ROME,19 May: The floods that sent rivers of mud tearing through towns in Italy\u2019s northeast are another drenching dose of climate change\u2019s all-or-nothing weather extremes, something that has been happening around the globe, scientists say.
\nThe coastal region of Emilia-Romagna was twice struck, first by heavy rain two weeks ago on drought-parched ground that could not absorb it, overflowing riverbanks overnight, followed by this week\u2019s deluge that killed 13 and caused billions in damages.
\nIn a changing climate, more rain is coming, but it\u2019s falling on fewer days in less useful and more dangerous downpours.
\nThe hard-hit Emilia-Romagna region was particularly vulnerable. Its location between the Apennine mountains and the Adriatic Sea trapped the weather system this week that dumped half the average annual amount of rain in 36 hours.
\nAntonello Pasini, a climate scientist at Italy\u2019s National Research Council, said a trend has been establishing itself: \u201cAn increase in rainfall overall per year, for example, but a decrease in the number of rainy days and an increase in the intensity of the rain in those few days when it rains,\u201d he said.
\nItaly\u2019s north has been parched by two years of drought, thanks to less-than-average snowfall during the winter months. Melting snow from the Alps, Dolomites and Apennines normally provides the steady runoff through spring and summer that fills Italy\u2019s lakes, irrigates the agricultural heartland and keeps the Po and other key rivers and tributaries flowing.
\nWithout that normal snowfall in the mountains, plains have gone dry and riverbeds, lakes and reservoirs have receded. They cannot recover even when it rains because the ground is essentially \u201cimpermeable\u201d and the rain just washes over the topsoil and out to the sea, Pasini said.
\n\u201cSo the drought is not necessarily compensated for by these extreme rains,\u201d he said, \u201cBecause in northern Italy, the drought depends more on snow being stored in the Alps than on rain. And in the last two years, we have had very little snow.\u201d
\nCivil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci said the new normal of extreme weather events in the Mediterranean requires Italians to adapt and Italy to rethink its flood protections nationwide. He cited a fierce storm-triggered landslide last fall on the southern island of Ischia, off Naples, that left 12 dead.
\n\u201cWe can\u2019t just pretend that nothing is happening,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cEverything must change: the programming in hydraulic infrastructures must change, the engineering approach must change.\u201d
\nHe said those changes are necessary to prevent the types of floods that have left entire towns swamped with mud after two dozen rivers burst their banks.
\nThe key going forward is prevention, he said, acknowledging that\u2019s not an easy sell due to costs. AP<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not a nation inclined to prevention. We like to rebuild more than to prevent,\u201d he told Sky TG24.
\nItaly is far from alone in lurching from dry to deluge. California and the United States West sloshed its way from a record-setting megadrought to at least a dozen atmospheric rivers dousing the state with so much rain that a long-dormant lake reappeared.
\nScientists say flash floods of the kind seen in Germany and Belgium two years ago, which killed more than 220 people and caused billions of euros in damage, will become more likely as the planet warms.
\n\u201cThe rainiest events seem to be in many places getting rainier,\u201d Princeton University climate scientist Gabe Vecchi said Thursday.
\nIn 2021, the United Nations\u2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientific panel said it was \u201cestablished fact\u201d that humans\u2019 greenhouse gas emissions had made for more frequent and intense weather extremes. The panel called heat waves the most obvious, but said heavy precipitation events had also likely increased over most of the world.
\nThe U.N. report said \u201cthere is robust evidence\u201d that record rainfall and one-in-five, one-in-ten and one-in-twenty year type rainfall \u201cbecame more common since the 1950s.\u201d AP<\/p>\n
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