It is dry in Western Europe. Extremely dry. Dry enough for me to to write a blogpost about it for www.eoswetenschap.eu, our local popular science journal. They asked me if the current drought could serve as proof that the climate warming.

Unfortunately, the blog is in Dutch, yet I’ll hint the answer for you: it’s not. We should always be wary about the difference between one weather event – no matter how extreme – and the global climate.

Potato flowering in a hot evening sun. Especially agriculture is suffering from the drought.

Yet the drought does fit in neatly in the observed ànd predicted increase in extreme weather events that come with climate change: more droughts, more heat waves, more and heavier storms… We are up for some years in which one weather record after the other will be broken, as climate gets more and more unpredictable.

And I think it is crucial that we are all aware of that fact.