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Comment by Jdam | Hacker News Reader

I'm originally from the Rhine river area and I still spend time there. It's certainly true that the water level was low this summer, but it was an exceptionally long and hot summer. I found interesting that my grandma labeled the it "a summer like the summers we were used to long time ago".

There's even a famous german song "Wann wird's mal wieder richtig Sommer?" (When will we have a real summer again?).

Btw since it was basically constantly raining from Oct-Dec, the river replenished really quickly.

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> I found interesting that my grandma labeled the it "a summer like the summers we were used to long time ago".

Old people often make fact-free claims about how things used to be.

We don't need to rely on faulty human memories. There are actual records of water levels, rainfall, and temperature for all of the 20th century.

It is simply not true that the past summer was something that occurred frequently in the past.

> Old people often make fact-free claims about how things used to be.

It's fun, because if there is something that is really a cliché is people complaining that the weather is not what it used to be. This has been going on for far longer than there has been any talk of climate change. So every time I hear someone saying that you can see climate change is happening because the weather is not what it used to be, I take it with a double pinch of salt.

Alternatively, the existence of the cliche might suggest that (some) climate change is always happening, just on a timescale that makes old people complain, and everybody else just be incredulous.

> Old people often make fact-free claims about how things used to be.

It probably isn't a faulty memory, just one of our inbuilt recall biases. Human minds tend to remember extreme events more vividly. If you think back to past years you most easily bring to mind the unusually hot summers and most biting winters.

The drought was extreme and even the recent rainfalls have not yet replenished the soils.

Also I haven’t heard of any evidence to support that such droughts are normal for Germany.

To put it bluntly, we’re seeing Climate Change in action.

On the other side of the world, in Japan, we had more rain than ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Japan_floods

So, the lack of rain is far from happening everywhere.

That's the point. Weather patterns are changing, not everything shifting to one specific weather. Not everything is getting hotter. Eg Europe for now is getting warmer, but at least the west and north of Europe can actually expect more cold, rather than more heat, as the gulf stream (bringing hot water north) is slowly getting weaker and will, following current trends, at some point reverse itself. The equatorial areas can in return expect much more heat (and no relief by patterns such as the gulf stream) and will increasingly desertify over the next decades.

Sorry the first sentence should read:

That's the point. As the earth overall is heating up weather patterns...

Correlation is not causation... Do we know that weather patterns would not change if the temperature of the atmosphere was not changing?

Correlation does not always imply causation. We live in a world with imperfect information and each of us has to decide the best course of action based on the evidence available. The phrase “global warming” is just a shorthand way of saying that we are adding massive amounts of the energy to the system controlling weather. When we see weather changing whilst knowing that we’ve added a massive amount of energy to the system then a reasonable person concludes causation. It’s the most likely explanation.

Anecdotal points like yours don't really mean much considering the long term trend data mentioned in the article.

It was a very hot, but on top of that an exceptionally dry summer. Even in hot summers, Germany would get rain every two weeks or so, sometimes more often. This year, in some regions it didn't rain for months.

2018 was exceptional, the rain was not enough. There's a great episode of Quarks about this. Absolutely recommended if you speak German (unfortunately no translation seems to be available).

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