Fact check: what caused the German floods?

As a study in how hysteria develops, the reporting of World Weather Attribution study into last month’s floods in the Rhineland could hardly be bettered. You will no doubt have heard or seen headlines over the past couple of days claiming that climate change made the floods ‘up to nine times’ more likely. Some even ran without the ‘up to’ — such as the Times, which reported with apparent confidence: ‘Deadly floods nine times likelier in warmer climate’.

What ordinary readers are less likely to have done is to have read the study itself. Needless to say, it paints a very different picture of the event and any causal link with climate change. The ‘nine times figure’ comes from analysis of rainfall intensity in the localised Meuse and Ahr areas over a two day period, the 13 and 14 of July, when a small area of southern Belgium and northern Luxembourg received more than 175 mm of rain.