The drought could leave us without beer

The records indicate that Europe it has never been as dry as in these last decades. This drought has direct consequences on our lives, among other things because it threatens basic food products such as milk or products such as beer. Remember that a cow needs more than 100 liters of water a day to produce milkand that recently farms unable to compete with the macro farms for prices have been closed.

So crazy is the situation that countries like Spain are forced to import milk from Europe. But since Europe is also going through severe droughts, it is likely that we will end up importing from the US and China. Something similar was seen in the southern hemisphere summer in Argentina and Brazil. The problem is not only the drought but also the market and the price war: we forgot about self-consumption and, of course, that of the sustainability.

Another striking case of ubiquity of drought impacts found in beer. Recently, the president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador halted beer production in northern states, which are suffering from a serious drought, especially affecting the city of Monterrey. It is the second most populous in the country and home to powerful brewing industries. Beer production requires large amounts of water and in the north of Mexico it is compromising water for domestic use. Various studies indicate that climate change is threatening the brewing industry in various places around the world.

The strongest droughts in recent centuries

Climate change is accelerating, leaving both desolation and confusion in its wake. Part of this confusion is generated by contrasting precipitations that in some places bring with them droughts, while in others they bring floods. Even in some areas like Europe, a few years bring floods (for example, in 2021) and other dry years (2022) in practically the same places. This makes it difficult to find clear patterns or trends and gives credence to skeptics and climate change deniers..

But yes, despite apparent contradictionthese very opposite effects are triggered by the same process: the warming of the atmosphere by the emission of greenhouse gases. That warming that increases the variability of the climate and makes it increasingly rare for it to rain softly and continuously.

The fact that there are no two days or two months or two years that are climatically the same makes us lose perspective of what is happening.

A) Yes, lately either it rains much less than normal or it rains much more and torrentially. Extreme rainfall has become more frequent and intense in certain areas of Europe over the last century and there is evidence that man-made climate change is responsible for it. Precipitation maxima are clearly associated with thermal anomalies and with the sustained global warming trend.

Let us not forget that the devastating effect of the July 2021 rains and floods in Europe was amplified by the human alteration of river basins, their artificialisation and the loss of vegetation and natural soil. One year later, many of these flooded areas of Europe have suffered the most intense drought since the Middle Ages.

The foundations of Holland rot

Dutch houses built on wooden stilts are rotting after severe drought. The famous Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has sunk more than 15 centimeters. Like many buildings built before 1970 in this swampy country, the museum stands on some 8,000 wooden posts as its foundation.

This is because dry summers lower groundwater levels, expose poles and fungi, which need oxygen to survive, the foundations are rotting. In this case it is the scarcity of water, and not the excess, which causes the disaster.

At a time when Europe is suffering the worst drought in the last 500 yearsthis problem may not be limited to the Netherlands, as wooden foundations are also used in parts of Sweden, Germany, and to a large extent in the Italian city of Venice.

The Dutch have to rethink their water management strategy. Perhaps they should lock in the groundwater instead of keeping the sea out. If they don’t take action, the houses could collapse in a decade. Without government support for these climatic macro-risks, insurance companies cannot assume the expenses that currently fall on the owners.

Do we have a bad memory or are we really facing an extreme drought?

The fact that no two days or two months or two years are climatically the same It makes us lose perspective of what is happening.

Despite the great variability of precipitation in the new human-induced climate, it is possible find certain patterns thanks to statistics and research multidisciplinary that allow reconstructing long time series of temperature and precipitation in areas and moments in which there is no or there was no instrumental record.

A recent study carried out by Cambridge University researcher Ulf Büntgen and collaborators links climatic series extracted from European tree rings, combining growth data and isotopic data from living and dead trees, both intact and transformed into furniture or historical pieces or archaeological. All this allows understand the great climatic fluctuations throughout the different epochs and allows us to conclude that, despite the droughts of the various historical periods, Europe is now suffering the strongest droughts in the last 2,110 years of its history.

An increasingly intense Azores anticyclone

But what is behind the increasing drought in Europe? Its about Azores anticyclonewhich, together with the Icelandic low pressure zone, determines wind and rain patterns in the North Atlantic.

The Azores anticyclone greatly influences the climate of much of Europe, especially winter rain in the western half of the continent. The researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA) Nathaniel Creswell-Clay and collaborators have found that Since the industrial era, the extension of this anticyclone has been increasing in accordance with the climate change of human origin..

This expansion of the Azores anticyclone is generating unprecedented droughts in the last 1,200 years. High pressures are significantly more common in the industrial era (since 1850) than in the pre-industrial era, leading to abnormally dry conditions in the western Mediterranean, including the Iberian Peninsula. Simulations of the last millennium indicate that the expansion of the Azores anticyclone in the industrial age is unprecedented in the last millennium (since the year 850 of the Christian era), which agrees with the data of the precipitation indicators in Portugal. The expansion of the Azores anticyclone emerged after 1850 and was reinforced in the 20th century, which is consistent with warming of anthropogenic origin.

Speaking clear

It is necessary to speak clearly. But it is not always possible. Sometimes because things are not clear and other times because it is scary to do so. The connection of extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves or extraordinary storms with climate change is scientifically evident. On that side it is easy to speak clearly.

However, as analyzed by researchers Zuhad Hai and Rebecca L. Perlman, many politicians find it difficult to make such links in public for fear of voter reaction. We must work for an informed citizenry, capable of supporting those who make such obvious connections to science. There is no room for lukewarm messages and weak climate policies.