Central Europe is facing the worst drought of the last millennium

The year 1540 was the warmest in Central Europe in the last 1,000 years. An unprecedented eleven-month drought has resulted in one million deaths and massive destruction, according to Swiss climatologists. This summer presents characteristics reminiscent of it, argues one of them, the professor of the University of Bern, Christian Pfister.

“In 1540 the heat and drought lasted from February to the end of the year. For eleven months it hardly rained at all in extensive areas of Central Europe. The whole summer not a single rainfall was recorded. In July, with temperatures above 40°C, forests burned from France to Poland. Thick smoke spread over the European continent and covered the sunlight.

More communities than at any other time in the past millennium were destroyed by peacetime fires. The small rivers dried up completely and the bigger ones turned into streams. Already, since May, the water was running out, the wells and springs dried up.

Because of the drought people were desperate for drinking water. An estimated one million people died, most from dysentery. Many domestic animals died of hunger, thirst and heat. Cattle were necessarily slaughtered. River transport stopped.

People were starving. There was no flour because most of the mills stopped working. That means there was an energy collapse.”

This is how the drought of 1540 has been described by Christian Pfister, an eminent Swiss historian of the environment and climate, in interviews with German public radio (DLF) and the authoritative Zurich newspaper Neue Zuericher Zeitung (NZZ).

The recent publication of the book “Climate and Society in Europe in the Last 1000 Years”, which he co-authored with the – also distinguished Swiss climatologist – Heinds Wanner, and this year’s drought in Central Europe brought the disaster of 1540 back to the fore. The two University of Bern professors identified 18 extreme summers of the last thousand years and found that the worst drought was that of 1540.

Summer 2022

The this summer but this could also be classified in the same category: “Due to the extremely long drought, the summer of 2022 exhibits characteristics reminiscent of the drought of 1540,” Pfister recently told Stuttgart radio (SWR).

The findings of the two authors coincide with earlier research – specifically for the year 1540 – conducted by 32 scientists of various specialties from all over Europe under the director of the Center for Climate Change of the same university, Oliver Vetter, and which was published in the scientific journal Climate Change in 2014.

Does the past reflect our future? However, Pfister described it in SWR in dark colors: “If the disaster were to happen again, animals would still be dying today, navigation on the Rhine would come to a complete halt, railway lines would buckle, water would dry up, the energy supply would collapse with similar concequenses. A drought as large as that of 1540 will happen again sooner or later, especially in an increasingly warm world overall. There is some useful evidence for the increasing risk of extremely hot summers.

The consequences would probably be fatal even for countries that possess high technology. No one is prepared for such a horror scenario. At the very least, the authorities should be prepared for something like this, so that things don’t go the way they did with Covid 19.”

“I have repeatedly tried to warn of such a possibility. But the authorities just smiled at my warning about a new 1540,” Pfister has told the German scientific magazine Spektrum. But here is where his prediction and that of all his colleagues who co-signed the older study, is being verified this year, at least partially and it is once again relevant in Central Europe…

But how did the scientists reach these conclusions since there is no data from measurements of that time? The researchers evaluated 312 reliable written sources from France to Poland and from Tuscany to northern Germany. Most information came from northern Switzerland, eastern France and southern Germany by people who kept systematic weather records and also recorded vegetation growth and autumn harvests.

During the investigation, they even discovered a particularly valid “weather calendar” from Krakow, which was compiled by Marcin Biem, a theologian and rector of the university of the Polish city. The scientists also gave the data they collected from 165 tree rings to the Zurich University of Technology to process. Thus, they arrived at a fairly accurate picture of the drought of the year 1540.

The situation was dramatic. Not a drop of rain fell in Spain from October 1539 to the beginning of April 1540. The winter was dry and warm in northern Italy as in July. The event went unnoticed north of the Alps, but in January 1540 the unprecedented eleven-month period of the so-called “great drought” began there as well. In fact, according to Professor Christian Pfister: “the first lasting rain did not fall until 1541”.

Countless people collapsed while working. The crop was destroyed. Prices for flour and bread skyrocketed. At the beginning of August, the leaves fell from the trees, as if it were already autumn. People crossed the Rhine, the Elbe and the Seine without getting wet. The surface water soon evaporated completely and some cracks were so wide that a foot could fit through. Because there was no water to evaporate, which would absorb heat, the air continued to warm.”

“This caused the heat wave of 1540 to stabilize,” Zurich University of Technology climatologist Sonia Seneviratne explained to Spiegel. The only lucky one seems to have been a certain Anna Smidin. According to a Heidelberg University archive, she unearthed a pot of 900 Roman silver coins from the time of Emperor Augustus in a swamp (near present-day Augsburg, Bavaria) that had dried up, to the point where it had been revealed to her in a dream. It is interesting, however, that western Russian chroniclers report sudden downpours, floods and cold in that year. Summer just wasn’t there…

What if the weather of 1540 repeats itself?

“The consequences would be dramatic. Mass death of animals is expected, water for cooling nuclear power plants will not be sufficient, the transportation of goods through rivers would be largely stopped and the consequences for human health can only be speculated. The disaster of 1540 should be a warning of what can happen. No one is prepared for such an extreme case. I hope we never experience something like this,” said Pfister in the German scientific magazine “Spektrum”.

According to Sonia Seneviratne, however, “it remains doubtful whether the warnings could be given in time. The causes for the weather development in 1540 are largely unclear. At best one can only speculate. Even a spring drought (considered a harbinger of a very hot summer by meteorologists) is only marginally suitable as an indicator of impending drought. In 2011, the spring in Central Europe was as dry as in 2003, but without the drought extending into the summer as in 2003.”

The opinion expressed in “Spiegel” by the professor of the University of Freiburg Riedinger Glaser is also ambiguous: “The heat of 1540 relativizes the assessment that the heat is of anthropogenic origin, that it comes from the greenhouse effect. However, the anthropogenic greenhouse effect increases the likelihood of severe heat waves.”

RES-EMP

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