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  1. July 16, 2021

This new willingness to make these explicit connections is in part due to advances in attribution science. As Vox’s Umair Irfan has explained, “Researchers now have far more data showing just how much climate change affects the frequency and likelihood of heat waves (and fires that follow them), ocean heat waves, droughts, and intense storms.”

In other words, the more extreme weather events that happen, the more opportunities scientists have to learn about just how bad the impact of climate change really is.

How climate change can produce extreme rainfall

Germany’s National Meteorological Service said the two most impacted states, Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, recorded between 4 and 6 inches of rain in the 24 hours between July 14 and 15. According to CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller, that amounts to almost as much as the region usually sees in a month.

There are two main links between climate change and extreme rainfall events like the one in northwestern Europe. First, as Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts in the School of Engineering at Newcastle University, told me, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. “According to the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, a one-degree rise in temperature has the potential to give you a 7 percent increase in the intensity of rainfall,” Fowler said.

“The second point is that the [Earth’s] poles are increasing in temperature at two to three times the rate of the equator,” Fowler said. That, she said, “weakens the jet stream of the mid- latitudes, which is basically over Europe. In summer and autumn, the weakening of the jet stream has a knock-on effect causing slower-moving storms. So there’s a double whammy of increasing intensity, but the storm lingers longer too.”

And that kind of double whammy can have devastating impacts on the land and infrastructure.

“All this happened very fast, and I’ve never experienced a situation which developed that fast,” Tanja Krok, head of volunteering service in the German Red Cross in North Rhine-Westphalia, told me. She’s been working in the region for nearly 30 years. “In 2002, we had flooding in the east of Germany, but it impacted one region and developed slowly,” Krok said.

The powerful flow of water has also caused landslides, leaving some roads unusable if not completely washed away. “We’ve never had landslides before. We feel like our houses here are stable and fixed. It’s not often that you see houses collapse,” Krok said.

Europe’s flood-warning system is also to blame

In addition to climate change, experts have also pointed to communication failures in the European Flood Awareness System.

The German weather service issued warnings for the event on Monday, three days before it actually happened. The hydrological services in Germany also issued a warning. Given the number of warnings in place, experts have said that the problem is not as much forecasting as communicating the severe impacts of flooding events to the greater population.

“The issue is not that there wasn’t a warning in place. There was. We’ve got really good forecasting models now. So, both these events, and also the floods that we saw in New York and London earlier in the week, there were flood warnings in place for those. We knew that heavy rainfall was coming,” Linda Speight, a flood forecasting specialist at the University of Reading in England, told me.

“Over 100 people should not have died in a flood in Germany. That shouldn’t happen in Western Europe in 2021,” she said.

Speight, who works at the nexus of hydrology and meteorology to understand how the weather will cause flooding, thinks the high loss of life could be because people did not understand the seriousness of the warnings.

“If you issue a weather warning which says there’s going to be 200 millimeters of rain tomorrow, that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean a lot to me — and that’s my area of specialism, so I doubt it means very much to the general public,” Speight said. “We need to change how we communicate warnings. For example, instead of saying, ‘There will be 200 millimeters of rain,’ we need to say, ‘There will be rapidly rising water levels, damage to properties, a risk to life.’”

And as extreme weather events like these become more and more common, learning how to communicate the danger effectively will be even more critical. “Across the world, we need to get better prepared for these kinds of events,” Speight said. “Everybody can learn lessons from the flood in Germany and see how they can apply them to improve to be more prepared in their own countries.”

But while early-warning systems can help reduce the loss of life, the ultimate answer is for humans to stop emitting carbon dioxide and other planet-warming greenhouse gases.

“The climate is warming, and it will keep on warming as long as we emit CO2. Last time I checked, we’re still emitting huge amounts of CO2,” Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a visiting professor at Oxford University who studies the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, said.

Bourdain in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.

Roadrunner does something similar, albeit with a very different figure at its center: Anthony Bourdain, the chef, writer, and travel documentarian who died by suicide in 2018. From the film, we learn next to nothing about Bourdain’s childhood, family, or youthful interests, how he learned to cook or why. And that’s great. Instead, he emerges fully formed in the film as a chef at Manhattan’s Les Halles restaurant in the 1990s, a lanky, handsome guy with an earring and a lot of energy.

From there, Roadrunner — which at times pulses with energy that feels borrowed from a late-’90s music video on MTV, in a good way — straps us onto the back seat of the motorbike that was Bourdain’s career, starting with the bombshell publication of Kitchen Confidential in 2000, rocketing through his awkward early TV years and into the more confident ones, and ending with his devastating death.

Bourdain isn’t here to comment on his own life, but the filmmakers dug up a lot of footage from his shows and TV interview appearances, plus B-roll and videos shot by family and friends, which makes it feel as though Bourdain was intimately involved with the movie anyway. The screen is full of him, looking out onto a lush landscape from a plane or firing snark at a producer or sitting on the ground in a family’s home or downing the beating heart of a cobra in a restaurant. We hear from many of his friends, like chefs David Chang and Éric Ripert and artist David Choe, and from the crew that followed him all over the world. We see him with his first wife, Nancy Putkoski; and then his second wife, Ottavia Busia, mother of their daughter Ariane; and finally with Asia Argento, his final girlfriend, with whom he split shortly before his death.

My eyebrow raised a few times throughout the film, and as I thought about it afterward. I am bothered by the section that involves Argento — it veers disturbingly close to outright blaming her for Bourdain’s death. Most likely, it’s his friends’ attempt to find a cause for his death, but that’s an ill-advised way to grapple with death by suicide. Bafflingly, Neville has said he didn’t ask Argento to participate in the film, which would have been a lot more fair to her, and the decision to exclude her without informing viewers raises some acute ethical questions.

Neville also used an AI model to create audio of Bourdain “speaking” some unspecified lines (with his estate’s permission) that Bourdain had in reality only written down. At best, that was unnecessary, and should have been handled differently or disclosed to audiences. A degree of manipulating reality is inherent in the act of making a film, but the choice is worthy of the serious pushback it’s been receiving.

The two chefs and friends sit at an East Village hot dog joint. Focus Features
David Chang and Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.

But I think, on balance, the movie is still worth watching. Roadrunner quite successfully gives us all the reasons to admire and love Bourdain’s work, his insatiable curiosity, and his passion for every culture on the globe and desire to share the world with everyone.

And it also works hard to avoid a dangerous conclusion. Roadrunner makes a strong case for an artist who died far too soon. But it doesn’t want us to think of him as a martyr, or of his death by suicide as some proof of noble genius. It won’t romanticize the end of his life (though it may try too hard to find the reasons it happened).

Instead, his friends break down in angry tears, frustrated with him for leaving them, upset that his work was cut short by his death and the mental illness that drove him to it. Processing that trauma doesn’t come easy, and Roadrunner brings it to the surface.

So, it’s a gutting film. It’s unsettling in spots. It doesn’t offer answers, or at least not answers that make things better. The end of Bourdain’s life doesn’t have a single meaning, a neat takeaway. The messiness of existence is the point.

And that, Roadrunner suggests, is where Bourdain’s cultural significance lies. He loved food, loved people, loved travel and adventure. He could be brusque and loving, tender and tough, brilliant and baffling. He was a person worth making a biographical documentary about. In resisting the urge to paint its subject as a saint, Roadrunner gives us something better: a human.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain opens in theaters on July 16.

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