This must have been scary for Venetians. Six hours of water five feet above where it normally is. Walking around sidewalks hip-deep in the lagoon — yuck! A beautiful city, but that lagoon is nasty. Is it global warming? Well, that’s hard to say. There had been a lot of rain the weeks beforehand, so the rivers were high, and there are sometimes naturally-occurring high tides just by way of the force of the gravitational interaction of the moon and the earth. The highest tide ever recorded was seventy-four inches (thirteen more than today’s, which was the fourth-highest tide on record) and that was more than a hundred years ago. So I’m not quick to attribute an extraordinary event like this to global warming, although that couldn’t have helped.
