Cars are swept away as flash floods hit Italian holiday regions

The Daily Mail reports flash floods, evacuations and red alerts across three Italian regions as Storm Charles moves through southern Europe, and it names sources for several figures and for official advice. It never says that warming makes heavy rainfall like this more frequent or more severe. With no event-specific attribution study in the material, that gap is minor.

1. Leaves out the climate link

   Minor

   “Torrential rainfall and powerful winds have battered Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Liguria and Tuscany, unleashing severe flooding”

   Why this matters

   The words "Torrential rainfall" and "severe flooding" describe an extreme rainfall event. Nowhere in the article does the Mail add a word on how warming affects such events.

   The impression it gives

   A reader takes the floods as weather alone, with nothing to connect them to a wider change in how often or how hard such downpours hit.

   The context

   Human-caused warming has made heavy rainfall more frequent and more severe (R2). The material holds no attribution study for this storm, so the article cannot be faulted for leaving out an event-specific finding. The gap is general context only.

   How we know

   • On the recordThat warming has made hot extremes, heavy rainfall, agricultural and ecological drought, fire weather and intense tropical cyclones more frequent or more severe.ipcc.ch (opens in a new tab)
   • Checked against the whole articleIt never uses the words “warming”.