The connection between extreme flooding and the war in Ukraine

Written by Darko Butina on September 4, 2025. Posted in Current News

Since the beginning of 2023 a series of extreme flooding events were observed, some of which were never seen previously, for example flooding in Dubai and Saudi Arabia and snowstorms in New York and Moscow

Those extreme events continued to be observed throughout 2024 and up until the end of July 2025, the time of writing this report.

Please note that throughout this report the main theme will be that there is a causal relationship between extreme flooding events and extreme heat generating events, such as the war in Ukraine.

The objective of this report will be to identify the possible causes of those events and emphasise the fundamental role that the Earth’s Water Cycle has on retaining water, and preventing the overheating of our planet, while keeping it habitable for the last 2-3 billion years.

Part 1. Chronology of extreme flooding between the January 2023 up to present day, July 2025

Year 2023

• Flooding in Italy, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia
• Storm of the century hit Crimea, Krasnodar region and Sochi (Black Sea cost)
• Worst snowstorms in Moscow since 1878

Year 2024

• Brutal winter storm batters US with New York and Pennsylvania hit hardest
• Massive flooding in Orenburg, Russia
• Dubai was grappling with more than 142mm of precipitation within two days period, the amount that the area usually gets in a year and a half.
• The flooding began in Austria and the Czech Republic, then spread to Poland, Romania and Slovakia, and then onwards to Germany and Hungary
• The flash flooding occurred in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia
• China’s disastrous summer floods

For more details and video clips of those events, Google search on relevant dates and corresponding geographical locations listed above.

Part 2: The Earth’s Water Cycle

71% of our planet is covered by of water, the rest is land. It is estimated that water was present around three billion years ago and we know that the first simple organisms started in the water and later spread to the land.

Human body consists of 50-70 percent of water and therefore no life on our planet exists without water.

The molecule of water is the only molecule that exists in three different states: solid at 0^OC, liquid between 0^OC and 100^OC and gas at temperatures above 100^OC.

A very simple depiction of the Global Water Cycle that is taught in schools is shown below:

The cycle starts with the evaporation, of water molecules in liquid state by the heat from the sun, into the gas phase which then freezes at high altitudes to ice. In time those ice particles merge into clouds which then descend towards the ground, where milder temperatures melt the ice and the resulting rain gets into ground, rivers and oceans.

That cycle keeps repeating itself in the process that keeps our planet water-covered for so long.

 The Science behind the Global Water Cycle

• Relationship between the ground level air temperatures and altitude

Our planet is a body that rotates around its own axis and at the same time rotates around the Sun with the other planets that are part of our solar system. A single Earth’s rotation around its own axis takes 24 hours, while the rotation around the Sun takes 365 days (divided into 12 months organised into 4 different seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter).

One of the most important aspects that is controlling the recycling of water within the Earth’s atmosphere, is that irrespective of the temperatures of the air at ground level at different geographical locations, the air temperature is getting colder in a linear fashion as it reaches an altitude of 10,000 meters or 10 kilometres.

As one can see from Graph1, at an altitude of 10,000 meters the temperature of the air is -50^OC:

• It is the clouds that cool the Earth

The huge importance of the clouds in keeping our planet from overheating cannot be emphasised enough. To fully understand that fact, we need to discuss the physico-chemical processes influencing formation of the clouds.

As mentioned earlier in the paper, water freezes at 0^OC(changes from liquid to solid state) and boils at 100^OC (changes from liquid state to gas state).

The following steps are happening when the heat from the Sun starts warming the water :

• The air together with the water molecules starts to go up into higher altitudes
• Once the mixture of air and molecules of water in the gas state reach two kilometres (see Graph 1. above) the water molecules start to freeze
• Molecules of water in their gas state are accumulated at higher altitudes where they initially start to form small clouds which eventually grow into a large cloud
• The inner temperature of those large clouds can reach -30^OC and the weight of the cloud full of ice starts a descent to lower altitudes and warmer air temperatures
• So, the large cloud that could be described as a large block of ice at high altitudes, becomes a large bucket of water and ice at low altitudes, which then opens and ‘returns’ all that evaporated water from one geographical location, back to earth at a different location.

Before we can discuss one of the key points of this paper – how do clouds cool our planet, we need to address the term ‘Global’ as in ‘Earth’s Water Cycle.

During each step of the first cloud formation outlined above, there is the constant movement of the air masses above the ground level called ‘wind’, which is also transporting clouds to different locations across the globe.

The direction of movements of the air masses and the clouds will depend on the direction and the strengths of the prevailing winds, which are seasonal in nature.

We can briefly summarise this part of the report in the following way:

• Whenever there is an event/events generating an extreme amount of heat either by human actions or by nature, it is the Water Cycle that ‘kicks in’ and redistributes the excess of water vapours from the epicentre of the extreme heat location to areas across the globe.

 How the clouds followed by rain cool our planet?

We will now discuss in more details the science behind the cooling effects of clouds.

There are two main reasons why clouds followed by rain are cooling our planet:

1. The white top surface of the clouds reflects some of the incoming sun’s rays back to space
2. The temperature of the rain released from clouds is just above 0^OC and when the molecules of cold water start to mix with much warmer molecules of air, the overall result is of cooling the air below the clouds. This is known in thermodynamics as the ‘heat exchange’ where the warmer object (molecules of air) transfers the heat to the colder object (molecules of water).

We can observe the applications of the heat exchange principle in almost every aspect of our lives, from fridge and freezers to air conditioning and car radiators, to name just a few.

As was demonstrated so far in this part of the report, it is the Earth Water Cycle that has kept water on our planet millions of years before humans came along and was dealing with extreme heat events, such as volcanoes, tectonic movements or massive fires.

It is doing the same job with the extreme heat events caused by man, such as two global wars. What is important to emphasise again is that the Water Cycle not only distributes the water across the globe via clouds, but equally importantly stops our planet from overheating and keeps it habitable.

Part 3 Ukraine war, February 2022 – July 2025

This part of the report will attempt to identify possible links between the observed extreme weather events listed in Part 1 and the war between Russia and Ukraine which has been raging now since February 2022.

The main line of reasoning that this report is using is as follows:

• That the extreme weather events, observed as huge amounts of rain or snow being released by the clouds in very short periods at different locations, are caused by some extreme heat generated events, such as war
• Since the only major war since 2022 is between Russia and Ukraine it would make that location a potential epicentre and source of huge evaporation of water molecules
• If the epicentre of the heat generating events is mainly Ukraine, the prevailing seasonal winds would be ‘carrying’ the water molecules in the clouds towards and beyond different geographical locations across the European countries around Ukraine.

Please note that the major fighting throughout of this war was and still is happening in the Eastern part of Ukraine (see details on Live Map Ukraine) and according to the Global Wind Atlas the seasonal wind patterns in terms of wind direction and strengths are as follows:

• Winter/Spring (January – June): Easterly winds are the most frequent, with peak percentages in March.
• Summer (June – September): Northerly winds become more dominant.
• Transitional Periods (late Spring/early Summer, late Summer/early Autumn): Widespread Westerly winds are observed.

The data describing intensity and the exact location of the war can be found on https://liveuamap.com/en/ free of charge.

One must be aware that the website discussed here is NOT an official site of the Ukraine’s Defence Ministry but overall, it still gives very valuable information for analysis of the events that happened over the last three and a half years.

 Also note that all reporting of the Russo – Ukraine war by the official websites of the various Russian Federations Ministries or Russian News Channels have been censored by EU countries and labelled as Russian propaganda.

The reason for mentioning this is that any data analysis of very complex events, like wars, has to clearly identify the sources of information and a way to validate them independently.

How to get data from the map

Once one clicks on the link it opens with the latest situation of the war:

To find the daily situation of the war over the past couple of years one needs to click on ‘the time’ icon which is in the top right corner:

For example, if one clicks on the time button and chooses 1 March 2023, the following map would be displayed:

Let us start with explaining some general points about the map. The red circles identify the geographical locations where the Russian army is attacking and placing the mouse on any of those icons gives more details.

The blue circles identify the locations where the Ukraine armed forces are engaged. The slightly pink map on the right/below or above the line of contact are areas of the Russian Federation, while on the left are regions of Ukraine.

In order to fully comprehend the sheer intensity and gravity of this war consider the following facts:

1. The map above, where the numbers of dots reflects the intensity of fighting on a given day can be found on EVERY single day between 1 March 2023, until the end of July 2025. The number of circles (intensity of fighting) and their geographical location might vary but there was no pause in the fighting observed since beginning.
2. USA, Nato and all EU members have been supplying large quantities of the weapons to Ukraine, initially from the old Soviet Union weapons reserves and in the last two years, the most advanced weapons that the USA and NATO use.
3. The most modern weapons that both Russia and the USA/NATO are using, generate huge amounts of heat which is then multiplied when the targets are fuel depots and munition storages.

It is almost impossible to fully comprehend the quantities of fuel used for  hundreds of thousands of tanks, thousands of flying hours of airplanes; tens of thousands of various drones; and ammunition for millions of artillery pieces in 1,600 days of continuous fighting.

Then to try to calculate the amount of heat that was generated during this period and predict the effect of that continuously generated heat on evaporating water molecules in nearby seas, lakes and rivers.

There is however an emerging pattern which suggest possible association between extreme heat generating global events and the locations of extreme events connected by wind patterns.

Part 4. Summary and Conclusions

This report attempted to correlate the set of observations of extreme flooding events, in some cases never observed before (Dubai and Saudi Arabia) with the war in Ukraine which started in 2022 and continues at the point of writing this report in July 2025.

Part 1 listed only a small percentage of the numerous news reports of extremely unusual flooding occurring in various geographical locations across the globe in excess of the usual annual seasonal rain or snow events.

Part 2 was dedicated to the science behind the Earth’s Water Cycle which kept water on our planet for the last three billion years and also explains how this water cycle deals with any extreme heat generating events.

What was also explained in Part 2 is that in addition to recycling evaporated water molecules across different geographical locations via clouds and wind, it also has cooling effects due to the heat exchange between ice cold water molecules from the clouds and the warmer air molecules at ground level.

In other words, it is the combination of the recycling of water molecules which keeps 71% of our planet covered by water and the cooling effect of heat exchange between air and rain, that stops our planet overheating.

The most important fact that cannot be emphasised enough is the unique physico-chemical property of the water molecule which can exists in all of the three states, solid(ice), liquid and gas state and which continues to ensure life on our planet.

The data of the war in Ukraine in Part 3, obtained from the Livemap website, gives us some idea about the colossal amounts of heat energy generated over the last three and a half years of continuous fighting, with new weapons in use such as thermobaric missiles, which generate heat of over one thousand degrees Centigrades.

There are several very important and unexpected findings during the writing of this report that needs mentioning:

• The science behind the global water cycle clearly undermines and questions the fundamental failure of man-made global theory that our planet is continuously and uncontrollably heating up and predicts that in the very near future the life will be only possible at the coldest parts of Earth
• The seasonal prevailing winds which are moving the clouds in a chaotic way make almost impossible to build the long term weather forecasts with high accuracy

In conclusion, our planet has a self-sustainable global water cycle which recycles the water molecules across its surface and at the same time prevents it from overheating.

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