"Merkel blames 'climate change' for Germany's bad floods, but real reason was botched local warning system"

Source:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/merkel_blames_climate_change_for_germanys_bad_floods_but_real_reason_was_botched_local_warning_system.html

"Germany has made a big deal about how global warming is the reason behind the region's catastrophic floods.

According to NBC News:
      "The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been caused here," [Chancellor Angela Merkel] said.

    She said the force of the storms suggested that they had "something to do with climate change," adding, "We have to hurry, we have to get faster in the fight against climate change."

She also palled it up with Joe Biden on climate change just a few days ago:

    While in the United States, the chancellor and President Biden signed a pact that included a commitment to "taking urgent action to address the climate crisis,"

which is to include stronger collaboration "on the policies and energy technologies needed to accelerate the global net-zero transition."

Others have been even more aggressive, such as Merkel's leftist finance minister, who seeks to replace her in the upcoming September German election:

    "I am firmly convinced that our task is stopping human-made climate change," Mr. Scholz told ZDF public television.

He praised his party's role in passing some of Germany's first climate laws when the Social Democrats governed with the Greens from 1998 to 2005, but called for a stronger effort to move toward a carbon-neutral economy.

    "What we still have to do now is get all those who have resisted right up to the end that we raise the expansion targets for renewable energies in such a way that it also works out with a CO2-neutral industry to give up this resistance," he said.

Hey, that'll get the floods to stop. 

Nothing like remodeling the world on the greenie and failed socialist models and giving government all the power. 

Just ask Cubans how those things work out.

In reality, the problem is more immediate. 

The politicians may be bloviating about global warming, but the catastrophe that happened was a problem with a failed government early warning system.

According to the Times of London, here's what really would have halted the high loss of life in those devastating floods (non-subscription reprint here):

    The first signs of catastrophe were detected nine days ago by a satellite orbiting 500 miles above the tranquil hills around the Rhine river.

    Over the next few days a team of scientists sent the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a macabre prophecy:

the Rhineland was about to be hit by "extreme" flooding, particularly along the Erft and Ahr rivers, and in towns such as Hagen and Altena.

    Yet despite at least 24 hours' warning that predicted, almost precisely, which districts would be worst afflicted when the rains came, the flood still caught many of its victims largely unawares.

    Germany got its preparations "badly wrong", one of the experts who built Europe's sophisticated flood prediction model told The Sunday Times.

Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at Reading University, said that a "monumental failure of the system" had led to one of postwar Germany's deadliest natural disasters,

which had by last night claimed at least 133 lives since Wednesday and left hundreds of people unaccounted for.

At least another 24 people were dead across the border in Belgium, a figure that the country's national crisis centre expected to rise, while the rains forced thousands from their homes in the Netherlands.

So they developed all this technology, which it turns out was very accurate, and never got the message out. 

The article states that they even ran a dry run on their emergency systems, which didn't work...and did nothing.

To be fair, early warning systems are very hard to get entirely right. 

Indonesia has had tremendous problems with its early warning system for tsunamis (it's hard to get cell phone texts to locals when earthquakes knock out the transmission towers),

and California has had spotty success — genuine success in San Diego County in getting everyone out safe from wildfires in 2014 (my sister was one of them) — and bad problems in subsequent fire evacuations up north since then. 

The politicians there, too, like to blame wildfires on global warming instead of their own bureaucratic failures. 

Warning the public to oncoming catastrophes is a valid function of government, so let's just say they're falling down on the job on their legitimate functions (you had one job),

while calling for more power for themselves because-global-warming.

Whenever a government entity calls for more climate change legislation with accompanying government power, look for something they're hiding.

This seems to be what we are seeing in Germany now, now that the establishment is pointing to global warming while ignoring its own failures to warn.

Germans are famous for two things, and this phenomenon is instructive:
one is precise, high-quality technology, and the other is grotesque overbearing bureaucracy.

In this election year for that country, guess which one won out."