free lunch, no deus ex machina that will save us from ourselves, that will let us continue as we have been going. That way lies disaster.

    Every human activity has a cost. Not a just the trivial, arbitrary monetary one, but a real cost on the Earth’s ability to sustain and absorb it. There are far too many things that we can afford financially that we cannot afford ecologically. There are eight billion of us. We have an inevitable, irreducible, base level of activity needed to support us. Anything beyond that starts to bring in matters of justice and ethics. We can’t all live at billionaire levels of consumption and acquisition. Billionares are not actually “worth” more than anyone else, no more important, no more worthy of safety and health. They are as unable to order “more rain” than any of us, though they may be, proportionately, more responsible for there being less rain. Who adjudicates this? More importantly, how to solve this?

    Our window for action gets narrower all the time, with actions required becoming more desperate and more drastic. We lost more than four decades during which we could have worked out less painful and costly measures. That time is gone, burnt with the carbon that has brought us to where we now find ourselves. Our ability to “manage” this unfolding disaster diminishes by the hour, and if we don’t manage it ourselves, it will be managed for us, by forces and processes, the complexity and ramifications of which we barely understand. But we don’t need any more knowledge or understanding to realize that “business as usual” will simply hasten disaster. And, we already understand enough to know that they cannot be bribed, bought, or placated.

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