Ahr Valley

Right now we're only capable of doing those pilot phases, some research, just as Maja Göpel just pointed out, the early stage of projects.

But when it comes to implementing those on a large scale basis, which we do need right now because droughts are not only happening in southern Germany, as I said, here in my constituency as well, we're having low water levels, but on the other hand, in winter I'm pretty sure we're talking about high waters and floods again at our rivers, just as the Ahrtal flood.

And this is something, um, that all government levels should tackling together, and that's why we need to change the constitution for that to allow all government levels to work together.

And, uh, Maja Göpel, do you think this is a, is a solution? Is this, uh, you know, just a drop in the bucket, or is this, could this be a breakthrough, something like this?

It's, uh, that's again a good question.

So I would say the extreme rainfall events and the extreme flash floods and the landslides that come with them that we've seen in the la-let's say, or in the last year, so there's been one extreme event last year, very extreme event last year indeed in Germany, in the Ahrtal, which was basically an ever, I mean, yeah, out of sample extreme event.

Nothing like that ever happened.

Just last week there was this, um, flooding in Libya with a storm called, I think called Daniel, which was, I mean, had insane amounts of water.

So then if it rains, then the amount of water that sort of basically drops out of the air is more, and that leads to ever stronger extreme rainfall events.

In this sense, the fact that we're seeing unprecedented extremes all over the world that have a common cause, which is anthropogenic climate change, anthropogenic global warming, I should be fair in admitting that the mechanisms that I discovered in that two thousand nine-nineteen paper that you mentioned, those...

They do connect extreme rainfall events across continents, but not in the way, um, that connects, let's say, something that happens in the Ahrtal in Germany and what we have seen in Libya last week.

So it's a different mechanism and in this case, these events that you mentioned, these extreme rainfall events are still connected, but not via atmospheric wave patterns as I...