Just took a train ride from Vienna to Budapest for a few days, and couldn’t help but notice how very, very dry everything is .. as an Australian living in Europe for a few decades now, I’ve always been intrigued by just how green everything is, literally something growing in every single crack in the pavement, or endless rolling green fields of prosperity during spring - whereas, where I’m from its year-long spinifex and grass shrubs and wattles with the occasional bush flower bloom, barely hanging on out in the desert, mostly reds and blacks and greys, not much green - so the vibrancy of European fields and the abundant diversity of countryside flora have always been pleasant to my eyes ..
During this trip, I was kind of shocked that things felt a bit more Australian to my eyes .. the grasses are dry and barren, the beautiful city parks of both Budapest and Vienna dustier than usual, the Danube water level definitely noticeably lower than I remember ever seeing.
I’ve long been encouraging my European friends to not take the abundance of growth for granted, and now we see it in the environment, plain and clear: the worlds’ weather is changing.
A week of sweltering heat is predicted for us again in Vienna, and as we get started on September and then October so close, two thoughts are on my mind: use this opportunity to go for more dips in the Danube, and .. I wonder what the floods of late-autumn will bring, because .. inevitably .. this super dry summer means there will be heavier rains in October. Might be we look back in a month or two and wish we had this dry heat back again, who knows ..
Either way, neither city is particularly comfortable in the heat. A hundred or so years ago, the heat retention was a feature. Now it’s a bug.
I had a similar observation this year. In 2015, I was in California, was doing some hiking on the weekends, and I found it very unnatural how all the grasses were dry, trails dusty, on the hills/mountains. I came back to Slovakia, and I was happy to see the green grass. Fast-forward to 2026, and our grasses are equally dry and trails are equally dusty. Water management seems to be more important than ever, because this is only going to get worse. Maybe we need to build massive reservoirs, to retain the flood water somehow, if we want to keep living here in the next 100 years.
I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse. I believe he may not have even bothered planting the normal cash crops, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. That said, the year before I think it was so wet early in the year that farmers really struggled to get crops in the ground.
In areas like Valencia there are ancient irrigation systems and water rights controlled by water councils older than many countries. I wonder if the UK will need to do similar, irrigation ponds, flood control structures and canals to control the flow of water through the landscape.
This is the challenge of extreme weather, it's either drought or floods, and wild swings from the one to the other. As a kid growing up in Australia, we heard many such stories, especially if the rains came on too suddenly, since then the ground can't absorb the water, and you get flash floods.
> I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse.
The Clarkson who ran a popular car show and for years mocked Greta Thunberg and called her an "idiot" that deserved a "smacked bottom" for raising the alarm on global warming?
Oh, noe, I feel so sorry for him. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!
> Oh, noe, I feel so sorry for him. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!
In reality he now has the most popular show on Amazon. Even his brewer is probably a bigger contributor to his income than the "farming" side of his farming.
The difficulty he faces though is very common amongst British farmers but most don't have a camera crew producing 4k video of the entire growing season.
I don't know if it is gloating so much as it is recognition that unlike most injustice that happens in the world the people most responsible for it are going to suffer at least some of the consequences along with the hoi polloi.
A refreshing change of pace, even if the end result is horribly tragic for everyone.
As someone who hope global warming is man-made becuase that woudl be FIXABLE at least in theory, this is EXTREMELY deceptive report and graph and for the sake of humanity these scientists should be doing MUCH better.
Comparing sample rates during the spike to sample rates for the rest of the graph? Hidden inside those sample rates can be dramatic changes (some of which we know if that ARE NOT IN THIS GRAPH) for example the little ice age and the volcanic warming periods of europe as recently as the last 1000 years which dramatically changed the climate.
Im not arguing against human-climate change, I'm arguing that this type of junk science does no one any favors.
The little ice age is in the graph, it was just completely insignificant on a global scale, as opposed to global warming which as you can see from the graph is extremely significant on a global scale. You are expecting to see the little ice age on the graph because you think that was a comparable event to global warming, but the fact is it wasn't.
Local changes due to global warming are even more significant than the global average shows, for example the arctic has, on average, warmed more than 3 times as much as the global average.
This chart shows direct measurements where available (generally like 1800 to present), our best estimates for earlier temperatures, and expected future temperatures based on what we've seen so far.
Here is Google's AI description of DPG:
> the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, or DPG) is held in exceptionally high regard and is recognized globally as one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world
That's the organization whose work you refer to as "junk science".
We are discussing aridification in europe, a specifically local event? Also one that can happen regardless of global warming and has happened severalt times in the last 5000 years.
Do you not even track what conversation context you're in before going off?
edit: im editing here to respond to the absurd response below. The reponder, while lecturing rabidly missed several things like the difference between aridification and heat, local vs global, and europe not being the world.
I want to point out that its poeple exactly like this poster who ruin global warming debates with demonstratably false, confused, or foolish comments. Is polution bad and causing warming, yes most likely. Has the commentor below proven that? no. And in fact repeated danced around proving it while insulting me. This person is not the ally you need.
> missed several things like the difference between aridification and heat, local vs global, and europe not being the world.
I didn't miss any of that. I have already pointed out that difference in earlier comments, like when I informed you that the little ice age was local and that the arctic is warming much faster than most other places. Europe has also warmed more than many other places. And obviously the aridification is a direct result of the warming and prolonged heat waves. This article comes right after Europe experienced it's hottest summer ever recorded.
You haven't demonstrates that anything I've said is false. You referred to the article I linked as "junk science" despite the fact that it's from a very well respected organization, then you went on to just move the goal posts entirely and now you're just slandering me.
And I have in fact proved, as well as reasonably possible in an internet comment section, that the planet is warming. That was the very first thing I did, by linking an article that proves it beyond any reasonable doubt, and highlighting a chart that visualizes the severity and clear cause of the issue in a way any moron could understand if they weren't willfully ignorant.
Calling people morons is again the wrong move. You are the problem.
In fact I believe that global warming caused this but was trying to illustrate that YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
The proper response would have been explaining that 1540’s comparable drought by tree ring analysis lasted only 1 year and our samples yearly from church grape harvests help us understand direct correlation and magnitude change.
Compared to the recorded 11 month 1540 heat wave with corresponding small rings, early harvest and a dry Rhine river; 5 year consecutive heating acts as a vapor lock which then compounds aridification.
This is causality not correlation.
Instead you used a correlative and foolish argument of “line go up so you’re a moron”
Stop and think man. You are using the wrong facts and junk science to prove your point and you look foolish doing it.
A local event that is closely related to the unprecedented anthropogenic global warming that is indisputably responsible for the half decade of back-to-back-to-back heat record breakage streak we're currently on yes. And no, as far as we know this has never happened before unless you count mass extinctions millions of years ago where nearly everything on the planet died. That's what breaking a record means, we have never seen these temperatures before and now we're breaking those records every. single. year. And for the record, in those mass extinctions the global warming happened over thousands of years. This global warming is happening over decades.
Also I forgot to address this point in your earlier comment:
> As someone who hope global warming is man-made becuase that woudl be FIXABLE at least in theory
The fact that I am able to shoot you in the face does not imply that I am able to fix you afterwards. We are in no way capable of removing all the carbon we have added to the atmosphere within a reasonable timeframe, it would probably take about a thousand to a few thousand years if we really went for it.
And as I've shown you with the graph, global warming is indisputably, without a doubt, anthropogenic which means man-made.
Arguing about whether this heat wave is related to the severe global warming we are currently is experiencing is absolutely asinine, there is literally not a single fucking thing about the climate on our planet right now that wouldn't be different without climate change. The heat wave in Europe would be less hot, and/or it would be shorter, or it wouldn't be here at all. The general severe warming Europe has seen over the past decade would not have occurred.
The reduction in biomass at the boundary was possibly much greater. For example, no coal was formed for 10 million years, and the shell part of marine sediments was reduced by 97%.
My friend that show is legendary. Not on the same watchers level as original Top Gear (who can surpass 300 million), but its extremely good and literally eye-opening to millions about woes and challenges of modern agriculture.
I must admit I was utterly clueless before watching that show, what an eye opener. I hope Jeremy will be OK regarding his health, he is a national treasure.
He used to mock global warming and its advocates but thats visibly thing of the past once he got off his high ego horse behind the wheel and proverbially smelled the grass/coffee out in the countryside.
He might be a treasure, but's he's also a prick. He has a long history of letting his on-screen persona leak into meatspace (or maybe it's the other way around) and that's not a good thing.
Edit - since people seem to not believe me, at minimum, he punched his producer [1]. Which wasn't the first time he turned violent - he punched Piers Morgan [2] for letting Clarkson's extramarital affairs go public. Oh, he also had poorly concealed extra-marital affairs.
And I'll admit I watch his shows. The first two seasons of Clarkson's Farm were good TV. And with May and Hammond, he provided years of entertainment for car enthusiasts. None of which should excuse his boorish behavior off-screen.
Same here. Watch it, it's good entertainment, he's still an asshole that uses people. In fact, even in the current show, where he used that insult on one of his employees who someone said she looked like pre-transition Caleb — that's exactly the kind of thing he does and he found that funny so couldn't help himself but use it.
I don’t know, in a world where dictators bomb whoever they want, if punching someone is the worst thing you can do. People continue to follow and fangirl the politicians who enact violence, so why should one go on a crusade against a tv star who gets a little hands on?
I wasn't conversing in the first place, I'm just bored of reading through exchanges where at some point someone says Aha! That's a fallacy! Got you, I win!
I know you weren’t. Which was my point: the conversation was not shut down. If pointing out someone’s manipulation is not OK to you, then you’re probably better off trying a different discussion board.
Well, parts of it are naturally a desert. But plenty of forest and wetlands too. In fact there were even more wetlands before we channelized many of the rivers.
Current research is that it would get a lot drier than it is currently. Also the AMOC collapse process would play out over many decades (~50-100 years) it will not be a sudden event.
Warm oceans, as they are, would surely bring rain? Hence why the UK is so rainy. The ocean is warmer than the land, it's like warm water in a cold room, you get the moisture coming off it. If the ocean isn't warm any more, I reckon (as an amateur engineer not climatologist) that would reduce the rain we get.
That is one part, the other part is that you would get more persistent high pressure blocking patterns over Europe due to reordered atmosphere circulation which will lead to more intense droughts. That is what happened this summer.
As far as I remember, here in Budapest - apart from a handful of quick showers - it rained exactly once all summer, and altogether about four times since the end of winter. The city is estimated to lose a third of its trees in the next 10-15 years.
The summer heat, the drought, combined with winter cold spells and now usual late spring frosts have all but destroyed the country's agriculture too. The new government has initiated a water retention plan, but it might be too little to late.
Very similar experience with Romania and the Netherlands. I grew up in western Romania (was born in the mid '90s), and moved to the Netherlands over 5 years ago. When I first came here, I was stunned by how green everything was, being mid-summer. But this summer I just realized that many areas have a yellowish hue. Vegetation has dried up in some places, something I don't remember witnessing around here before.
I occasionally watch development of infrastructure projects in Romania, videos such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eETeHvExMxw . This is completely different from what I used to remember. Completely dry fields. Fields used to be green at this time of the year. So much dust everywhere.
I do think I'll return one day, because somehow there's still some part of me that's melancholic about the places I've grown up in. But it now seems that if I wait many more years it will be a completely different landscape than the one I left, and not in a good sense.
Also an Australian living in Austria (there’s a few of us), although not in Vienna.
Whenever I return to Australia (also mostly rural locations) the major difference I notice is bird life. There are so many more birds in Australia. Maybe they’re just noisier.
We put feeders out in our Austrian garden and do see plenty of small birds, as well as woodpeckers, crows and pigeons. However, in Australia there are lots of small birds too, like finches and wrens. As well as magpies, currawongs and the large noisy flocks of galahs and sulphur crested cockatoos. King parrots and rosellas regularly seen. Maybe it’s a regional Australia phenomenon, but it really stands out to me.
That's my memory of Sydney to. In Europe we sold every land parcel, reduced their habitat (forests) to 100m blocks, then 50m, then a public park with scientific studies used to justify that they'll be better off in the park... then they die. Turns out all scientific studies are paid out by promoters and everyone has a price.
how could a world gov body not become corrupt but also rule over easily corruptible groups that are self interested - ie like those who slowly sell teh land to developers and reduce ecosystems to nothing to the detriment to the greater good?
The October flood of crows and other migratory birds down the Danube, past Vienna, is pretty awesome though, to be fair. Like a river of birds in the sky each day, and it is an inspiring sight indeed.
its been decades since visiting Austria but when i visited Freiburg 5 years ago it seemed like there were only birds where people were feeding them and our walks in the black forest were noticeably quiet because we heard NO bugs. the lack of buzzing was eerie. im from northwest US
seen Germany's insect decline written about but didnt expect it to be noticeable
El Nino involves moving moisture around, not just reducing precipitation all over. So the opposite can also be seen in some places. The eastern US and parts of the midwest have had a very good year, an the US harvest of maize is projected to be the 2nd highest ever, slightly above 16 billion bushels.
Locally (New York state), things have been so wet we're seeing premature leaf drops from maple trees due to leaf fungus (tar spot disease).
What part of NY are you in?
Here in northern Central NY we’ve been ‘abnormally dry’ all summer long. The forecasters keep promising rain, but it’s little more than a sprinkle when it arrives.
Lawns are brown. Trees are dropping leaves, but that’s to slow evaporation.
Around Ithaca. If I go to https://www.drought.gov/ and look at New York state, there's only two fairly small patches of D0 (the lowest drought category, actually "pre-drought") in the state; the rest is not under drought.
This whole summer I've felt that things have been remarkably green and verdant where I live in the Midwest. It reminds me of my childhood, everything is just so much more green and lush this go around.
Water is lost in drops a year to the universe. It’s raining somewhere. The EU having a poor memory of historical weather patterns.
Yes, I think climate change is real and we need to fix it.
Droughts have been recorded in history for centuries, long before climate change would have ever existed.
Let’s fix the climate, let’s also try and be rational about historical regional weather patterns.
It’s not really a common perspective, but I have a theory that the primary cause of especially this kind of drought has way more to do with Europe essentially draining itself through all of the river straightening projects of the 19th century. How could it not be.
Before all the industrial age river straightening that has gone on until even rather recently with damming and concrete encasement projects in I think even the 1990s, you not only prevented the river water, i.e., mountain glacial waters and evaporative rain waters from meandering and saturating the lowlands, but you even speed up the pace not to mention shortening the distance.
Sure, it wasn’t a fast process, but as anyone who has had a small water leak in their home can tell you, constant flow of water at even a small rate adds up over 24/7/365 and 200 years. You’ve literally not just been draining all your fresh water into the ocean, but you’ve been draining your water battery in the form of the saturated wetlands, soil and structures like the gravel aquifers of Central Europe of water. More people are befuddled why there is a drought after they drained the water cycle battery for 200 years, not to mention that the European population has almost quadrupled over that time and people used far less water in the past, not even to mention that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe.
Ironically and in seemingly typical contradictory and counterproductive manner, the EU seems to quietly and maybe even ignorantly agree with me based on several directives and regulations they’ve been passing to restore some wetlands, river flows, and floodplains. Unfortunately it’s very little and very late (as people may be noticing) the rule of thumb is that what was destroyed takes at least 6x the effort to restore.
The concept of winter pretty much stopped existing where I live. It's just colder autumn. The ground doesn't freeze. Snow doesn't accumulate. No amount of meandering is going to compensate for the fact that the mountains do not hold water. Something needs to feed the springs and rivers. And the source is gone. Europe is shifting into a different climate, where water primarily comes as rainfall, causing floods. I imagine it's similar to Asian countries, and we will have to learn to deal with that.
I get what you are saying. I think I mentioned that I am not really all that optimistic that the process has not become irreversible in the near term, but the way I see it the only way that you could try reversing it is to effectively try to retain as much water as possible, which would require things like flooding flood plains with river water when it is available in the near term, planning for "wilding" river flows back into historical flood plains over the medium term, i.e., 50 years, and making policy that would move people out of flood plains to expand the wilding, using channels and dikes to lead river water into meadows and plains and dissuading populations in flood plains, and reversing the population growth of a population that is about 4x the size of what it was in 1800.
It sounds drastic, but all I keep hearing is that we need drastic actions, but those drastic actions seem to always be based on diffuse, abstract, and really rather meaningless and insignificant things like reducing energy use, while at the same time driving tens of millions of more people from low energy consumption regions into relatively high energy consumption regions.
But to address your point too, yes, Europe seems too be shifting into a different climate, but it's because based on my theory, Europe has effectively drained it's water cycle of the very moisture it needs. Sure, climate change has warmed things everywhere, but don't you think if Europe had the moisture it drained into the oceans that could evaporate under the higher heat into clouds that both would provide ray reflection/shadow/cooling, and deposit rain into the alps in the form of snow in winter; things would likely look a lot different?
The thing is that the source does not have to be gone, because it is actually not in Europe at all, but you have to kind of "kickstart" the cycle again if that is even possible. The source of European moisture in the European water cycle is effectively the USA and the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean area. The Gulf Stream then drives that moisture by way of the energy in the water towards Europe, where it then is driven inland from the north through the cooling at the poles.
What I am saying is effectively, if you drain your lawn with elaborate drainage systems that suck all the moisture out at a faster rate than you can even water it, you should not be surprised that it still will dry up and die.
There are clearly things going on, e.g., the US has not really had anywhere near the number of hurricanes that keep getting predicted, but I can assure you that the heat is generating a lot of storms and clouds. It's a bit anecdotal, but I am actually oddly surprised at how "cool" the ocean water is this year in particular compared to the past. I hope it's not the other wild prediction scientist have made that he AMOC seizes up and you guys end up wishing there were more global warming, but that's for another day.
Plenty of ways. That's what we have science for. For one, why choose 19th century projects when we did millenia of terraforming, mostly by doing away with forrests and wetlands, but also planting artifical forrests over dry sand areas (see the Cap Ferret fire) etc. etc.
but also, the heatwaves of this summer mostly consist of hot air from Sahara being driven to Europe and staying there.
> that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe
It takes very little time for water to reach the sea. From rain falling in Germany or snow melting in the Alps to it entering the North Sea takes less than two weeks. Even at the current extremely low flow the Rhine is still delivering 800 m3 / second to The Netherlands, and during high-flow periods it can deliver over 12.000 m3 / second. Any kind of meaningful retention just isn't going to happen, short of a giant hydro reservoir. Some river straightening isn't going to be more than a rounding error.
The real issue here is the loss of the glaciers, which are the actual "water batteries". Previously a lot of snow fell in the winter, stayed there, and slowly melted off during the summer. Nowadays a lot of rain falls during the winter, and it immediately flows downstream, with nothing to melt during the summer.
Population is completely irrelevant here, by the way. Any water used by people ends up going back into the river after some filtering. No need to invent an immigration conspiracy.
You are not catching on my friend. That is precisely the issue, that the straightening of the rivers... you are aware that was done, right? ... and channeling them out of wetlands, flood plains, and meanders and oxbows has effectively narrowed and sped up the water flows, while also shortening, i.e., both length and water time in river/land, largely because meandering, longer natural rivers are also flatter, i.e., the same elevation gain/drop over 30% more length and they are wider, i.e., the past volume of greater water stored itself in gravel "batteries" (hence where Kiesgruben" come from which fill into a Baggersee) and left by glaciers a very long time ago.
It's really not all that complicated when you realize what I am saying and it just seems to proximal for Europeans for some reason, i.e., they don't really seem to have a sense for how things were in the past, based on my experience talking to them, i.e., they think the rivers they have have always been more or less the way they currently are even if they are maybe manicured with banks or something. For additional context; the Rhein was up to 30 times wider than it is today before being straightened.
Here's a decent illustration of that [1] which shows not only how the river was straightened from the meandering oxbow river into the straight red river, but also notice that all of the green area is the historical path of the river and the flood plains it produced which would have been fed by all those meandering oxbows. All of that is now gone with the drainage of Europe having been completed over about 200 years now.
It's really not all that different in the USA either in case you were wondering, but e.g., the Mississippi has only been straightened since the 1930s and is still very much not really fully controlled even though the straightening along with deforestation and soil erosion has also led to the USA being essentially drained. And here too, people are wondering why it's getting dryer more. We have similarly also chocked our country full of way more people that can sustainably be supported in an ecologically sound manner, but liberals and conservatives have one thing in common, they slap the roof of the car and proclaim "this bad boy can fit so many f--king people in it." out of a toxic combination of lust for power, decadence, entitlement, and greed.
I don't think this view is especially controversial. Many past infrastructure and industry projects make the drought worse today - dams, channels, mines (especially open-pit). In my area (eastern Poland) single communist-era irigation project is responsible for destroying 73% of peat bogs, meadow marshes and wet meadows [1]. Restoring them to previous condition is completely infeasible.
That's a really good point. I've seen some work on retaining moisture in the desert, and if memory serves, the successful ones create small check dams to retard water flow down a watercourse, giving it time to soak into the ground and replenish groundwater.
It would be interesting to see whether one could apply that to European waterways as part of marshland regeneration.
Interesting theory and I can see how you get there.
But if drainage changes were the primary cause, we would've seen drought severity increasing across the time period where straightening/etc were happening... instead the drought severity increases begin _after_ that period, better aligned with temperature changes.
Additionally, your analogy to a water leak from a tank doesn't hold, because the water recharges over time...
Further, your complaints about immigrants also doesn't make sense, as water usage has been going down (and residential utilization is quite low, altogether).
As such, my theory is that you're just a right-wing crank who wants to find a reason to deny global warming, and to hate immigrants.
For what it's worth, please do not go for a dip in the Danube river proper here in Vienna, the currents are too dangerous for bathing and there is no official bathing spot anywhere for this reason. Instead, visit our other waters such as the lakes of the Old Danube or the high-water protection side-arm New Danube.
Yes, good clarification, I personally spend my times at Grillplatz 11 on the Neue Donau side of Donau Insel (Danube Island) .. it has been a wonderful summer and the water is delightful. Very safe and rewarding swim, every time.
I’ve had it explained to me that it evaporates in the heat and gets deposited in the mountains and the atmosphere above the more northern states, where .. once things cool down, it condenses and moves through tributaries in a big rush or two during the massive temperature changes of October/November.
The thunder storms we’ve had in Vienna in the last few years have produced amazing floods - reminiscent of the desert storms of Australias north-west, where I am from - and a couple years back, the engineering of Viennas water ways was put to the test, with the floods overflowing railway lines and traffic arteries of the city in ways not seen much before this decade...
Not in the Alps, but mid summer looked like the start of autumn. At this rate, it won't be long until we don't even have an autumn like the tropics.
Swiss Tourism Agency will have to work overtime now promoting Tiktok clips and Insta reels, because of Rösti's stupid policy. And the country is going to pay for it over the next few decades.
Finland has escaped most of the heat of Central Europe. We have had hard rains occasionally, but overall not that much more rain. From stats look like 100-150% of historic numbers.
So it has really not rained outside the high pressure zone. So I am not really sure where it all would be.
that sounds wonderful from the ~1000 square miles of Phoenix, Arizona, where a century of concrete and asphalt retain so much heat that the clouds bounce around the borders of the heat bubble overhead, unable to dump rain regularly enough to evaporate away the stored heat, but with rainfall regularly visible outside the edges of the metropolitan area, in the wide open skies.
My wife and I retired to Tucson last year, and intentionally went through this first summer just to get the full experience. Never again! We've been under flash flood warnings the last several days and have only had a few sprinkles to go with the 108F days.
So... I had a look at Eureka CA weather this morning. Looks like Western Norway. Nice. Spending July and August up there might be mandatory for our mental health.
We spent 3 years in Tempe back in the '80s. It sucked then too.
Eureka is a weird place. It's got a foggy microclimate that you can actually see as you drive into it. Even for the Northern California / Oregon coast it's especially cool and rainy.
As a Portlander I treasure our 3-4 months of sunny weather. I wouldn't be able to handle the year-round gloom.
good info...dad lived in hillsboro so i understand the monotony boredom of overcast skies. interestingly, i personally find phoenix area worse since rain is way more rare than sun up there, and it's mega dramatic insane when it happens, from winds.
that's good info : i'll take a look at Eureka, but think further north would be even better, like Oregon coast. I'm from Chicago outer suburbia originally so miss actual greenery and rain without the mega-dramatic desert windstorm bullshit...and at altitude at the foothills north of the phoenix metro area it's been way over 100 for a very long time, though less insane than som eof the 8 years we've been here (for work and outdoorsiness).
I can’t imagine what the Netherlands would look like if desertification would occur. It seems implausible that those flat, flat lands would ever turn brown and grey and dusty - but I won’t be surprised if things turn that way in a few years. I hope the Dutch have a solution, they always seem to when it comes to water control ..
I think currently one of the biggest risks for The Netherlands is salinization. If there is not enough river water and the groundwater level is too low, sea water will push upward, contaminating the river beds and increasingly much soil around it. This summer they had to close locks to block seawater and to increase the fresh water level. Of course, this has a considerable economic damage, since it blocks inland shipping.
Netherlands is also in a much worse position due to being downstream of literally everyone.
It's going to be a huge future fight in the EU because all countries upstream will want to retain 'all' the water and the remaining low flow will still have all those countries their industries dumping toxic waste, meaning the ratio of water-waste will get ridiculous.
The Rhine, which becomes the Waal in the Netherlands, has been exceptionally low now for most of the summer and caused major issues for shipping.
It has only a single waterlock and so there is no retention of the water in it when a period of draughts like the ones this summer happen.
Germany has had a project for adding water locks to the Rhine ongoing in burocracy purgatory for the last 26 years now, and if this situation doesn't shake things up I don't think anything ever will.
There is still enough water, it is just unevenly distributed over the year. Previously winter snow was retained in the Alps and released as it melted during the summer, nowadays winter rain immediately comes downstream as giant floods.
If upstream countries were able to retain a significant portion of those floods and release it as a trickle during the summer, The Netherlands wouldn't have any problems. It is literally impossible for it to be worse than it currently is.
Besides, most of the water used in The Netherlands does not come from the large rivers, but from local rainfall. The drought is due to sticking to the historical policy of trying to immediately get rid of any excess water, rather than retaining it locally. No need to do anything EU-wide to solve that, just get the farmers to accept that the land will be a bit soggy in the winter.
Drought in The Netherlands is artificial though. Millionaire farmers are pumping up water to water their crops during the day. Due to the heat most of the spray evaporates before it touches the plants. During the winter they artificially lower the ground water level for personal benefit.
Also of this so they can gain even more millions by exporting all the food across the border. Time to block some more highways, destroy some more property and kill some more people in order to secure those sweet EU subsidies.
Not saying that Dutch farmers don't use a lot of water overall, but they have some of the most effective farming practices on the planet when it comes to water usage.
Correct, but those very same practices are causing huge damages to the local environment and economy, while the farming relies on foreign imports to function and the majority of its production is exported.
Rather than exporting farming products, The Netherlands should focus on exporting farming practices.
That doesn’t change the fact that the millionaire megafarmers completely screwed over Dutch water management for personal gains. Did you know that farmers are basically completely in control of waterschappen despite only bringing in a couple percent of the GDP.
Satellite data measuring Leaf Area Index shows a strong trend of global greening, not desertification. About 50% of land shows accelerated re-greening, including in europe, while only about 8% shows browning. There is no scientific case for desertification, which would be a surprise when we are pumping the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses.
Wow, that's kind of incredible. I've always been able to walk out into parts of it for quite a distance in prior visits over the years but I'm guessing this new average is an extreme.
To be honest, it's not unusual for that part of the Europe to be pretty yellow in August. I was taking train rides to Budapest regularly between 2010-2020. But it's getting worse for sure.
I agree with that, but was specifically referring to the description of everything being very dry in that area. I noticed this already 15 years ago, the area around Budapest was much more yellow and dry compared to countries up north.
But yes, the intensity and especially the duration of the heat has intensified. I stopped visiting my family in the south of Europe around five years ago, and visit in either fall or spring. Can't really take the heat, it's not worth it.
Hungary was largely swamps and marshlands in the past, much of which was drained to give way for large-field monocultural agriculture, this started in the 19th century, and was further developed, until we got here. Now the "non-existent climate change" is added to that, and I wonder if our forests will survive me...
Also soil erosion is a problem, so I think I'll live to get it all to a desert.
Sure, it gets dry in summer, it’s not always so lush - at least in my experience over the years.
But, parks of dead grass, and dust devils blowing in the corners? Can’t say I’ve seen that much over the decades of visiting the region. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much dry, dead grass.
I, for one, am very grateful for my neighborhood turning the streets into cooler, greener little oases for pedestrians. Perhaps those eucalyptus trees the Schönbrunner Zoo keeps for its koalas will be of use in providing avenues of shade in the decades to come, who knows …
I have an ancient forest near where I live in Switzerland. In the core zone of the forest they do no maintenance whatsoever. The trees live, they get gigantic and very old. They die. At some point the top breaks off and then many years later the rest of the tree is so fungus-eaten it tips over too and rots on the ground.
Sunlight never reaches the ground because of the tall giant trees so there's no undergrowth. It's just dead leaves and mushrooms.
Something that was completely 100% noticeable was that during this drought of several months this forest was still incredibly healthy. You walk into the forest and the temperature drops several degrees Celsius and the ground still seems wet. I could tell that the groundwater level sunk maybe 4 feet by looking at some pits that normally have water. But still the ground didn't feel dried out.
I compared this to a forest where they do maintain the forest and harvest giant trees for wood. They don't clear it but just by cutting out these tall trees they let sunlight reach the ground and dry the forest out.
Well, I also have an oak forest just in front of my balcony here in western Switzerland. Most of it is natural reserve, around half is literal scientific reserve. They don't harvest, let everything where it falls unless it completely blocks one of few pedestrian paths, then they use horses to drag it aside. It has few small streams (with crayfish!!) and one river flowing through
That forest was crispy dry, almost dusty in recent weeks. One spark could burn it all down easily. We had... 2 properly rainy days through whole summer? Few thunderstorms but they were very local, and all of them avoided directly our area and that forest like plague.
At least those crayfish managed to survive as I've seen 2 last week, they are more susceptible to water pollution and some brutal fungal infection which can be brought from other streams and basically sterilize whole stream (happened in other parts of our canton around Lausanne). Water somehow didn't stop. Back where I come from in eastern Europe their local crayfish weren't often so lucky - streams bone dry.
i am currently hiking through switzerland (in cossonay this evening) and have been struck by how wet the forest ground is compared to my home (colorado, usa). locals have told me that’s very recent because of the storms that came through a few days ago.
the mittelland seems dry but since i’m walking through farmland, mostly, everything around me looks green, while i walk on dusty paths.
In the last years Europe had suffered a wave of wildfires at a level never seen before. Most of it started by people and many of them provoked in a sort of coordinated attack. Also there is a war in Ukraine blowing up everything at full steam and releasing huge amounts of heat to the lower atmosphere. Both facts must be taken in mind to understand the current situation.
Europe has suffered a damage in many ecological buffers that that may be recoverable unless they suffer a second attack. A forest can be burnt just a limited number of times before it turns into a desert. Monegros was one of the biggest oak forests in Spain. The name can be losely translated as "black hills" that suggest repeated wildfires as wrong management techniques. Take a look at the place now. Australia was also covered in rainforests in the past.
I really hope that when the nature sabotage stops, the situation will improve a little at least, even if we are at a much, much worse place than before the Ukraine war.
Perhaps the cutting and removal of the trees also plays a factor? They suck in water over their life, then once they are cut the forest loses that moisture.
Get in a time machine. Go back to 1970. Make sure world starts phasing out all coal power by 2000, replacing with nuclear and what renewables are available then, and make sure modular scalable reactors are available for China so they use that instead of coal to power their rise. Convince everyone that late 20th century unscientific greens are full of shit and nuclear power is better than coal.
(Renewables were not fully competitive with fission until the 20teens, too late.)
It’s dialed in.
That’s not to mean replacing stuff with non carbon emitting sources today is worthless. It’s very important. Right now we are dialing in the next escalation of the problem, and we can still blunt that if we give a damn.
One thing you can do today is keep arguing against the romantic anti industrial unscientific greens. Degrowth and “abstinence based” policy will never work. People will never go for it, and we are never returning to pre industrial times. It’s a fantasy. If you try to force it people will elect anti environmental populists (as they have) and you will get the opposite of what we need.
Fantasies displace realistic solutions in the discourse, and “everyone needs to become poorer” gives anti environmental and fossil fuel industry shills a way to frame their case as “we are on the side of human development.” Don’t give them that argument. Stop it. It also won’t work with developing nations. “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.
The solution is to replace fossil fuels with non carbon emitting sources, not to stop people from using energy.
In Europe, we're already degrowing since 2008, even more so if you only look at the real, physical economy because we have to import our fossil energy. We won't be able to power the same lifestyle with nuclear and renewables either, the math doesn't add up. Jean-Marc Jancovici is a french engineer explaining this in great detail, see for example https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/84-jean-marc-... if you don't speak french.
It won't work. You can absolutely trim a lot of fat from the modern lifestyle, but then you'll be left with a residual. Meanwhile the developing world will keep developing and we have no right to order them to stop.
The idea that it's not possible is bullshit too, and it's still bullshit even if you ignore nuclear power.
Back in the 2000s there was a ton of discourse around peak oil. As part of that, I recall reading very detailed breakdowns written by actual engineers and scientists arguing why you would never have a mass-market EV with the range of a gasoline car and you would never be able to power more than 10-20% of a modern economy with solar power. I own two EVs, one with gas-comparable range, and California currently gets almost 40% of its total electricity (averaged across day and night) from solar, and climbing. There were whole books on this. I think one was called Power Down. It was all 100% wrong.
I also recall reading detailed analyses by aerospace engineers about how you would never have a reusable rocket, that it was simply impossible or would cost so much it wouldn't be practical. First stage reusability is now routine, and second stage reusability is coming.
Detailed breakdowns of why X is impossible have an incredibly poor track record unless they reduce directly to the laws of physics. Will faster than light travel ever be possible? No, and I believe that, because if it was it would mean a huge part of modern physics (not just relativity) is wrong in very bonkers ways.
There is no first principles physics argument for the limits this guy is arguing.
Of course if you imagine infinite growth on a finite planet, that fails. That's a trivial argument. But that's not happening, probably due to birth rates declining. The question I'm addressing is: can this civilization and its near-future extrapolation be powered without fossil fuels? The answer is yes, and again even without nukes. Throw nukes in there and it just gets easier.
IMO this is 100% ideology and is an example of what I call "problemism." A "problemist" is someone who uses a problem as a stalking horse for one and only one solution that turns out to smuggle in some kind of ideological or social agenda.
I see problemism as a dishonest propaganda technique. It's a way to sell the idea without directly selling the idea, instead using concern over some other thing to smuggle it in.
So you know I'm not just picking on the left: right now there's a big freak-out on the right about birth rates. The problemists there argue that it's why we need to get back to ultra-traditional family structures and take rights away from women. They're not interested in any solution that doesn't do that, because they don't actually care about the problem. They only care about taking rights from women.
This guy and those like him only care about degrowth as part of what is probably some kind of anti-industrial political ideology. If the problem could be solved without it, that would be bad as far as they're concerned, just like how the far right doesn't care about solutions to birth rate decline issues that don't involve reactionary social agendas.
Most of these people are anti-capitalists. Thing is, I don't mind that. I don't think capitalism is the ordained perfect system. But if you want to sell me on an alternative to capitalism, argue for it directly on its merits. The test is: if climate change and fossil fuel depletion did not exist, could you still make your argument for abandoning capitalism in favor of your system? If not, then you're engaging in "problemism" to sell bullshit. Because there is no physical reason that you could not drastically cut CO2 emissions without abandoning capitalism. A simple progressive carbon tax combined with cheap renewables could do it. We just lack the political will.
I wasn't taking about ideology, I was talking about what is already happening. Here's a graph of total freight volume (a proxy for the real physical economy) in the EU 15 countries since 2000, notice the peak around 2008:
> Here's a graph of total freight volume (a proxy for the real physical economy)
In 2008, people and businesses were still buying new computers every year or two, printing everything on paper, buying physical media. I don't know anyone that does this anymore. I don't think that is a good proxy.
In the US there was a slight drop around that time, but not close to 25% in the eu. If it was due to businesses buying less physical media wouldn't it be sth seen in the US data in some year too?
I would note that the population increase 2008-present in the EU (340M to 350M) is much lower than the US (305M to 345M), which could account for a rather significant difference too. I don't think either of these is a "smoking gun" but they both seem pretty significant confounding factors.
This is a gross misunderstanding of what degrowth means.
The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled to resources (as it has), but there is a limit, unless you seriously want to argue that iron (for example) can be an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
An economy is a method of allocating resources. This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs (consider that we produce many times the amount of food that's needed to feed everyone's needs, but massive amounts of it used for industrial meat production and biofuels).
> we are never returning to pre industrial times
This is an absurd strawman.
> everyone needs to become poorer
This is, in fact, the industry propaganda. What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form), rather than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
> “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.
This is misdirection. Getting water, food, shelter, and medicine for everyone on the planet is well within our means as a species. It is the ideology of free movement for goods but not people and infinite growth that makes it impossible to meet those needs, because it requires and underclass who can be used for cheap labour and contained in states built for that purpose.
It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find.
Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all of which are heated and cooled 24/7. How much energy do they use? What is that energy use in terms of average European households?"
I used European because Americans are notable energy pigs and can cut a lot without losing much. Europeans are closer to the reasonable baseline.
The total it comes up with for our gas-guzzling fat cat is 96-97 GWh per year. That's including three homes and a continuously operating jet aircraft. This is a totally ridiculous footprint, of course.
Claude Fable says the average European household uses about 15,000 kWh/year in electricity, heating, etc. That means our fat cat corresponds to about 6,400 average European households.
The population of Europe is around 750 million people.
There's about 3000 billionaires worldwide, and if they all lived as absurdly as my caricature they'd use 288 TWh per year.
That corresponds to around 19.2 million European households, or about 2.5% of the energy use of a middle class Europe.
The vast bulk of energy and resource use supports the middle class, and raising people out of poverty.
Inequality probably reduces energy use. If we improved equality it would mean more people with a basic middle class standard of living. A society in which almost everyone has a European middle class standard of living would consume far more energy than one in which a few fat cats live it up and everyone else is poor.
Personally I agree with the left at least a bit on this. I think we have too much inequality. If we reduce inequality, that will increase energy consumption, so we'd better build solar panels and batteries and reactors at the same time.
Their money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is many times a source of great suffering. If they had to make that somewhere adhere to rules or abide by law or stop exploiting others - humans or nature - it would cost them a great amount of money.
If that's true it would mean fixing this injustice would just even out who gets to have what. It would not meaningfully reduce consumption, certainly not enough to make a huge difference in CO2 emissions.
(There might be one exception to that: reducing warfare. War is a gigantic waste twice over: tons of energy to fight, tons of energy to rebuild all the stuff we break. But I doubt eliminating warfare would be enough alone to cut emissions enough to matter.)
There's only two ways to reduce CO2 emissions by a large amount in a durable lasting way:
1. Replace CO2 emitting sources of power with those that don't emit CO2.
2. Destroy the middle class.
Actually I guess there's a third: kill a lot of people.
Anything less is a rounding error that won't make much of a difference.
I'll take option 1. Luckily the laws of physics say we can do it. We just need the political will. There's also precedent. Many developed countries' emissions per capita has been falling while growth has actually continued (in most cases) and standard of living hasn't moved much. We just need to do a lot more of what works.
> Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.
The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true. But you are also assuming that reducing emissions must come with a reduction in lifestyle, which is untrue. Think about the way that our computers are designed to be disposable and unrepairable, or how clothing is made worse and worse (because it's more profitable, which is only necessary because of the need for infinite growth). Or, as you pointed out, North Americans use a ton of energy for terrible reasons, and fixing that problem would improve their quality of life: walkability, bikability, and public transit so people can drive less (or even stop owning a car) while also getting improved health; replacing flights with more comfortable high speed trains; removing the need to maintain a lawn for every house (shockingly terrible for the environment); etc. Or how we ship things all around the world to be assembled in different phases in different countries because it's cheaper (and suppresses labour). What so many of the things we need to do to solve this problem have in common isn't a reduction in lifestyle (some will do the opposite!), but rather that they impact profits and therefore threaten infinite growth.
Yes, there are some things that people won't like doing, like significantly reducing the amount of meat they eat (>15% of global emissions are from meat production, and it is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon). But pretending nothing will ever change doesn't solve the problem (and we'll be catastrophically forced to change later if we don't voluntarily do it sooner).
I'm not saying nothing will ever change. That's a misreading. I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.
Environmentalists have been making the "abstinence first" guilt trip argument for decades and it's done absolutely nothing and it will never do anything. That approach is a total failure. I use the abstinence framing because it's like abstinence-based sex ed. Instead of having sex, teenagers have guilty sex.
Let's say Claude's wrong. The argument still stands if it's off by 10X. Soaking the rich won't help by more than a rounding error, and redistribution might actually increase resource use. It's also a one-time thing.
Speaking of AI: turning off all the AI data centers won't help either. They're a few percent of electricity use. A few percent won't matter and it's another one-time thing. It's not an ongoing solution to anything if the economy is still powered by burning stuff.
Then you have the developing world. Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.
There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.
If Africa modernizes on coal like China did, that'll add another China worth of emissions, which would be catastrophic. The only way out is for Africa to industrialize and modernize on sources of power that don't emit CO2.
Luckily that's possible, but telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen. It's how you get them to say "fuck you" and ignore you.
Here in Washington State, a decade ago we had an initiative (I-732) to do a carbon tax and lower regressive taxes (we have one of the most-regressive tax structure in the USA). The environmental groups opposed it because it wasn't handing out money to them and it lost narrowly.
Eventually the legislature passed a complicated cap-and-trade scheme and they spend the money on bullshit and lie about it: "The projects the department touted amounted to just under 4% of their original estimates." https://phys.org/news/2026-01-washington-state-overestimates...
> I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.
But energy source isn't the only problem. The problem is partially that energy use is high in and of itself. Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already). The ideology of infinite growth requires ever more cobalt, and so it depends on that oppression and ecological damage. Reduce, reuse, recycle are in that order for a reason, but we are never able to do the first because of infinite growth.
I think your framing of "abstinence" is nonsense. What are we abstaining from? Economic 'growth'? Energy usage? Consumerism? If so, all we're "abstaining" from is the thing that benefits rich people to our own detriment. We must distinguish economic growth from improvements to lifestyle, which as I stated are frequently at odds.
> They're a few percent of electricity use.
Continually growing, using far more resources than just electricity, for mostly downsides to humanity, and causing significant local pollution.
> Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.
Sure, let's just make up numbers. Sorry, I meant let's burn methane to have 'Claude' make up numbers.
> There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.
But you haven't dealt with the fact that the reason they're deprived is because of the very system you're supporting. I agree that all people ought to have the same access to technology and standards of living, and doing so requires that we reshape how technology works and is distributed. That will never happen under the current system, because doing so would impact profits. Infinite growth is the thing preventing us from fundamentally improving our technology and societies to be sustainable.
> telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen
I am arguing for the opposite, but you seem not to have read what I wrote.
> Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already).
> The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires
The top 10% is overwhelmingly not billionaires, or even millionaires. The top 10% is basically all of the US except the poorest. And some upper middle classes elsewhere.
> The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources.
Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.
> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.
Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.
> This is an absurd strawman.
Need to read more degrowth fiction then.
> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)
The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.
> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.
We won't go back. That's the thing, the false option. I think you underestimate how much being poor sucks. I personally call this the "it's better to reign in hell" principle.
So if we are dumb and don't cut emissions, we will "reign in hell," and it'll look like a dark cyberpunk dystopia. There might also be some pretty nasty wars and genocides in there.
I think that's the real choice we have. If we reduce carbon emissions enough, we can blunt the effects of climate change and adapt without too much pain. If we don't, we get to LARP Bladerunner with billions taking shelter in air conditioned mega-blocks when the deadly heat waves hit.
Nature isn't happy life in harmony. Nature is suffering and death. It's an amoral Darwinian meat grinder.
Let me make it concrete. I have kids. Let's say you give me a choice.
Option 1: I go to the future where we live closer to nature, more primitively, but my daughter died of a childhood disease.
Option 2: I go to the future that looks like Bladerunner or Kowloon Walled City with killer heat waves requiring air conditioning to survive, but my child is alive because of modern medicine.
I'd pick two and so would most people, which is why we'll never go back. The infant and child mortality rates alone in "wild nature" are enough to turn people away. It's better to reign in hell.
But I don't think we have to do that. We could do things like carbon taxes, provided we stop spending the social and political capital on guilt trip tactics and back to the land bullshit that will just be ignored, which is why I'm wasting my time ranting about this.
It's popular right now because the impacts are visibly getting worse. This weather event in Europe is far from normal, and the trend is accelerating.
If we fail to control it, what will happen is that we'll be reduced in population by an order of magnitude or two. We won't be able to sustain the technology we've created, we'll have mined easily accessible minerals and energy, and there is a real chance we will not return to being an advanced species in the same way we are today.
A simple reduction to greens vs not-greens is not helping anything. We can use more solar and wind. We can be more efficient with energy. We can stop burning hydrocarbons immediately and reserve the for material science and we can replace most car energy sources with electric.
None of this is even difficult, it just hurts some established interests who are fighting it with everything they have. They would rather that the planet get destroyed than to lose their wealth and power.
I'd prefer my kids not live in Bladerunner, also, and right now that's the path we're on.
Bluntly: too late. You'd have to rewind to 2001 or so and go on the strictest measures worldwide. But we are utterly unequipped to deal with global issues, the Ozon layer success notwithstanding.
The problem with people constantly pointing to the Ozone layer is that it was only really addressed because it cost virtually nothing to do so. All we had to do was switch from one bad thing to another good thing, which was already becoming cheaper.
Climate change as a whole requires a fundamental shift from the basis of almost all chemical manufacturing and transport logistics. And doing so will cause cataclysmic changes to the socioeconomic standings of entire regions of the world.
>The problem with people constantly pointing to the Ozone layer is that it was only really addressed because it cost virtually nothing to do so. All we had to do was switch from one bad thing to another good thing, which was already becoming cheaper.
The tin-foil tongue in cheek joke in the refrigeration industry is "how do you know if a refrigerant is bad for the atmosphere?. because DuPont's patent expired".
Which is to say that R12 would've never gone out of fashion if not for big moneyed first world interests who have the ear of politicians whining that the 3rd world was gonna make and sell stuff cheaper and hurt their profits and that protecting the ozone layer only happened because it was good for big business. Subsequent changes in refrigerant are less flagrant but the undertone is still there. C02 never really caught on because you can just buy the stuff at any welding gas supply place for pennies, the entire supply chain stands to lose a source of profit with that as a refrigerant.
Sure but like the guy said we needed to do that 30 years ago. Even now we're basically ignoring the problem. "Look at all these renewables" while we're still building new coal plants. And even still, most people are debating whether it's even a problem, and whether it's anthropogenic.
How many humans are worried about getting food on the table today? How many have the mental space to dedicate to climate change in any way? I'd guesstimate more people are worried about short term food security...
Nuclear is too slow. Not only are you running fossil plants for decades while you build nuclear reactors, you are also emitting additional CO2 during the construction process!
Renewables reduce CO2 emissions today. Building a solar farm takes months, building a wind farm takes single-digit years. They'll have recouped their construction emissions well before the first nuclear reactor comes online.
It is important to remember that the challenge we are facing is not *how do we build a fully-renewable grid", but "how do we reduce CO2 emissions the fastest". Having a 95% solar-and-wind grid with 5% fossil backup 10 years from now is significantly better than having a 100% nuclear grid 20 years from now!
Building enough nuclear to replace fossil electricity generation is both insanely expensive and not enough to fix the problem because plenty of emissions don't come from electricity generation.
>Historically, CMIP models, the gold standard in climate science, show the AMOC is very stable; although it may weaken, it will always recover [...] In 2020, research estimated if warming stabilizes at 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), 2 °C (3.6 °F) or 3 °C (5.4 °F) by 2100; [...] does not approach collapse,
Antinuclear have and always had zero power to stop nuclear plants. Except for Germany, if nuclear stopped growing was because of its economics. The same economics that stopped solar photovoltaics until it made sense.
Even France, that is heavily pro-nuclear, can't find the economics to build new nuclear energy at decent pace.
Also, nuclear was not replaced by more carbon, except again a for a couple of years in a small country (by global standards) called Germany. Everyone else is planting more clean energy.
What we did: growing China and all Asia at high rates based on coal, for decades. Offsetting by a lot internal combustion engine efficiency by buying bigger and more cars. Buying stupid and useless stuff on the other side of the planet. Everyone first hobby today is "travelling the world", preferably by plane. Being 10 billion people, and richer (more capita and more consumption per capita). None of those thing would be solvable with more nuclear plants.
You're acting as if politics AKA overregulation (first person to say "You think nuclear should be unregulated???" gets a medal) has had no effect on the price of nuclear energy.
Dude, Germany sets the tone for whole EU and then some more (aka Switzerland, they are extremely pushy also in matters which should be completely upon given country, like citizen gun laws).
They are the biggest economic force bar none (at least for now, lets see in few years when their car industry will be mostly a thing of the past). They steer 500+ million continent like a fiddle.
I have to crap on Merkel here yet again - she was horrible, utterly despicable leader. Much of the backlash in popularity of extreme right across Europe is her doing. She killed nuclear which wasn't in greatest shape, but it was well before we had actual replacements. She studied as nuclear physicist. Europe as a continent would be in much better shape politically, economically, militarily and socially if she didn't get so much power for so long. German ADF is completely her doing.
Of course when she met real power dealers like putin she caved immediately so he played her like those proverbial fiddles.
Russia has huge influence in German politics. I believe there is connection there as well, but I cannot find any public information to cite regarding funding of anti-nuclear power movements.
I gave you links that support my argument, very well.
I am not sure what else you want. Quotes from each one, inline?
If you don't have the time to read what I posted, and understand how it applies to this thread, then please copy and paste this thread into an LLM chat bot, and ask for clarity. I just tried that, and even an LLM understood my response.
Holy fuck, Batman. No one's interested in that LLM verbiage. You made specific claims. Claim A:
"Environmentalist groups were in some cases entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
It's clear from context that you're talking about genuine organizations and not astroturfing. So far you've not named a single one that was "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
This is the most obtuse interaction I have ever had on this website. Is this simple enough?
> In 1969, Robert O. Anderson, an oil man whose long career included a stint as the Chief Executive Officer of Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) (now part of BP, the company formerly known as British Petroleum), gave David Brower $200,000 to start Friends of the Earth (FOE).
You think it is obtuse because your lies are being called out.
FotE was founded by David Brower, Donald Aitken, and Gary Soucie as its Wikipedia page and multiple other sources corroborate. Emphatically, it was not "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests". Hence, your claim is a lie.
Moreover, Robert O. Anderson donated a large portion of his fortune to philanthropic causes. Among them, an art museum and a literary magazine. $200k was chump change to him. Anderson's philanthropy was his own personal interest and had nothing to do with the "fossil fuel" industry.
So unless you want to make the rather dubious claim that Harper's Magazine was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, you have nothing.
Successful massive nuclear and renewable deployment at world scale, would it have happened, would have only solved one third of the problem. Agriculture, construction and all carbon-emitting industry processses (steel production) require their own solution too.
Sure, my point is that it would not have been enough to divert climate change, though it would have probably bought a few years/decade and allowed public discourse to move above "nuclear vs wind power" while burning more and more coal, and start discussing other problems. (on another hand, everything that public discourse touches gets politicized to stupidity so I'm not sure if I'd rather have the public choose how to decarbonize concrete production or some magical alternative that does not involve the general public talking about it).
Since uranium at 3x the current price could supply the current world primary energy demand with burner reactors for only about 5 years, diverting climate change with nuclear would have required mass rollout of breeder reactors. These were stopped by their own inherent cost and technical problems, not by greens.
And now, not even the French are pursuing them, sending the strong signal that nuclear is off the table as anything but a minor contributor to stopping CO2 build up.
I think it is extremely simplistic to blame the nuclear transition's failed potential solely on them.
1. The fact that nuclear power has been quite safe so far does not mean that it would have been just as safe if its deployment would have rapidly spread.
2. Nuclear energy is unfortunately tightly coupled with nuclear weapons, as well as the treaties and geopolitics that were designed to keep them only in the hands of the few. Quite many late 1900s crises in Europe could have looked different if nuclear material was even more widespread than it was. I don't even wanna think about nations outside Europe that have been extremely unstable in the past and in recent history.
3. Seeing how intensely fossil fuel companies spread misinformation and disinformation about green technology and climate science, it's hardly a far-fetched idea that that same industry had a hand in helping policymakers steer away from an energy source that would unseat it from the throne.
Too much about nuclear safety was based on trust and if that fails the consequences are huge. In Europe we learned the hard way what it means if a plant is not safely build and how bad the communication is when there is an accident.
And then you are also going to trust the same people when they are saying the waste issue is solved.
If your arguments are luddites and fearmongering you have not improved trust in any way.
Nuclear, even with Chernobyl which infamously cheaped out to use an explosive roof, is safer than almost every energy source, only solar is safer per kWh
No nuclear accident has involved a reactor built after the 1960s. Yet we regulate as if a dozen more Chernobyls have happened
No. You can shit all you want over the antinuclear boys but:
* Building nuclear plants is a 5-10 year plan. More if you haven't built them in a while.
* The first economy in the world has quite literally started wars over oil because it wants to keep using it.
* The countries that would be the biggest emitters right now are also the ones doing the most in electrification.
Building more nuclear wouldn't have changed shit: there is an ongoing work to maintain the world dependent on fossil fuels. We can't even get electric cars to properly pick up.
EV only this year became comparable in prices to gasoline cars thanks to massive efforts by Chinese companies to reduce battery prices and improve drivetrain.
With that further changes can be very quick as forcing EV no longer requires reallocating money from other things.
If 100% of new cars were EVs then there might be feedback loops that accelerate the long tail. Like gas stations becoming leas profitable, less prolific, and more expensive.
You might also see battery prices push the price of new cars well below that of second hand ICE vehicles.
Even if the replacement window for existing vehicles doesn’t change, the environmental impact would run ahead of the adoption curve. High volume use cases like delivery and Ubers would be the first to switch to EVs.
Climate change is related to our consumptions, period, focusing only on energy or transport doesn't tackle the whole problem: we consume too much, eat too much (cattle and fish in particular) and destroy too much in our quest for more and more.
Inefficient transport or energy is just one aspect of the whole problem.
But I'm tired of hearing how it is just a matter of energy or transport, it's literally missing the forest for a tree, even if it might be a particularly big one.
Your chosen forest exists within the even bigger forests of human action and ecology. That doesn't mean we have to focus that wide. When one part of the picture is both specialized and huge, it makes sense to focus on it.
Reading some of these comments is really depressing. Since I can remember we talk about climate change and it's still not in peoples head.
When will it be real? When your home burns down due to a forest fire? When there is no water? When there is no food because everything is too dry? When a storm destroyed your home?
It is likely, never. When all of this happen, a not-so-insignificant percentage of population would still say "it is god's will" or "it is just nature" or "it is just cyclical" etc, will never acknowledge humans caused a big part of it. There is a well funded, well coordinated effort by media, politicians, pundits, businessmen etc that will make sure of it
I find most comments differ from scientific reality in both directions - denial one way panic the other. It's no doubt real and I think most people accept that but it may be dealable with.
For Americans, at lest, it will take that kind of personal tragedy.
Those who are most loudly opposed to universal healthcare switch their story instantly when they or a loved one gets in a terrible accident or develops nasty cancer. The jump to the socialism of go fund me in a heartbeat.
I think it will be the same with climate change. Entire cities or states could be really bad with millions displaced or dying but others will still deny it because they are fine.
Once it hits them personally, they’ll be screaming bloody murder blaming everyone and saying they need assistance.
Have you tried talking to people in real life? At least most people here have some knowledge about it. In real life, nobody cares. I understood that 5 years ago, and now I act accordingly
I don't know, I am not an expert, but it seems more concentrated in france/uk/central europe and adjacent.
Also in southern europe summer is generally a dry season, and rainfall happens mostly in autumn/spring. One does not expect much rainfall to happen in the summer. In contrast, in central/northern europe summer is often the wettest. Having an overall dry summer is a common thing in the south, but not as you go north. Maybe this factors in on computing drought indices.
Spain itself has very diverse climate, so not sure what applies where there. But other parts of the south had plenty rain in the spring. It is lack of rain/snowfall in the rest of the year that can create problems there more than lack of rainfall in july. And a lot of what people describe, like brown/yellow grass and vegetation, is normal part of the cycle in august in the south already.
Just came back from a bike tour through rural Bavaria, it's insane how dusty everything is - and that despite a short but intense rain today night. The farmers around here are pretty much screwed this season, and not just the crop farmers but the cattle farmers as well, as they have to buy lots of feed now that they'd only have to buy in winter.
Compared to, e.g. France, this week’s Bavaria looked refreshingly green. Not saying it’s great but it didn’t feel too dry (maybe it depends where specifically?). I didn’t know about the farmers’ struggles, though.
Yeah France got truly fucked over from what I've heard this year. We in Germany only caught the trail of the heatwaves and that already was enough for me, France got fried.
Not in the Western world, we got enough food to last us a good while (recent issues with the FDA and food recalls in the US notwithstanding). China is probably also going to be safe, they learned from Mao Zedong's failures and got stockpiles. Africa is going to get fed as long as the Ukrainian and Russian grain exports keep going.
But who is going to get screwed hard is a lot of the rest of Asia, thanks to the Iran War taking out a lot of fertilizer sources...
I'm totally with you. The proliferation of AI, to me, is a collective choice of convenience over climate. Remember Covid? We can do something, we just won't.
The general population didn't exactly get a choice. AI is forced on us in many apps we were already using, solely because CxOs believe any mention of AI results in Line Goes Up.
The population didn't choose for convenience. The billionaires chose for additional profit.
Do we even want to? AI is in many ways amazing. We should obviously not be powering these data centres with gas, but... that's hardly unique to data centres. America voted for Trump well before AI used any power.
AI has quite a lot to do with current policy. I thought we were going to have carbon emissions peak with electric cars and the like and now suddenly everyone wants to build tens of GW of data centers powered by gas turbines. Although I'm not anti AI, I could back limiting data center build out to available green energy.
But we can blame AI for making it much worse in 5 years instead of making it less bad as everyone agreed to ~10 years ago (until an idiot ascended the throne)
The conservation status of the Eurasian Beaver is "least concern" and the population is increasing. Their distribution doesn't cover all of Europe, but there's certainly no shortage of them.
Funny. We have beavers in the Lobau in Vienna. But it's still dry. And yet we want to build a highway tunnel through it. Guess we just need more beavers. It's famous for it's naturism anyway.
I think it often gets overlooked that effective carbon taxing would tax you right out of pretty much all modern convenience. Which would be the point, but people would fuckin revolt if it actually happened. Parent is complaining about 0.00000000001% of the damage done over the last 100 years.
A very gradual carbon tax that could've been introduced a couple of decades ago would've been more tolerable, and would've given the market and consumers more time to adapt.
You could carbon tax it, and give people immediately back the equivalent of what they would lose (on average). Then they can keep their lifestyle - if they are truly diehard about it - or they can adopt a climate friendlier lifestyle and pocket the change.
That was exactly the plan in Germany when we finally had a progressive ("center-left") government coalition a couple of years ago. The plan was dragged out and eventually killed by the centrist/neoliberal coalition partner (FDP). It is extremely sad it went this way. Just think of the acceptance the people would've had: Germans might have called for higher CO2 taxes out of pure selfishness...
If would probably reduce it some as a side effect.
But the two biggest points would be that every power plant and tons of factories stop emitting CO2, and the cost of vehicles shifts significantly in favor of electric.
> Who cares if a small burger pollutes more than commuting with a SUV.
This affirmation only holds up for factory farming / intensive animal husbandry.
Extensive pastoralism (aka free-ranging grazing animals) don't pollute per se, and if certain conditions are met (regarding population density), they can have positive effects on (already anthropicized) ecosystems by linking ecotopes.
1. a single cow produces 250 grams of methane per day. Methane is insanely more dangerous to the environment than CO2. A single adult cow pollutes in a day as much as a car driven for 165 miles. And that's only for emissions.
2. As a cow does not pollute just what it emits, you need to add the lifecycle: cows need to be fed. 80% of the food we humans grow goes to feed animals, not humans. Beef gets the lion share. So we consumes insane amounts of money, fertilizers, gas, just to feed cows, that pollute like crazy anyway. The amount of water cattle consume (from drinking to the one needed to grow food) is also extreme.
3. Cows produce a lot of waste, that ends up in rivers. Along fertilizers (mostly used to grow food for cattle anyway), it pollutes so much that waters around souther US are essentially dead.
4. By mass, beef alone, outmatches every single land animal on this planet, combined. You could put on a scale every single tiger, domestic dog, rabbit, squirrel, horse, hyppo, kangaroo, etc, etc, etc on the planet. They would weight less than the cows we grow.
4. Red meat is a category 1 carcinogenic. You should eat it rarely. I don't know where you get your nutritional facts, maybe from Joe Rogan?
In essence, you demonstrate fully my point: we humans don't want to know really what our impact on the planet is, and we're happily distracted into the "just buy an electric SUV" trolling.
It is not. There are no studies with simply meat. They count burgers and processed stuff. I literally do 90% carnivore so eat nothing processed. I only put salt on the meat.
> You could put on a scale every single tiger, domestic dog, rabbit, squirrel, horse, hyppo, kangaroo, etc, etc, etc on the planet.
Carnivore animals rarely are eaten. Horse/rabbit are low fat. Beef & lamb are the two most popular that are available nearly everywhere.
> I don't know where you get your nutritional facts
The best diet for mental health is animal based keto diet and carnivore diet (only red meat actually!, maybe some fish which is even more expensive often)
The diet is used for kids/adults with refractory epilepsy & serious mental disorders like schizophrenia/bipolar/eating disorders, diabetes (it's easy actually but there are many potential people for this).
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A short example: The only way to do vegan keto diet for epilepsy/schizophrenia/bipolar, is to eat protein powder, because there is no non-processed vegan food that has protein and is low carb.
The focus of the discussion is topic is how dangerous is cattle farming to the planet. The answer is very, I gave you numbers, you're free to debunk them.
The topic of whether red meat is category 1 or 2 carcinogenic is less of an interest to this thread.
If you want to keep your diet, keep it, it doesn't change it has an insane impact on the planet in terms of greenhouse gases production and resource consumption. It kills the planet, whether you like it or not. It's unsustainable.
Beef can be raised carbon negative, it’s just more expensive. Maybe not scalable to 8 billion, I don’t know, but the man buying meat from a butcher buying from small farms raising grass fed cows is not the problem (it’s the corn that makes them fart, can’t digest as well)
1. There's no evidence that carnivore diet has any long term benefit, as this 2026 article that reviews all of the available literature points out. In fact there's more evidence of the contrary.
> The Carnivore Diet may offer short-term health benefits but carries substantial risks of nutrient deficiencies, reduced intake of health-promoting phytochemicals, and the development of cardiovascular disease. At this time, long-term adherence to a CD cannot be recommended.
2. On the contrary, the mediterranean diet is one of the most studied and backed with more evidence behind its long term health benefits.
3. In any case the topic is climate change, which agriculture and cattle are very strongly responsible for as cattle farming produces both lots of greenhouses as well as being very resource intensive.
Which is fine. But don't pretend it to be otherwise with your social media diet.
It's not social media diet, it was invented to help children with epilepsy. The same diet works in other scenarios (diabetes 1 & 2, bipolar, schizophrenia, adhd are some examples).
Again, it's very hard to form correct opinions when you're not in the trenches and just read stuff online.
A (complex) example: are bad blood lipids actually bad when you're very fit? This is being researched, might take some years. It's a complex topic, see "lean mass hyper responder" or "The cholesterol code" documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Z8bUb1P94 . (this is the cardiovascular angle)
> 2. On the contrary, the mediterranean diet is one of the most studied and backed with more evidence behind its long term health benefits.
Yet it doesn't work in any of the scenarios I said.
It's not a bad diet, but it's a random diet IMO, no thought went into it, or some evolutionary design (I live in a mediterranean country and ate it by default).
ps: the mediterranean should work on type 2 diabetes. But what happens if eating even some plain/simple/good carbs/sweets/fruits still triggers your brain so high-carb food remains an addiction in your head? The only solution might be to quit even the "good" carbs, so after some time, you have no triggers/urges for bad food and can live in peace.
Let's cut the chase: if you have medical conditions for which *a doctor* prescribes you a carnivore diet, referring to the original comment, you can be exempt from the carbon tax.
No, that's your opinion not backed by any science.
As I posted you a comprehensive review of carnivore diet literature there's no evidence of any long term benefit, in fact, there's evidence of the contrary.
You really sound like somebody who takes advice from Joe Rogan and Tik tok instead of going to a doctor.
Continue believing the narratives and data that back your preferences or your anecdotal experience I guess.
There is no literature on carnivore, it's just people who eat more meat while still eating "normal" food.
While carnivore is eating only meat.
Your paper just said that you may have issues with blood lipids and stuff, there's no real measurements if those blood levels end up as real issues.
Example:
> In contrast, a systematic review by Palmer (2025) [12] concluded that the long-term adverse effects of red and processed meat consumption—such as increased risks of type 2 diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension, inflammation, and atherosclerosis—clearly outweigh any potential benefits [12].
Putting diabetes & obesity in there is literally insane! One big issue on carnivore or keto is it's very hard to gain weight, because protein & fat are very fulfilling.
The whole study is always "eating more meat might do this", and never considering real carnivore where you eat nothing else. And even on cases on carnivore, most of the things were extrapolating from the transitory period (hint: staying 30 years carnivore and transitioning to mediterrean also has issues)
Again, it's very hard when you know no details whatsoever.
This is a mongodb moment for you my man (going by marketing), but it's ok, you just don't know better, and don't have the tools or time or ability or the necessity! to try anything else.
Heme iron and its link to oxidative stress has been re-evaluated over time.
Vegetables contain non-heme iron (Fe 3+), which is reduced to (Fe 2+) by the body on demand for absorption. In contrast, heme iron is already in its reduced state (Fe 2+). Because of its high bioavailability excess heme iron reacts with peroxides to produce highly reactive free radicals (Fenton reaction).
I was responding to the carcinogenic aspect of meat, not to you personal diet. You can ignore it ("It is not") but it doesn't make Fenton reaction less real.
I see many recycled misheard clichés here, starting by the "red meat is carcinogenic" mantra, that nobody serious has proven still, and that at this point is just pseudoscience.
> By mass, beef alone, outmatches every single land animal on this planet, combined
This is most probably false. To start you are repeating a claim that you didn't really understood. One problem is that you are confusing animals with mammals. Other is that you are confusing animals with vertebrates. In fact, we really don't have decent data on most invertebrates, and almost no reliable data in many vertebrates.
> Cows produce a lot of waste, that ends up in rivers
In the real life, most people use this on fields and agriculture, as crop fertilizers.
And the point 2 is missing a couple basic rules of ecology.
1) Big animals use energy more efficiently than small animals on the same category and,
2) Herbivores suffer a lot of pressure to feed themselves accurately. We can't just eat enough zucchini to replace beef, because we can't digest cellulose, because our small gut is not well adapted to this, and because most vegetables are basically water. The day is just too short.
1. It has the most nutrients that are absorb-able by the body.
2. You can live really well by only eating red meat (& fat). Think eating lamb everyday.
3. It is cheap enough. Some type of wild fish might be better but fish is expensive.
4. It can help diabetes & mental illnesses (IMO biggest healthcare costs).
5. You need to eat low carb & high fat for most of the benefits though.
You need to eat the fat, the fat is actually more important, you need a ratio of 2-1 (2 grams of fat for every gram of protein+carb) for mental issues.
1. Between them, diabetes is very easy. It should heal T2D, and make T1D glucose more stable so you need less insulin. When you've been T2D for more than 7 years becomes harder, might need more time or it's more complex. See https://www.virtahealth.com/ for diabetes
2. Epilepsy depends on what type you have, can fully heal or not work at all, because they have different mechanisms. Has been working for 100 years. https://charliefoundation.org/ for epilepsy
3. Mental issues the same as epilepsy, might work like a miracle, might not work at all, and everything in the middle, depending on the issue & root of the problem. Works surprisingly well in Bipolar Mania. https://www.metabolicmind.org/ for mental issues
This is a nice documentary that covers all cases above ^ including rising complications:
Cholesterol Code Movie for complex topics/cases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Z8bUb1P94.
Complications that arise in the documentary above ^ are a bit rare in general population.
It was a good amount of rain, but most of it just went straight to rivers as soil is really dry (think if try to get a dry sponge wet again, soil behave in a similar way). It helps but if there are no new rain episodes, water tables will stay low, soil dry in depth and most of the country in a complicated situation regarding water.
Yes, we certainly need to re-wood uplands in the UK, but we also need to make rivers meander, reintroduce marshes and let place live the Somerset levels flood
Yeah they still have restrictions in my area but I don't know how to find out the real situation. I am close to the Seine and I've seen it quite high the other day, but that's probably not a good indication of the general state.
The article is talking primarily about Eastern Europe. It's also not inconsistent to say that it's raining during a drought. That's why we distinguish between weather and climate.
I said nothing about the drought. My comment was on timing, which affects the optics of those who read it. Imagine going on vacation for 2 months, as they do, then coming back and reading this article while seeing heavy rain outside. With all the fake news you can see how some folks would be skeptical.
I read this article, all of it. I'm still trying to square the circle of how a report about the tribulations of fish-farming on the Danube align with the broader concept of the "Desertification in Europe". To me, it seems like a bs, but credible, AI article about fish-farming challenges on the Danube which met some sloppy editor who simply stuck a more click-baity headline on it - one that was completely unrelated to the content.
I live in Portugal, near Lisbon (not in Lisbon, as it has become impossible to afford for locals, even tech workers). Many times it would be cheaper for me to travel by plane to a city like London, than the gas+tolls cost to visit my family that live less than 1h away by car. It takes ~2h30 minimum by public transport.
I find it pretty ridiculous how the carbon taxing is extremely heavy on cars, but pretty much non-existing for air travel here. Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy, depletes the housing stock, and removes local businesses and culture, but the tourists are always prioritized by government.
> Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy
Portugal is heavily dependent on tourism: it's 10% of the GDP. In the EU not even France is that high: Spain is higher but Portugal's economy definitely depends on tourism.
When stats says: "10% is tourism, 40% is services", if you remove the 10% linked to tourism, the services economy does crash too. And so does the 20% that is "construction": a part of that is second effects from tourism.
You can't just say: "We'll just remove 10% of our GDP and we'll be fine". Firstly even at "only" 10% you'd be totally screwed and then anyway the actual number would be much higher.
Here in the Czech Republic it is also very noticeable - rivers are running noticeably low and I've seen smaller streams dry out completely. Many trees ore getting orange or shedding leaves.
Also quite interesting sometimes what plants don't have issue with the dryness - often quite exotic ones originally from the Mediterranean or from Asia.
I must depend on the country because the trend is that some countries, the UK for instance, are receiving more rain as climate warms, but it is becoming more seasonal. This year winter was extremely wet then indeed summer has been a record dry, so not sure how the year will look like overall (plus it's a strong El Niño year).
I expect future summers to be drier and future winters to be wetter. Our gardens are going to look very different. Already I see more people (myself included) rewilding their gardens. I've had a lot more wildlife as a result, but may be due to hotter weather as well.
In the park behind my house a large Goat Willow tree has just mostly toppled over. Completely dry summer, then a week of rain has caused the tree to just collapse.
Yes, we really need big investment in infrastructure. At the moment parks and gardens don't have automatic watering as we expect rain to do its job, and we suffer from hosepipe bans because infrastructure to store water is not fit for purpose.
This reminds me of the story of Noah in Bible school.
The huge swath of people are incentivized to pretend nothing is wrong, and the vast majority can’t do anything about it so also pretend nothing is wrong.
Everyone is living in this world where we still depend on each other to survive, but connected through technology that makes it seem like we don't. The problems that people face are magically solved behind the scenes.
As such, nobody really has a sense of community or belonging, so nobody really thinks past the virtue signaling aspects of how to preserve, protect, and grow that community.
And the people that do are forced to inconvenience themselves while they see others that don't care.
where i live in central america, there's normally rain almost every day from may to September. We've had rain perhaps twice in the past 2+ months. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country (and a mountain range), they have had lots of flooding. Crops lost in both cases.
Let's say a magical enviro-fascist cabal of superhumans appears tomorrow and are somehow able to completely dismantle and ban all sources of energy that emit large amounts of CO2 while also somehow providing replacement quantities of non-emitting alternatives (e.g. wind, solar, and nuclear).
In this environment we will still need to geoengineer the planet for as long as the carbon we have already burned remains in the atmosphere. We are already way outside the pre-industrial baseline. And carbon capture is very energy-intensive, so no matter how much of our solar energy abundance we put into it, we are going to be geoengineering for decades.
It's too late for that. We had to do it 20 years ago. Plus, you and I have no power over fossil fuel extraction, but we do have the individual ability to put sulphur in the upper atmosphere (with effort). Game theory rules everything.
I could see countries drastically affected by heat doing it. If they experience mass death, or even in the case of island countries complete elimination, what threat would make them stop?
Any solution relying on collective sacrifice is unrealistic IMO. I believe in geoingineering because it's better compatible with how economy works. Either that or we discover a magic abundant non-polluting energy source, but I woldn't rely on that
Oh, yes, geoengineering, because nothing can go wrong …
Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.
A lot can go wrong, but a long is going wrong already. I think putting effort in trying to do it as safely as possible is more productive than trying to convince nations to become poorer voluntary. Alternative energy is important too, but so far it rather complements than replaces fossil fuel.
But this is one of the classic blunders! "Things are going wrong, so we have to do something! This is something, so we have to do it!"
Well, no, we have to do something that will help. Doing something that makes things worse isn't the answer, and the worse things are, the less we can afford to do so.
"This might help, but also might really mess things up" is not the answer - not in politics, not in economics, and not in climate change.
But I agree with one part of your post. Persuading nations to become poorer voluntarily is not a viable strategy.
It is not collective sacrifice. The war on drugs was imposed worldwide by the American élites and it consisted on banning the production, trade and use of many drugs.
Oil is a drug for the world’s economies. If you remove it, the economy plummets with billions of starving people because everything is grown, produced or transported using fossil fuels
How do you do that without completely messing up the supply chains that keep us fed and alive for the next 6 months? The wealthiest people (who also happen to be ones that are a bit more sheltered from the climatic crisis) will still be able to afford food. Billions of poor people would just starve without petrochemical fertilizers and the diesel required for industrial farming and transportation of food. We could've had a smooth transition a few decades ago. Now it's super late and the choice is short term catastrophe vs long term catastrophe. Do you know how much fossil fuels it takes to build and maintain a wind farm or an electric truck? How much petroleum coke is burnt making the cement to build the towers that make walkable cities possible?
The alternative to fossil fuels and the climate crisis is basically an incredibly deadly and uncomfortable step out of the industrialized world. No one is making that decision. It's a fancy trolley problem where the amount of people on the tracks has 10 figures on both sides and blurry timelines.
Just the increase of gas prices due to the iran war is going to cause some fucked up harvests in africa, south america and asia. The poorest farmers aren't able to afford fertilizers. I have a coworker who has ties in Guinea-bissau. The farmers there are basically getting spitroasted by the combination of climate changed caused droughts messing up their cash crops followed by increased oil prices due to wars they have nothing to do with increasing the price of their agricultural inputs. Your simplistic view on fossil fuels will not keep them alive long enough to see the even worst effects of climate change that are coming. If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.
We really need to be pursuing Ocean Iron Fertilization https://www.whoi.edu/ocean-learning-hub/ocean-topics/climate... . We need to both drastically reduce our release of GHG emissions and work to pull CO2 out of the air. This is the only method that seems remotely plausible. I agree that I don't like the sulphur seeding because it doesn't actually remove C02, and higher concentrations of CO2 are toxic to humans.
We're not Kardashev II. We're not even Kardashev I. And nuclear and solar are meaningless if we don't reduce fossil fuel use, which we currently aren't doing (quite the opposite, actually). And carbon removal is a red herring.
Here in Italy for example they never held power, but they did a huge lobbying and advertising campaign just AFTER Chernobyl that lead to a referendum whose result essentially forbids nuclear power in Italy.
The Christian-Democrats signed the end of nuclear power in Germany, not the Greens. Please stop this mindless scapegoating. And electricity is only 30% of our global carbon emissions.
I brought up Germany because it is the example that comes to mind. The greens never held any power anywhere. Anti-nuclear laws have all been passed by right-wing (or ""center"") parties, pushed by fossil fuel lobbies.
You're very misguided in trying to place the blame of the climate crisis entirely on the only ecologists in politics.
Until very recently, all major right-wing parties were insisting that climate change wasn't real and that we should "drill, baby, drill" or burn "clan coal". Do you think they share a part of the blame or is that on the Greens too?
And lastly, building nuclear plants is all well and good, but it is meaningless if it's only added capacity. Same with solar. We have to close coal and oil plants, or all of this is useless. You should start advocating for that instead.
Just a friendly reminder that Fortune has been owned since 2018 by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a member of the Chearavanont family that controls the CP Group conglomerate. CP Group created Siam Land Flying in 1991 as its in-house flight department for executives. It later added charter (Executive Wings) and air-ambulance services and still operates King Air 350 and Hawker jets.
These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
>These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
Would you rather than they kill stories relating to climate change and pretend everything's fine instead? If not, what's the actual point of bringing that factoid up? Sure, rich people flying in private jets might be bad, but I'm not sure why it deserves extra condemnation just because they happen to own a publication that's reporting on the effects of climate change.
I simply found it comical that they probably make quite a bit of money rolling these articles out while the owners fly around in their private jet fleet. Most people probably don't know that unless someone told them - which is exactly what I just did. Clearly it touched some nerves.
I’m sorry but the gotcha here is that.. the owner is in a family that also owns an air charter business with all of four small private jets and an air-ambulance business?
Give me a break, what does this have anything to do with the content of the article.
Well, million euro’s is currently about 1,158,300.00 United States Dollars, so maybe the copy editor looked at the number and didn’t want to offend the sensibilities of their readers .. anyway, the point is, I don’t think this (parentheses) indicates a dumbing down of anything, other than maybe a sleepy editor who didn’t catch its distraction ..
I like to rant about "journalists" just copy-pasting Apple's claims that it's recycling program retrieved "more than 2204lb of gold". So is it no more than 2205lb? And why the specific number? Oh is it because in their "environmental report", they just got round numbers in metric (e.g. here 1000kg) and converted them to imperial? (There were about 10 of those numbers, and they all have the same issue). And the concept of significant figures was missed by the school curriculum of everyone involved?
It's just a monetary conversion and it's in their style guides. How much is "millions of euros" in dollars? Answer: "millions of dollars".
If they'd said "it's estimated to cost 1.5 million euros", they'd have added "(1.7 million dollars)". But since they didn't have a specific value, they just used the units.
I imagine their style guide says non-dollar currency amounts always need to have a dollar conversion. There are lots of Americans who won’t know the current USD-EUR ratio off the top of their heads. It has fluctuated over the years and used to be significantly further from parity, and we essentially never buy goods priced in euros here.
I think you misread. It's not "euros is dollars", it's "millions of euros is millions of dollars", simply saying that conversion rate is close enough to 1:1 that no new number is needed
I don't know what Europeans are worried about. You'd have to ask them. Who's dying from "heat warnings"? Are you trying to make my point about rampant idiocy in my country?
If you were assuming that I'm European for some dumb reason, then rest assured I'm not worried about this passing thought on the writing style of a publication I never read.
Thank you for your concern, but I will be alright.
The article is shining a light on a serious, potentially devastating situation in Europe. You, due to ignorance or misunderstanding, point out that Americans are supposedly stupid because millions of dollars are roughly millions of euros. But the underlying problem is that it is the Europeans that are worried the most about climate change, and are the ones that have refused to implement mitigating strategies that would help overcome the challenge. They lack energy resources, the will to take action, and rely on blaming others for their predicament. But it is stupid Americans with their energy, air conditioning, and water reservoirs.
Are you saying that one can't be "genuinely" intelligent AND one or more of the following:
1) curious about their IQ
2) enjoy timed puzzles
3) want to be part of the Mensa community
4) have a friendly IQ competition with friends
5) be an insecure teenager and take the test for validation
Does "genuine" intelligence preclude all of the above?
The comment I was replying to implied that being unafraid of global warming was a sign of low IQ. I am not afraid, and my IQ is relatively high. So I shared that.
Did you not read the parent before it was deleted?
This is not a good argument. AC is needed every summer for some years now for much of northern europe, the only question is how many days per year. The last heatwave was not in 2003.
You do not need AC in every house necessarily. You need ACs in public buildings and in places that matter for the most vulnerable population. You need at least places this population can go during the hottest part of the day.
Solutions are known in places where heatwaves are common place, but somehow northern europe takes time to realise that they are actually solvable.
It doesn't, this does not mean society should not care about people who are most vulnerable during heatwaves. ACs are obviously no solution to desertification, if anything at mass scale they may even increase temps in dense urban environments.
I reply to different comment than yours anyway, so you cannot interpret my comment as answering at yours.
What's your next beef after that? Should we put cows and sheep under AC? Forests and fields under AC? Iceland should start installing AC? The Magreb countries should live under the surface of the Earth like mole people? Why don't people relocate to the Antarctic, those idiots?
Legally? Almost certainly no one. Ethically? The corporate executives who deliberately covered up evidence of global warming, starting back in the 70s.[1]
It's "their" fault, at least according to Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, who is one of "them". His view is that if a specific group, of about 1000 powerful people, chose to address climate change, it would be fixed.
That’s laughable. The number 1 cause of climate change is spread out living. The 0.1+ acre lot with a detached single family home that results in enormous distances required for all the mass to travel.
There is no way people would have or will accept living in Honk Kong style dense living to save the future planet. Hell, they don’t even accept driving smaller vehicles much less changing their whole lifestyle.
How do we get Earth back to something resembling the steady state we know can work long term?
1. Electrify almost everything that can reasonably be electrified.
Move quickly to EVs, and replace anything that can practically become electric with an electric version. Self driving & fleet utilization will push transportation cost per mile lower than ever before.
For the power grid, data centers, and other large 24/7 consumers: solar + wind + battery storage. Deep geothermal also looks interesting.
Build lots of desalination capacity.
Maybe even planes can eventually be electrified. Imagine shorter hops with battery swaps at sea (aircraft carrier sorts of things). Too crazy?
2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.
Cargo ships.
Long haul aviation, if the electric plane idea really is impractical.
For those, we can turn energy + CO2 into liquid fuels, creating something closer to a closed carbon cycle.
3. Remove excess CO2.
CO2 persists in the climate system for 200+ years, so getting emissions to zero does not necessarily return atmospheric CO2 to previous levels.
We will need to remove enough to be net negative & over time bring it back down to the CO2 levels we know worked long term.
That takes energy. Fortunately, solar + wind + storage are cheap enough now & getting cheaper.
4. Find places for all that solar.
Deserts are obvious.
Floating solar could potentially contribute.
Agricultural land is interesting too. Agrivoltaics can sometimes provide useful shading while still allowing crops to grow.
5. Deal with the transition period.
Once we are making a serious transition toward decarbonization and carbon removal, it may make sense to investigate temporary solar geoengineering, such as injecting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, to partially counteract warming while atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are being brought down.
The purpose would be to stop the feedback loops such as more forest fires, thawing permafrost, and loss of ice and other reflective surfaces.
Obviously geoengineering has major risks and should not substitute for reducing emissions. But as a temporary bridge, it seems like something that deserves serious research.
We can do all this.
None of it requires magic. We already have, or can plausibly engineer, most of the pieces.
This all sounds good, but the Government of one of the world's primary super powers (The United States) is currently unwilling to participate in fighting climate change, so any plan seems DOA without a major policy change on that front.
Agreed, and also Moscow sees this as a huge positive change. More ice-free ports, more arable land, plus avoiding action means they get to keep selling their major export.
Europe is now really stuck between two huge enemies, regarding climate. We can do a lot to prepare, we just need to wake tf up.
Our Union gives us many advantages. We just need to use it before our enemies destroy it.
Yep, unfortunately the only fix would be a world government. But that will never happen. So everyone's going to reach for a bigger slice of pie at any expense no matter what happens, no matter how clear the evidence is. (I'm not necessarily saying a world government is a good idea, but it's the only way to solve climate change that I can see)
> 2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.
What about wars? Unlikely anyone would completely electrify their armies anytime soon, and that blocks even starting the transition in the rest of economy. Some drones are electric, but you still need to move heavy stuff and many people in denied environments, and stationary electric grids are still more vulnerable than liquid fuels.
We've known what to do for a couple of decades now. But when the world's largest economy is run by a madman who just cares about lining his and his buddies pockets instead of the future of humanity, it's hard to make progress.
That video is quite biased. Just tell your clanker to critique it. It will point out that those numbers are quite cherry picked, and leaving out important details. E.g. the „GHG would reduce by only 2.6%“ study assumes that all crop production stays the same, which doesn’t make any sense.
Why no mention of increasing biomass of earth? It’s the living systems that buffer the chemical and energetic changes of the climate, and whether or not we can take back the carbon we’ve aerosolized, we can repair ecosystems and slow down changes in weather.
this tech bro utopia ALWAYS ignores relatively basic solutions. A great example is reliable, regular, and efficient public transit. We don't need self driving cars and all that mumbo jumbo. A bloody train, tram or a bus would solve most of these problems.
This! I live in Western Europe and have never owned a car. I mostly travel by public transport or bike. I rent a car about once a year, but could do without that as well. Before people tell me that I am an exception: I know other people like me in various other places in Europe! It is possible and actually good for your body to have to move, at least to the train station, carrying groceries etc.
>This! I live in Western Europe and have never owned a car.
I'm also in Western Europe and almost always needed a car for my commutes to work, unless I was willing to accept a 1-2+ h public transport commute each way, because tech employers where I live love locating their offices in the sticks where land is cheap because they're broke and cheap, and the city hasn't significantly updated public transport infrastructure in ~30 years, but the population and size of the metro area grew by like 3x.
>Before people tell me that I am an exception: I know other people like me in various other places in Europe!
The thing is, Western Europe is not a country, but a collection of various countries with various economies, cities, and infrastructure, and various people with various housing and career locations, some close and well connected to public transport, some not at all, and from my circle of acquaintances, yes, you are the exception, as most people I know get to work by car.
So, you can't possibly throw such blanket statement over everyone in Western Europe, unless you're massively obtuse or living in a bubble without realizing it.
Like, I'm sure most people in Munich, Paris, London, Madrid, Vienna, etc can easily get to work on the excellent public transport they have, but I don't live there and don't have such amazing public transport, so then car it is for us.
>It is possible and actually good for your body to have to move, at least to the train station, carrying groceries etc.
Bruh, I only need a car just to get to work in reasonable time, not to move or carry groceries.
I get my groceries from the supermarkets 5-10 minute walking distance to my place, but I don't have the luxury of employment jobs within the same distance, so car it is, unless I want to be wasting my life switching connections between slow and infrequent trams, busses and trains which often suffer delays.
And regarding the "body movement" as a pro for public transport, I'd rather have more free time to move in gym and to the workouts my body condition needs, rather than waste my time walking and sitting/standing on public transport, as that's not an actual workout but a waste of time, as all you can do is browse HN on the phone with the hand that's not grabbing the bar. Driving is also a waste of time, but at least it saves me almost 1 hour each way which is massive time save that I can use how I like.
It goes through periods of slow change and periods of rapid change, with regional variations. That will never change. The climate cannot be controlled precisely by humans. To think otherwise is just a comforting lie people tell themselves.
The vast majority of people concerned about climate change think there is some paradise we could have kept if only we hadn't been so "climate-sinful". It's uncomfortable to contemplate that the world is changing uncontrollably around you.
Wow dude. I'll just assume you genuinely don't understand this... So the TL;DR is that except for events like supervolcanoes and dinosaur-killing asteroids, no it does not go through periods of change that are this rapid.
You might be misled because you can find graphs of global average temperate that swing wildly by like 10C-20C. But look at the X axis, it's in hundreds of millions of years. Stretch it out to 100k years and it will look perfectly flat.
And yes there is some climate paradise we could have kept it we hadn't emitted so much CO2. The one where it isn't 50C in Baghdad and Europe isn't a dust bowl. Could we have kept it for 100 million years? Maybe not! But nobody is saying that. We could have kept it for 100k years, instead of like 100.
It's comforting to imagine it isn't a problem - both from an "I'm smarter than everyone else" perspective and "I don't have to worry about it", but you're lying to yourself. I dunno lots of people are happy to lie to themselves (at least 50% of religious people I reckon) but I can't do it.
Complete nonsense. Even climate chance won't change the amount of rainfall we get over the course of the year. In fact, it will most likely be wetter due to it.
But it will become more uneven, with droughts followed by torrential rains and floods. We simply need to adapt by creating underground water basins that store torrential rainfall preventing floods and also serve as buffers for when the drought comes.
I do believe places like Spain could see more desertification, though. But they were at the brink for centuries in any case, especially inland.
I’ve been to quite a few deserts that get the occasional seasonal torrential rain.
They still remain deserts nine to ten months out of twelve.
The water saturates the soil, can’t percolate to underground aquifers where it could otherwise be stored, and runs into (ephemeral) rivers, washing away some of whatever is left of the soil with it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if two places could have roughly the same yearly amount of precipitation yet look completely different depending on how the rainfalls are distributed over time.
Europe is caught in a dilemma: tourism, air travel, and city hopping are its economic lifeblood that keeps the continent running, but these also cause the greatest damage to the environment.
Since they can't fix the real problem are trying to go "green" in counterproductive ways that make things worse: blowing up nuclear plants or taxing cow fart.
More like 6%, roughly in line with its population share (5.4%). Not sure if that includes air travel, international air travel often isn't included in national statistics. https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
Whenever I see those statistics, I always find them very weird. Many of our products are made in China, but those are counted towards China's global emission, not Europe's. It also applies to the need of power generation for delocalized industry or importing food. A country handling a lot of industry will have a very high per-capita emission, but the people living there may actually have very low individual emissions.
If it's not significant, can I have 5% of your net worth?
If the EU mandated that products imported are made in a carbon neutral fashion, then importers of products will pay attention. Unfortunately it means higher prices, and the governments will get voted out of office by people voting for the populists selling the electoral promise of "Make Prices Low Again!"...
I like low prices, but I'm not looking forward to the chaos (political, social, what else) and deaths which I'm guessing will affect me within in the next 10 years.
The chaos is already here for us, the majority who are suffering the higher prices. Why do you think we're voting for the "extremist" parties? It's not because of "Russian propaganda", it's because life for the majority of us, normal Europeans, has become quite dreadful, economically and not only.
You're commenting on a comments thread about the possible desertification of Europe, a conversation we're having in the context of the record hot summer.
The extremist parties offer scapegoats and solutions for the unthinking ("The brown people! Remigration! The elite, except we're getting funded by the elite and we'll protect them and fuck you!"), and sadly there's too many stupid people who can't be spoonfed any concept of "think deeper" that like buying those...
The EU is responsible for a lot more than that once you factor in emissions in other countries producing goods bought by people and businesses in EU countries.
Unless you count the historical city center of Venice as a big city I doubt you'd get many big cities getting even close to those numbers
I can't easily/quickly find some numbers but if we want to accept, with a grain of salt, Gemini research on this even in Venice (I think it counts Mestre as well) it's ~15% and that's the highest it found.
Droughts are scary and they suck badly. California went through one for 10+ years. However, don’t go off the deep end and think that it’s the “new normal” like Californians did at one point.
All it took was one big rainfall a few years ago, and California has been out of drought ever since then. The reservoirs have been above historic norms and at the end of this summer, it’s only “abnormally dry”. Compare that to a few years ago where the entire state was mostly in an exceptional level of drought.
Droughts and heat waves suck and many people are suffering but nature goes in cycles and it will get better.
People are not scared of individual droughts. They are scared of the patterns. Here in Slovakia, the last real winter with proper snow depths we had was in 2018, if I remember correctly. There is pretty much no snow anymore. All the water comes in form of heavy rainfall, causing massive floods, and the water goes straight to the sea. Nature depends on the water accumulating on the mountains during the winter, and that just doesn't seem to happen, at least in this part of Europe.
Just took a train ride from Vienna to Budapest for a few days, and couldn’t help but notice how very, very dry everything is .. as an Australian living in Europe for a few decades now, I’ve always been intrigued by just how green everything is, literally something growing in every single crack in the pavement, or endless rolling green fields of prosperity during spring - whereas, where I’m from its year-long spinifex and grass shrubs and wattles with the occasional bush flower bloom, barely hanging on out in the desert, mostly reds and blacks and greys, not much green - so the vibrancy of European fields and the abundant diversity of countryside flora have always been pleasant to my eyes ..
During this trip, I was kind of shocked that things felt a bit more Australian to my eyes .. the grasses are dry and barren, the beautiful city parks of both Budapest and Vienna dustier than usual, the Danube water level definitely noticeably lower than I remember ever seeing.
I’ve long been encouraging my European friends to not take the abundance of growth for granted, and now we see it in the environment, plain and clear: the worlds’ weather is changing.
A week of sweltering heat is predicted for us again in Vienna, and as we get started on September and then October so close, two thoughts are on my mind: use this opportunity to go for more dips in the Danube, and .. I wonder what the floods of late-autumn will bring, because .. inevitably .. this super dry summer means there will be heavier rains in October. Might be we look back in a month or two and wish we had this dry heat back again, who knows ..
Either way, neither city is particularly comfortable in the heat. A hundred or so years ago, the heat retention was a feature. Now it’s a bug.
I had a similar observation this year. In 2015, I was in California, was doing some hiking on the weekends, and I found it very unnatural how all the grasses were dry, trails dusty, on the hills/mountains. I came back to Slovakia, and I was happy to see the green grass. Fast-forward to 2026, and our grasses are equally dry and trails are equally dusty. Water management seems to be more important than ever, because this is only going to get worse. Maybe we need to build massive reservoirs, to retain the flood water somehow, if we want to keep living here in the next 100 years.
I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse. I believe he may not have even bothered planting the normal cash crops, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. That said, the year before I think it was so wet early in the year that farmers really struggled to get crops in the ground.
In areas like Valencia there are ancient irrigation systems and water rights controlled by water councils older than many countries. I wonder if the UK will need to do similar, irrigation ponds, flood control structures and canals to control the flow of water through the landscape.
It definitely has a following.
This is the challenge of extreme weather, it's either drought or floods, and wild swings from the one to the other. As a kid growing up in Australia, we heard many such stories, especially if the rains came on too suddenly, since then the ground can't absorb the water, and you get flash floods.
As if being a farmer isn't already tough enough.
> I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse.
The Clarkson who ran a popular car show and for years mocked Greta Thunberg and called her an "idiot" that deserved a "smacked bottom" for raising the alarm on global warming?
Oh, noe, I feel so sorry for him. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!
> Oh, noe, I feel so sorry for him. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!
In reality he now has the most popular show on Amazon. Even his brewer is probably a bigger contributor to his income than the "farming" side of his farming.
The difficulty he faces though is very common amongst British farmers but most don't have a camera crew producing 4k video of the entire growing season.
Only a fool gloats about being right about the end of the world.
I don't know if it is gloating so much as it is recognition that unlike most injustice that happens in the world the people most responsible for it are going to suffer at least some of the consequences along with the hoi polloi.
A refreshing change of pace, even if the end result is horribly tragic for everyone.
I know this is controversial but I doubt this heat wave is entirely human made. Europe has gone through long arid periods in this past.
If you scroll down past the "Outlooks" header, you will see a chart that makes it abundantly clear what's going on and why.
https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
As someone who hope global warming is man-made becuase that woudl be FIXABLE at least in theory, this is EXTREMELY deceptive report and graph and for the sake of humanity these scientists should be doing MUCH better.
Comparing sample rates during the spike to sample rates for the rest of the graph? Hidden inside those sample rates can be dramatic changes (some of which we know if that ARE NOT IN THIS GRAPH) for example the little ice age and the volcanic warming periods of europe as recently as the last 1000 years which dramatically changed the climate.
Im not arguing against human-climate change, I'm arguing that this type of junk science does no one any favors.
The little ice age is in the graph, it was just completely insignificant on a global scale, as opposed to global warming which as you can see from the graph is extremely significant on a global scale. You are expecting to see the little ice age on the graph because you think that was a comparable event to global warming, but the fact is it wasn't.
Local changes due to global warming are even more significant than the global average shows, for example the arctic has, on average, warmed more than 3 times as much as the global average.
This chart shows direct measurements where available (generally like 1800 to present), our best estimates for earlier temperatures, and expected future temperatures based on what we've seen so far.
Here is Google's AI description of DPG: > the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, or DPG) is held in exceptionally high regard and is recognized globally as one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world
That's the organization whose work you refer to as "junk science".
We are discussing aridification in europe, a specifically local event? Also one that can happen regardless of global warming and has happened severalt times in the last 5000 years.
Do you not even track what conversation context you're in before going off?
edit: im editing here to respond to the absurd response below. The reponder, while lecturing rabidly missed several things like the difference between aridification and heat, local vs global, and europe not being the world.
I want to point out that its poeple exactly like this poster who ruin global warming debates with demonstratably false, confused, or foolish comments. Is polution bad and causing warming, yes most likely. Has the commentor below proven that? no. And in fact repeated danced around proving it while insulting me. This person is not the ally you need.
> missed several things like the difference between aridification and heat, local vs global, and europe not being the world.
I didn't miss any of that. I have already pointed out that difference in earlier comments, like when I informed you that the little ice age was local and that the arctic is warming much faster than most other places. Europe has also warmed more than many other places. And obviously the aridification is a direct result of the warming and prolonged heat waves. This article comes right after Europe experienced it's hottest summer ever recorded.
You haven't demonstrates that anything I've said is false. You referred to the article I linked as "junk science" despite the fact that it's from a very well respected organization, then you went on to just move the goal posts entirely and now you're just slandering me.
And I have in fact proved, as well as reasonably possible in an internet comment section, that the planet is warming. That was the very first thing I did, by linking an article that proves it beyond any reasonable doubt, and highlighting a chart that visualizes the severity and clear cause of the issue in a way any moron could understand if they weren't willfully ignorant.
Calling people morons is again the wrong move. You are the problem.
In fact I believe that global warming caused this but was trying to illustrate that YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
The proper response would have been explaining that 1540’s comparable drought by tree ring analysis lasted only 1 year and our samples yearly from church grape harvests help us understand direct correlation and magnitude change.
Compared to the recorded 11 month 1540 heat wave with corresponding small rings, early harvest and a dry Rhine river; 5 year consecutive heating acts as a vapor lock which then compounds aridification.
This is causality not correlation.
Instead you used a correlative and foolish argument of “line go up so you’re a moron”
Stop and think man. You are using the wrong facts and junk science to prove your point and you look foolish doing it.
Learn to do better.
A local event that is closely related to the unprecedented anthropogenic global warming that is indisputably responsible for the half decade of back-to-back-to-back heat record breakage streak we're currently on yes. And no, as far as we know this has never happened before unless you count mass extinctions millions of years ago where nearly everything on the planet died. That's what breaking a record means, we have never seen these temperatures before and now we're breaking those records every. single. year. And for the record, in those mass extinctions the global warming happened over thousands of years. This global warming is happening over decades.
Also I forgot to address this point in your earlier comment:
> As someone who hope global warming is man-made becuase that woudl be FIXABLE at least in theory
The fact that I am able to shoot you in the face does not imply that I am able to fix you afterwards. We are in no way capable of removing all the carbon we have added to the atmosphere within a reasonable timeframe, it would probably take about a thousand to a few thousand years if we really went for it.
And as I've shown you with the graph, global warming is indisputably, without a doubt, anthropogenic which means man-made.
Arguing about whether this heat wave is related to the severe global warming we are currently is experiencing is absolutely asinine, there is literally not a single fucking thing about the climate on our planet right now that wouldn't be different without climate change. The heat wave in Europe would be less hot, and/or it would be shorter, or it wouldn't be here at all. The general severe warming Europe has seen over the past decade would not have occurred.
We have actually had one similar high-CO2 event in the past, which wasn't human made.
It's called the Permian Extinction, and eliminated around 90% of all life on earth.
The reduction in biomass at the boundary was possibly much greater. For example, no coal was formed for 10 million years, and the shell part of marine sediments was reduced by 97%.
Why not? When the world is ending you take what joy you can, while you can.
When all you have left is having been right, there's not much else to keep you busy.
Yea might as well do anything you want that gives you joy…
Don’t even think through what you say remotely before you say it?
Why? It's all we have left because of people like Clarkson.
It has more of a following outside the UK. We know what he is like.
My friend that show is legendary. Not on the same watchers level as original Top Gear (who can surpass 300 million), but its extremely good and literally eye-opening to millions about woes and challenges of modern agriculture.
I must admit I was utterly clueless before watching that show, what an eye opener. I hope Jeremy will be OK regarding his health, he is a national treasure.
He used to mock global warming and its advocates but thats visibly thing of the past once he got off his high ego horse behind the wheel and proverbially smelled the grass/coffee out in the countryside.
He might be a treasure, but's he's also a prick. He has a long history of letting his on-screen persona leak into meatspace (or maybe it's the other way around) and that's not a good thing.
Edit - since people seem to not believe me, at minimum, he punched his producer [1]. Which wasn't the first time he turned violent - he punched Piers Morgan [2] for letting Clarkson's extramarital affairs go public. Oh, he also had poorly concealed extra-marital affairs.
1 - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35648682 2 - https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/piers-morgan-rev...
I don't like you're being down voted, let's not give celebrities extra passes to be the assholes they can be. Elon being another prime example.
And I'll admit I watch his shows. The first two seasons of Clarkson's Farm were good TV. And with May and Hammond, he provided years of entertainment for car enthusiasts. None of which should excuse his boorish behavior off-screen.
Same here. Watch it, it's good entertainment, he's still an asshole that uses people. In fact, even in the current show, where he used that insult on one of his employees who someone said she looked like pre-transition Caleb — that's exactly the kind of thing he does and he found that funny so couldn't help himself but use it.
Punching Piers Morgan is not a sign of a character flaw.
Fair enough ;)
I don’t know, in a world where dictators bomb whoever they want, if punching someone is the worst thing you can do. People continue to follow and fangirl the politicians who enact violence, so why should one go on a crusade against a tv star who gets a little hands on?
You can be against more than one thing.
That's appeal to bigger problems fallacy.
What's the name of the fallacy in which one tediously shuts down all conversations by highlighting a named fallacy?
> shuts down
You're free to continue conversing.
> all conversations
Also a fallacy.
I wasn't conversing in the first place, I'm just bored of reading through exchanges where at some point someone says Aha! That's a fallacy! Got you, I win!
I know you weren’t. Which was my point: the conversation was not shut down. If pointing out someone’s manipulation is not OK to you, then you’re probably better off trying a different discussion board.
the phallusy fallacy
California is naturally a desert. It is only unnaturally green and lush.
Well, parts of it are naturally a desert. But plenty of forest and wetlands too. In fact there were even more wetlands before we channelized many of the rivers.
California is a big state. The only true deserts are in the south east part of the state
A desert with the tallest trees in the planet.
Trees that evolved to survive wildfires because of the near year-long dry periods.
A state with a diversity of environments. Southern California, dry and dusty. Northern California, green and vibrant.
Northern California is dusty too. But green!
Underground cisterns are generally the way to do it and even the Romans were building them
The UK had a hugely wet start to the year, but that’s part of the pattern.
More intense rain fall then dry spells.
The high prolonged hot spells, with the wind can really make a lot of the land dry out.
So many dead and dying Field Maples around
Don’t really know what that has to do with my comment
California was also in a super drought at that time
Well, California is like that naturally. It's green only in the winter.
Meh, almost nobody will want to live in most of Europe post AMOC collapse in 20-40 yrs
It might compensate for global warming... I think a lot will depend on whether there is rain or not.
Current research is that it would get a lot drier than it is currently. Also the AMOC collapse process would play out over many decades (~50-100 years) it will not be a sudden event.
Warm oceans, as they are, would surely bring rain? Hence why the UK is so rainy. The ocean is warmer than the land, it's like warm water in a cold room, you get the moisture coming off it. If the ocean isn't warm any more, I reckon (as an amateur engineer not climatologist) that would reduce the rain we get.
That is one part, the other part is that you would get more persistent high pressure blocking patterns over Europe due to reordered atmosphere circulation which will lead to more intense droughts. That is what happened this summer.
What's that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
See “stability” section
As far as I remember, here in Budapest - apart from a handful of quick showers - it rained exactly once all summer, and altogether about four times since the end of winter. The city is estimated to lose a third of its trees in the next 10-15 years.
The summer heat, the drought, combined with winter cold spells and now usual late spring frosts have all but destroyed the country's agriculture too. The new government has initiated a water retention plan, but it might be too little to late.
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Very similar experience with Romania and the Netherlands. I grew up in western Romania (was born in the mid '90s), and moved to the Netherlands over 5 years ago. When I first came here, I was stunned by how green everything was, being mid-summer. But this summer I just realized that many areas have a yellowish hue. Vegetation has dried up in some places, something I don't remember witnessing around here before.
I occasionally watch development of infrastructure projects in Romania, videos such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eETeHvExMxw . This is completely different from what I used to remember. Completely dry fields. Fields used to be green at this time of the year. So much dust everywhere.
I do think I'll return one day, because somehow there's still some part of me that's melancholic about the places I've grown up in. But it now seems that if I wait many more years it will be a completely different landscape than the one I left, and not in a good sense.
Also an Australian living in Austria (there’s a few of us), although not in Vienna.
Whenever I return to Australia (also mostly rural locations) the major difference I notice is bird life. There are so many more birds in Australia. Maybe they’re just noisier.
We put feeders out in our Austrian garden and do see plenty of small birds, as well as woodpeckers, crows and pigeons. However, in Australia there are lots of small birds too, like finches and wrens. As well as magpies, currawongs and the large noisy flocks of galahs and sulphur crested cockatoos. King parrots and rosellas regularly seen. Maybe it’s a regional Australia phenomenon, but it really stands out to me.
That's my memory of Sydney to. In Europe we sold every land parcel, reduced their habitat (forests) to 100m blocks, then 50m, then a public park with scientific studies used to justify that they'll be better off in the park... then they die. Turns out all scientific studies are paid out by promoters and everyone has a price.
how could a world gov body not become corrupt but also rule over easily corruptible groups that are self interested - ie like those who slowly sell teh land to developers and reduce ecosystems to nothing to the detriment to the greater good?
I dont know
The October flood of crows and other migratory birds down the Danube, past Vienna, is pretty awesome though, to be fair. Like a river of birds in the sky each day, and it is an inspiring sight indeed.
its been decades since visiting Austria but when i visited Freiburg 5 years ago it seemed like there were only birds where people were feeding them and our walks in the black forest were noticeably quiet because we heard NO bugs. the lack of buzzing was eerie. im from northwest US
seen Germany's insect decline written about but didnt expect it to be noticeable
El Nino involves moving moisture around, not just reducing precipitation all over. So the opposite can also be seen in some places. The eastern US and parts of the midwest have had a very good year, an the US harvest of maize is projected to be the 2nd highest ever, slightly above 16 billion bushels.
Locally (New York state), things have been so wet we're seeing premature leaf drops from maple trees due to leaf fungus (tar spot disease).
What part of NY are you in? Here in northern Central NY we’ve been ‘abnormally dry’ all summer long. The forecasters keep promising rain, but it’s little more than a sprinkle when it arrives. Lawns are brown. Trees are dropping leaves, but that’s to slow evaporation.
Around Ithaca. If I go to https://www.drought.gov/ and look at New York state, there's only two fairly small patches of D0 (the lowest drought category, actually "pre-drought") in the state; the rest is not under drought.
https://www.drought.gov/states/new-york
Overall the state is 2.56" above normal for precipitation in 2026. Tompkins County is 4.3" above normal.
This whole summer I've felt that things have been remarkably green and verdant where I live in the Midwest. It reminds me of my childhood, everything is just so much more green and lush this go around.
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Can you be more specific?
Water is lost in drops a year to the universe. It’s raining somewhere. The EU having a poor memory of historical weather patterns.
Yes, I think climate change is real and we need to fix it. Droughts have been recorded in history for centuries, long before climate change would have ever existed.
Let’s fix the climate, let’s also try and be rational about historical regional weather patterns.
It’s not really a common perspective, but I have a theory that the primary cause of especially this kind of drought has way more to do with Europe essentially draining itself through all of the river straightening projects of the 19th century. How could it not be.
Before all the industrial age river straightening that has gone on until even rather recently with damming and concrete encasement projects in I think even the 1990s, you not only prevented the river water, i.e., mountain glacial waters and evaporative rain waters from meandering and saturating the lowlands, but you even speed up the pace not to mention shortening the distance.
Sure, it wasn’t a fast process, but as anyone who has had a small water leak in their home can tell you, constant flow of water at even a small rate adds up over 24/7/365 and 200 years. You’ve literally not just been draining all your fresh water into the ocean, but you’ve been draining your water battery in the form of the saturated wetlands, soil and structures like the gravel aquifers of Central Europe of water. More people are befuddled why there is a drought after they drained the water cycle battery for 200 years, not to mention that the European population has almost quadrupled over that time and people used far less water in the past, not even to mention that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe.
Ironically and in seemingly typical contradictory and counterproductive manner, the EU seems to quietly and maybe even ignorantly agree with me based on several directives and regulations they’ve been passing to restore some wetlands, river flows, and floodplains. Unfortunately it’s very little and very late (as people may be noticing) the rule of thumb is that what was destroyed takes at least 6x the effort to restore.
The concept of winter pretty much stopped existing where I live. It's just colder autumn. The ground doesn't freeze. Snow doesn't accumulate. No amount of meandering is going to compensate for the fact that the mountains do not hold water. Something needs to feed the springs and rivers. And the source is gone. Europe is shifting into a different climate, where water primarily comes as rainfall, causing floods. I imagine it's similar to Asian countries, and we will have to learn to deal with that.
I get what you are saying. I think I mentioned that I am not really all that optimistic that the process has not become irreversible in the near term, but the way I see it the only way that you could try reversing it is to effectively try to retain as much water as possible, which would require things like flooding flood plains with river water when it is available in the near term, planning for "wilding" river flows back into historical flood plains over the medium term, i.e., 50 years, and making policy that would move people out of flood plains to expand the wilding, using channels and dikes to lead river water into meadows and plains and dissuading populations in flood plains, and reversing the population growth of a population that is about 4x the size of what it was in 1800.
It sounds drastic, but all I keep hearing is that we need drastic actions, but those drastic actions seem to always be based on diffuse, abstract, and really rather meaningless and insignificant things like reducing energy use, while at the same time driving tens of millions of more people from low energy consumption regions into relatively high energy consumption regions.
But to address your point too, yes, Europe seems too be shifting into a different climate, but it's because based on my theory, Europe has effectively drained it's water cycle of the very moisture it needs. Sure, climate change has warmed things everywhere, but don't you think if Europe had the moisture it drained into the oceans that could evaporate under the higher heat into clouds that both would provide ray reflection/shadow/cooling, and deposit rain into the alps in the form of snow in winter; things would likely look a lot different?
The thing is that the source does not have to be gone, because it is actually not in Europe at all, but you have to kind of "kickstart" the cycle again if that is even possible. The source of European moisture in the European water cycle is effectively the USA and the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean area. The Gulf Stream then drives that moisture by way of the energy in the water towards Europe, where it then is driven inland from the north through the cooling at the poles.
What I am saying is effectively, if you drain your lawn with elaborate drainage systems that suck all the moisture out at a faster rate than you can even water it, you should not be surprised that it still will dry up and die.
There are clearly things going on, e.g., the US has not really had anywhere near the number of hurricanes that keep getting predicted, but I can assure you that the heat is generating a lot of storms and clouds. It's a bit anecdotal, but I am actually oddly surprised at how "cool" the ocean water is this year in particular compared to the past. I hope it's not the other wild prediction scientist have made that he AMOC seizes up and you guys end up wishing there were more global warming, but that's for another day.
May you live in interesting times
> How could it not be.
Plenty of ways. That's what we have science for. For one, why choose 19th century projects when we did millenia of terraforming, mostly by doing away with forrests and wetlands, but also planting artifical forrests over dry sand areas (see the Cap Ferret fire) etc. etc.
but also, the heatwaves of this summer mostly consist of hot air from Sahara being driven to Europe and staying there.
> that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe
what
> not even to mention that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe
Interesting how lived perception of resource scarcity and socio-economic change will attribute it all to ... others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theories
It takes very little time for water to reach the sea. From rain falling in Germany or snow melting in the Alps to it entering the North Sea takes less than two weeks. Even at the current extremely low flow the Rhine is still delivering 800 m3 / second to The Netherlands, and during high-flow periods it can deliver over 12.000 m3 / second. Any kind of meaningful retention just isn't going to happen, short of a giant hydro reservoir. Some river straightening isn't going to be more than a rounding error.
The real issue here is the loss of the glaciers, which are the actual "water batteries". Previously a lot of snow fell in the winter, stayed there, and slowly melted off during the summer. Nowadays a lot of rain falls during the winter, and it immediately flows downstream, with nothing to melt during the summer.
Population is completely irrelevant here, by the way. Any water used by people ends up going back into the river after some filtering. No need to invent an immigration conspiracy.
Modern mono culture fields also do not retain water at all, which doesn't help.
You are not catching on my friend. That is precisely the issue, that the straightening of the rivers... you are aware that was done, right? ... and channeling them out of wetlands, flood plains, and meanders and oxbows has effectively narrowed and sped up the water flows, while also shortening, i.e., both length and water time in river/land, largely because meandering, longer natural rivers are also flatter, i.e., the same elevation gain/drop over 30% more length and they are wider, i.e., the past volume of greater water stored itself in gravel "batteries" (hence where Kiesgruben" come from which fill into a Baggersee) and left by glaciers a very long time ago.
It's really not all that complicated when you realize what I am saying and it just seems to proximal for Europeans for some reason, i.e., they don't really seem to have a sense for how things were in the past, based on my experience talking to them, i.e., they think the rivers they have have always been more or less the way they currently are even if they are maybe manicured with banks or something. For additional context; the Rhein was up to 30 times wider than it is today before being straightened.
Here's a decent illustration of that [1] which shows not only how the river was straightened from the meandering oxbow river into the straight red river, but also notice that all of the green area is the historical path of the river and the flood plains it produced which would have been fed by all those meandering oxbows. All of that is now gone with the drainage of Europe having been completed over about 200 years now.
It's really not all that different in the USA either in case you were wondering, but e.g., the Mississippi has only been straightened since the 1930s and is still very much not really fully controlled even though the straightening along with deforestation and soil erosion has also led to the USA being essentially drained. And here too, people are wondering why it's getting dryer more. We have similarly also chocked our country full of way more people that can sustainably be supported in an ecologically sound manner, but liberals and conservatives have one thing in common, they slap the roof of the car and proclaim "this bad boy can fit so many f--king people in it." out of a toxic combination of lust for power, decadence, entitlement, and greed.
[1] https://eucorkarten.ub.uni-freiburg.de/wp-content/uploads/20...
I don't think this view is especially controversial. Many past infrastructure and industry projects make the drought worse today - dams, channels, mines (especially open-pit). In my area (eastern Poland) single communist-era irigation project is responsible for destroying 73% of peat bogs, meadow marshes and wet meadows [1]. Restoring them to previous condition is completely infeasible.
[1] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana%C5%82_Wieprz-Krzna
That's a really good point. I've seen some work on retaining moisture in the desert, and if memory serves, the successful ones create small check dams to retard water flow down a watercourse, giving it time to soak into the ground and replenish groundwater.
It would be interesting to see whether one could apply that to European waterways as part of marshland regeneration.
Interesting theory and I can see how you get there.
But if drainage changes were the primary cause, we would've seen drought severity increasing across the time period where straightening/etc were happening... instead the drought severity increases begin _after_ that period, better aligned with temperature changes.
Additionally, your analogy to a water leak from a tank doesn't hold, because the water recharges over time...
Further, your complaints about immigrants also doesn't make sense, as water usage has been going down (and residential utilization is quite low, altogether).
As such, my theory is that you're just a right-wing crank who wants to find a reason to deny global warming, and to hate immigrants.
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For what it's worth, please do not go for a dip in the Danube river proper here in Vienna, the currents are too dangerous for bathing and there is no official bathing spot anywhere for this reason. Instead, visit our other waters such as the lakes of the Old Danube or the high-water protection side-arm New Danube.
Yes, good clarification, I personally spend my times at Grillplatz 11 on the Neue Donau side of Donau Insel (Danube Island) .. it has been a wonderful summer and the water is delightful. Very safe and rewarding swim, every time.
> because .. inevitably .. this super dry summer means there will be heavier rains in October
What's the process here for that region? I don't think the moisture is waiting anywhere.
I’ve had it explained to me that it evaporates in the heat and gets deposited in the mountains and the atmosphere above the more northern states, where .. once things cool down, it condenses and moves through tributaries in a big rush or two during the massive temperature changes of October/November.
The thunder storms we’ve had in Vienna in the last few years have produced amazing floods - reminiscent of the desert storms of Australias north-west, where I am from - and a couple years back, the engineering of Viennas water ways was put to the test, with the floods overflowing railway lines and traffic arteries of the city in ways not seen much before this decade...
I dunno about that. I'm living in the mountains (French Alps) and it's unusually dry here. Trees are dying.
Same here in the Swiss Alps. Doesn't look so bad, but rain is WAY below what it should be. Still is
Not in the Alps, but mid summer looked like the start of autumn. At this rate, it won't be long until we don't even have an autumn like the tropics.
Swiss Tourism Agency will have to work overtime now promoting Tiktok clips and Insta reels, because of Rösti's stupid policy. And the country is going to pay for it over the next few decades.
Finland has escaped most of the heat of Central Europe. We have had hard rains occasionally, but overall not that much more rain. From stats look like 100-150% of historic numbers.
So it has really not rained outside the high pressure zone. So I am not really sure where it all would be.
West coast of Norway. 12-15 degrees and rain most of the summer.
that sounds wonderful from the ~1000 square miles of Phoenix, Arizona, where a century of concrete and asphalt retain so much heat that the clouds bounce around the borders of the heat bubble overhead, unable to dump rain regularly enough to evaporate away the stored heat, but with rainfall regularly visible outside the edges of the metropolitan area, in the wide open skies.
My wife and I retired to Tucson last year, and intentionally went through this first summer just to get the full experience. Never again! We've been under flash flood warnings the last several days and have only had a few sprinkles to go with the 108F days.
So... I had a look at Eureka CA weather this morning. Looks like Western Norway. Nice. Spending July and August up there might be mandatory for our mental health.
We spent 3 years in Tempe back in the '80s. It sucked then too.
Eureka is a weird place. It's got a foggy microclimate that you can actually see as you drive into it. Even for the Northern California / Oregon coast it's especially cool and rainy.
As a Portlander I treasure our 3-4 months of sunny weather. I wouldn't be able to handle the year-round gloom.
good info...dad lived in hillsboro so i understand the monotony boredom of overcast skies. interestingly, i personally find phoenix area worse since rain is way more rare than sun up there, and it's mega dramatic insane when it happens, from winds.
that's good info : i'll take a look at Eureka, but think further north would be even better, like Oregon coast. I'm from Chicago outer suburbia originally so miss actual greenery and rain without the mega-dramatic desert windstorm bullshit...and at altitude at the foothills north of the phoenix metro area it's been way over 100 for a very long time, though less insane than som eof the 8 years we've been here (for work and outdoorsiness).
It's so dry, even in tne Netherlands and north of France. Amazing how quickly it goes
I can’t imagine what the Netherlands would look like if desertification would occur. It seems implausible that those flat, flat lands would ever turn brown and grey and dusty - but I won’t be surprised if things turn that way in a few years. I hope the Dutch have a solution, they always seem to when it comes to water control ..
I think currently one of the biggest risks for The Netherlands is salinization. If there is not enough river water and the groundwater level is too low, sea water will push upward, contaminating the river beds and increasingly much soil around it. This summer they had to close locks to block seawater and to increase the fresh water level. Of course, this has a considerable economic damage, since it blocks inland shipping.
Netherlands is also in a much worse position due to being downstream of literally everyone.
It's going to be a huge future fight in the EU because all countries upstream will want to retain 'all' the water and the remaining low flow will still have all those countries their industries dumping toxic waste, meaning the ratio of water-waste will get ridiculous.
The Rhine, which becomes the Waal in the Netherlands, has been exceptionally low now for most of the summer and caused major issues for shipping.
It has only a single waterlock and so there is no retention of the water in it when a period of draughts like the ones this summer happen.
Germany has had a project for adding water locks to the Rhine ongoing in burocracy purgatory for the last 26 years now, and if this situation doesn't shake things up I don't think anything ever will.
I would argue the opposite.
There is still enough water, it is just unevenly distributed over the year. Previously winter snow was retained in the Alps and released as it melted during the summer, nowadays winter rain immediately comes downstream as giant floods.
If upstream countries were able to retain a significant portion of those floods and release it as a trickle during the summer, The Netherlands wouldn't have any problems. It is literally impossible for it to be worse than it currently is.
Besides, most of the water used in The Netherlands does not come from the large rivers, but from local rainfall. The drought is due to sticking to the historical policy of trying to immediately get rid of any excess water, rather than retaining it locally. No need to do anything EU-wide to solve that, just get the farmers to accept that the land will be a bit soggy in the winter.
Drought in The Netherlands is artificial though. Millionaire farmers are pumping up water to water their crops during the day. Due to the heat most of the spray evaporates before it touches the plants. During the winter they artificially lower the ground water level for personal benefit.
Also of this so they can gain even more millions by exporting all the food across the border. Time to block some more highways, destroy some more property and kill some more people in order to secure those sweet EU subsidies.
Not saying that Dutch farmers don't use a lot of water overall, but they have some of the most effective farming practices on the planet when it comes to water usage.
Correct, but those very same practices are causing huge damages to the local environment and economy, while the farming relies on foreign imports to function and the majority of its production is exported.
Rather than exporting farming products, The Netherlands should focus on exporting farming practices.
That doesn’t change the fact that the millionaire megafarmers completely screwed over Dutch water management for personal gains. Did you know that farmers are basically completely in control of waterschappen despite only bringing in a couple percent of the GDP.
This is fairly off-topic, but:
> tne
broke my brain for a second. Still does, to be honest. I don't think I remember seeing this typo before!
Satellite data measuring Leaf Area Index shows a strong trend of global greening, not desertification. About 50% of land shows accelerated re-greening, including in europe, while only about 8% shows browning. There is no scientific case for desertification, which would be a surprise when we are pumping the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses.
"The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000" https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024GEcoC..4902791C/abstra...
"Earth observation data shows that most European urban areas are becoming greener"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642...
I took a train from Berlin to Hungary. DB at one end, MAV at the other.
The ensuing week in the Czech Republic was lovely.
Balaton's current level is something like... 40-50cm so yeah you're right. This is unprecedented
Wow, that's kind of incredible. I've always been able to walk out into parts of it for quite a distance in prior visits over the years but I'm guessing this new average is an extreme.
To be honest, it's not unusual for that part of the Europe to be pretty yellow in August. I was taking train rides to Budapest regularly between 2010-2020. But it's getting worse for sure.
As an European, no, current situation is unprecedented.
It was getting bad already, but like this? Absurd.
I agree with that, but was specifically referring to the description of everything being very dry in that area. I noticed this already 15 years ago, the area around Budapest was much more yellow and dry compared to countries up north.
But yes, the intensity and especially the duration of the heat has intensified. I stopped visiting my family in the south of Europe around five years ago, and visit in either fall or spring. Can't really take the heat, it's not worth it.
I have been living in the area for 26 years or so, and while its not unusual to have dryness in summer, it is visibly more intense lately ..
The cities will have to refactor themselves to avoid becoming ovens.
I don't think it ever got to the current levels where even nuclear plants had to be stopped due to lack of water in the Danube.
Probably not. But it's not the first time the grass is no longer green in August. The only thing I said really.
Its already culling bio diversity. Birches are all gone, still standing but dead.
I think Hungary is supposed to be dry though? Not this dry, sure, but still.
Hungary was largely swamps and marshlands in the past, much of which was drained to give way for large-field monocultural agriculture, this started in the 19th century, and was further developed, until we got here. Now the "non-existent climate change" is added to that, and I wonder if our forests will survive me...
Also soil erosion is a problem, so I think I'll live to get it all to a desert.
Sure, it gets dry in summer, it’s not always so lush - at least in my experience over the years.
But, parks of dead grass, and dust devils blowing in the corners? Can’t say I’ve seen that much over the decades of visiting the region. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much dry, dead grass.
I, for one, am very grateful for my neighborhood turning the streets into cooler, greener little oases for pedestrians. Perhaps those eucalyptus trees the Schönbrunner Zoo keeps for its koalas will be of use in providing avenues of shade in the decades to come, who knows …
You don't have to take a train trip, all the grass along side the roadways looks like straw, at least around St Marx/Arena Wien/Gasometer.
Very true. When the Praterallee starts getting dusty, I’ll start worrying harder, though .. meanwhile, it’s an absolutely delightful environment.
I have an ancient forest near where I live in Switzerland. In the core zone of the forest they do no maintenance whatsoever. The trees live, they get gigantic and very old. They die. At some point the top breaks off and then many years later the rest of the tree is so fungus-eaten it tips over too and rots on the ground.
Sunlight never reaches the ground because of the tall giant trees so there's no undergrowth. It's just dead leaves and mushrooms.
Something that was completely 100% noticeable was that during this drought of several months this forest was still incredibly healthy. You walk into the forest and the temperature drops several degrees Celsius and the ground still seems wet. I could tell that the groundwater level sunk maybe 4 feet by looking at some pits that normally have water. But still the ground didn't feel dried out.
I compared this to a forest where they do maintain the forest and harvest giant trees for wood. They don't clear it but just by cutting out these tall trees they let sunlight reach the ground and dry the forest out.
Well, I also have an oak forest just in front of my balcony here in western Switzerland. Most of it is natural reserve, around half is literal scientific reserve. They don't harvest, let everything where it falls unless it completely blocks one of few pedestrian paths, then they use horses to drag it aside. It has few small streams (with crayfish!!) and one river flowing through
That forest was crispy dry, almost dusty in recent weeks. One spark could burn it all down easily. We had... 2 properly rainy days through whole summer? Few thunderstorms but they were very local, and all of them avoided directly our area and that forest like plague.
At least those crayfish managed to survive as I've seen 2 last week, they are more susceptible to water pollution and some brutal fungal infection which can be brought from other streams and basically sterilize whole stream (happened in other parts of our canton around Lausanne). Water somehow didn't stop. Back where I come from in eastern Europe their local crayfish weren't often so lucky - streams bone dry.
i am currently hiking through switzerland (in cossonay this evening) and have been struck by how wet the forest ground is compared to my home (colorado, usa). locals have told me that’s very recent because of the storms that came through a few days ago.
the mittelland seems dry but since i’m walking through farmland, mostly, everything around me looks green, while i walk on dusty paths.
today was very hot.
A good example of ecological buffer in action.
In the last years Europe had suffered a wave of wildfires at a level never seen before. Most of it started by people and many of them provoked in a sort of coordinated attack. Also there is a war in Ukraine blowing up everything at full steam and releasing huge amounts of heat to the lower atmosphere. Both facts must be taken in mind to understand the current situation.
Europe has suffered a damage in many ecological buffers that that may be recoverable unless they suffer a second attack. A forest can be burnt just a limited number of times before it turns into a desert. Monegros was one of the biggest oak forests in Spain. The name can be losely translated as "black hills" that suggest repeated wildfires as wrong management techniques. Take a look at the place now. Australia was also covered in rainforests in the past.
I really hope that when the nature sabotage stops, the situation will improve a little at least, even if we are at a much, much worse place than before the Ukraine war.
The problem is everyone killed the single greatest raiser of ground water levels for its fur. The humble and hardworking beaver.
Perhaps the cutting and removal of the trees also plays a factor? They suck in water over their life, then once they are cut the forest loses that moisture.
Trees essentially just make steam. They suck in water, transport it up to the leaves where it evaporates. So forests create rain.
Anyway your concern about losing moisture stored in trees isn't really warranted, the tree does not give back moisture.
AMOC collapse [0] is Europe's potential big climate challenge. Nasty business. I wonder how to help prevent that from happening.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Get in a time machine. Go back to 1970. Make sure world starts phasing out all coal power by 2000, replacing with nuclear and what renewables are available then, and make sure modular scalable reactors are available for China so they use that instead of coal to power their rise. Convince everyone that late 20th century unscientific greens are full of shit and nuclear power is better than coal.
(Renewables were not fully competitive with fission until the 20teens, too late.)
It’s dialed in.
That’s not to mean replacing stuff with non carbon emitting sources today is worthless. It’s very important. Right now we are dialing in the next escalation of the problem, and we can still blunt that if we give a damn.
One thing you can do today is keep arguing against the romantic anti industrial unscientific greens. Degrowth and “abstinence based” policy will never work. People will never go for it, and we are never returning to pre industrial times. It’s a fantasy. If you try to force it people will elect anti environmental populists (as they have) and you will get the opposite of what we need.
Fantasies displace realistic solutions in the discourse, and “everyone needs to become poorer” gives anti environmental and fossil fuel industry shills a way to frame their case as “we are on the side of human development.” Don’t give them that argument. Stop it. It also won’t work with developing nations. “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.
The solution is to replace fossil fuels with non carbon emitting sources, not to stop people from using energy.
In Europe, we're already degrowing since 2008, even more so if you only look at the real, physical economy because we have to import our fossil energy. We won't be able to power the same lifestyle with nuclear and renewables either, the math doesn't add up. Jean-Marc Jancovici is a french engineer explaining this in great detail, see for example https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/84-jean-marc-... if you don't speak french.
Yes, I've read tons of stuff like this.
It won't work. You can absolutely trim a lot of fat from the modern lifestyle, but then you'll be left with a residual. Meanwhile the developing world will keep developing and we have no right to order them to stop.
The idea that it's not possible is bullshit too, and it's still bullshit even if you ignore nuclear power.
https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/0...
Back in the 2000s there was a ton of discourse around peak oil. As part of that, I recall reading very detailed breakdowns written by actual engineers and scientists arguing why you would never have a mass-market EV with the range of a gasoline car and you would never be able to power more than 10-20% of a modern economy with solar power. I own two EVs, one with gas-comparable range, and California currently gets almost 40% of its total electricity (averaged across day and night) from solar, and climbing. There were whole books on this. I think one was called Power Down. It was all 100% wrong.
I also recall reading detailed analyses by aerospace engineers about how you would never have a reusable rocket, that it was simply impossible or would cost so much it wouldn't be practical. First stage reusability is now routine, and second stage reusability is coming.
Detailed breakdowns of why X is impossible have an incredibly poor track record unless they reduce directly to the laws of physics. Will faster than light travel ever be possible? No, and I believe that, because if it was it would mean a huge part of modern physics (not just relativity) is wrong in very bonkers ways.
There is no first principles physics argument for the limits this guy is arguing.
Of course if you imagine infinite growth on a finite planet, that fails. That's a trivial argument. But that's not happening, probably due to birth rates declining. The question I'm addressing is: can this civilization and its near-future extrapolation be powered without fossil fuels? The answer is yes, and again even without nukes. Throw nukes in there and it just gets easier.
IMO this is 100% ideology and is an example of what I call "problemism." A "problemist" is someone who uses a problem as a stalking horse for one and only one solution that turns out to smuggle in some kind of ideological or social agenda.
I see problemism as a dishonest propaganda technique. It's a way to sell the idea without directly selling the idea, instead using concern over some other thing to smuggle it in.
So you know I'm not just picking on the left: right now there's a big freak-out on the right about birth rates. The problemists there argue that it's why we need to get back to ultra-traditional family structures and take rights away from women. They're not interested in any solution that doesn't do that, because they don't actually care about the problem. They only care about taking rights from women.
This guy and those like him only care about degrowth as part of what is probably some kind of anti-industrial political ideology. If the problem could be solved without it, that would be bad as far as they're concerned, just like how the far right doesn't care about solutions to birth rate decline issues that don't involve reactionary social agendas.
Most of these people are anti-capitalists. Thing is, I don't mind that. I don't think capitalism is the ordained perfect system. But if you want to sell me on an alternative to capitalism, argue for it directly on its merits. The test is: if climate change and fossil fuel depletion did not exist, could you still make your argument for abandoning capitalism in favor of your system? If not, then you're engaging in "problemism" to sell bullshit. Because there is no physical reason that you could not drastically cut CO2 emissions without abandoning capitalism. A simple progressive carbon tax combined with cheap renewables could do it. We just lack the political will.
I wasn't taking about ideology, I was talking about what is already happening. Here's a graph of total freight volume (a proxy for the real physical economy) in the EU 15 countries since 2000, notice the peak around 2008:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/road_go_ta_to...
> Here's a graph of total freight volume (a proxy for the real physical economy)
In 2008, people and businesses were still buying new computers every year or two, printing everything on paper, buying physical media. I don't know anyone that does this anymore. I don't think that is a good proxy.
In the US there was a slight drop around that time, but not close to 25% in the eu. If it was due to businesses buying less physical media wouldn't it be sth seen in the US data in some year too?
https://www.bts.gov/us-tonne-kilometers-freight
(a bit easier in table form as the graph does not aggregate accross all means of transport).
I would note that the population increase 2008-present in the EU (340M to 350M) is much lower than the US (305M to 345M), which could account for a rather significant difference too. I don't think either of these is a "smoking gun" but they both seem pretty significant confounding factors.
This is a gross misunderstanding of what degrowth means.
The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled to resources (as it has), but there is a limit, unless you seriously want to argue that iron (for example) can be an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
An economy is a method of allocating resources. This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs (consider that we produce many times the amount of food that's needed to feed everyone's needs, but massive amounts of it used for industrial meat production and biofuels).
> we are never returning to pre industrial times
This is an absurd strawman.
> everyone needs to become poorer
This is, in fact, the industry propaganda. What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form), rather than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
> “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.
This is misdirection. Getting water, food, shelter, and medicine for everyone on the planet is well within our means as a species. It is the ideology of free movement for goods but not people and infinite growth that makes it impossible to meet those needs, because it requires and underclass who can be used for cheap labour and contained in states built for that purpose.
It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find.
Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all of which are heated and cooled 24/7. How much energy do they use? What is that energy use in terms of average European households?"
I used European because Americans are notable energy pigs and can cut a lot without losing much. Europeans are closer to the reasonable baseline.
The total it comes up with for our gas-guzzling fat cat is 96-97 GWh per year. That's including three homes and a continuously operating jet aircraft. This is a totally ridiculous footprint, of course.
Claude Fable says the average European household uses about 15,000 kWh/year in electricity, heating, etc. That means our fat cat corresponds to about 6,400 average European households.
The population of Europe is around 750 million people.
There's about 3000 billionaires worldwide, and if they all lived as absurdly as my caricature they'd use 288 TWh per year.
That corresponds to around 19.2 million European households, or about 2.5% of the energy use of a middle class Europe.
The vast bulk of energy and resource use supports the middle class, and raising people out of poverty.
Inequality probably reduces energy use. If we improved equality it would mean more people with a basic middle class standard of living. A society in which almost everyone has a European middle class standard of living would consume far more energy than one in which a few fat cats live it up and everyone else is poor.
Personally I agree with the left at least a bit on this. I think we have too much inequality. If we reduce inequality, that will increase energy consumption, so we'd better build solar panels and batteries and reactors at the same time.
Their money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is many times a source of great suffering. If they had to make that somewhere adhere to rules or abide by law or stop exploiting others - humans or nature - it would cost them a great amount of money.
If that's true it would mean fixing this injustice would just even out who gets to have what. It would not meaningfully reduce consumption, certainly not enough to make a huge difference in CO2 emissions.
(There might be one exception to that: reducing warfare. War is a gigantic waste twice over: tons of energy to fight, tons of energy to rebuild all the stuff we break. But I doubt eliminating warfare would be enough alone to cut emissions enough to matter.)
There's only two ways to reduce CO2 emissions by a large amount in a durable lasting way:
1. Replace CO2 emitting sources of power with those that don't emit CO2.
2. Destroy the middle class.
Actually I guess there's a third: kill a lot of people.
Anything less is a rounding error that won't make much of a difference.
I'll take option 1. Luckily the laws of physics say we can do it. We just need the political will. There's also precedent. Many developed countries' emissions per capita has been falling while growth has actually continued (in most cases) and standard of living hasn't moved much. We just need to do a lot more of what works.
The actual plan is option 2.
Or 3
Perhaps instead of using one of the hallucination machines that's aggravating the climate crisis, you could have done some research: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-worlds-top-1-of-emitter...
> Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.
The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true. But you are also assuming that reducing emissions must come with a reduction in lifestyle, which is untrue. Think about the way that our computers are designed to be disposable and unrepairable, or how clothing is made worse and worse (because it's more profitable, which is only necessary because of the need for infinite growth). Or, as you pointed out, North Americans use a ton of energy for terrible reasons, and fixing that problem would improve their quality of life: walkability, bikability, and public transit so people can drive less (or even stop owning a car) while also getting improved health; replacing flights with more comfortable high speed trains; removing the need to maintain a lawn for every house (shockingly terrible for the environment); etc. Or how we ship things all around the world to be assembled in different phases in different countries because it's cheaper (and suppresses labour). What so many of the things we need to do to solve this problem have in common isn't a reduction in lifestyle (some will do the opposite!), but rather that they impact profits and therefore threaten infinite growth.
Yes, there are some things that people won't like doing, like significantly reducing the amount of meat they eat (>15% of global emissions are from meat production, and it is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon). But pretending nothing will ever change doesn't solve the problem (and we'll be catastrophically forced to change later if we don't voluntarily do it sooner).
I'm not saying nothing will ever change. That's a misreading. I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.
Environmentalists have been making the "abstinence first" guilt trip argument for decades and it's done absolutely nothing and it will never do anything. That approach is a total failure. I use the abstinence framing because it's like abstinence-based sex ed. Instead of having sex, teenagers have guilty sex.
Let's say Claude's wrong. The argument still stands if it's off by 10X. Soaking the rich won't help by more than a rounding error, and redistribution might actually increase resource use. It's also a one-time thing.
Speaking of AI: turning off all the AI data centers won't help either. They're a few percent of electricity use. A few percent won't matter and it's another one-time thing. It's not an ongoing solution to anything if the economy is still powered by burning stuff.
Then you have the developing world. Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.
There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.
If Africa modernizes on coal like China did, that'll add another China worth of emissions, which would be catastrophic. The only way out is for Africa to industrialize and modernize on sources of power that don't emit CO2.
Luckily that's possible, but telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen. It's how you get them to say "fuck you" and ignore you.
All I can say is, I'm sorry Cassandra.
Here in Washington State, a decade ago we had an initiative (I-732) to do a carbon tax and lower regressive taxes (we have one of the most-regressive tax structure in the USA). The environmental groups opposed it because it wasn't handing out money to them and it lost narrowly.
Eventually the legislature passed a complicated cap-and-trade scheme and they spend the money on bullshit and lie about it: "The projects the department touted amounted to just under 4% of their original estimates." https://phys.org/news/2026-01-washington-state-overestimates...
> I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.
But energy source isn't the only problem. The problem is partially that energy use is high in and of itself. Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already). The ideology of infinite growth requires ever more cobalt, and so it depends on that oppression and ecological damage. Reduce, reuse, recycle are in that order for a reason, but we are never able to do the first because of infinite growth.
I think your framing of "abstinence" is nonsense. What are we abstaining from? Economic 'growth'? Energy usage? Consumerism? If so, all we're "abstaining" from is the thing that benefits rich people to our own detriment. We must distinguish economic growth from improvements to lifestyle, which as I stated are frequently at odds.
> They're a few percent of electricity use.
Continually growing, using far more resources than just electricity, for mostly downsides to humanity, and causing significant local pollution.
> Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.
Sure, let's just make up numbers. Sorry, I meant let's burn methane to have 'Claude' make up numbers.
> There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.
But you haven't dealt with the fact that the reason they're deprived is because of the very system you're supporting. I agree that all people ought to have the same access to technology and standards of living, and doing so requires that we reshape how technology works and is distributed. That will never happen under the current system, because doing so would impact profits. Infinite growth is the thing preventing us from fundamentally improving our technology and societies to be sustainable.
> telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen
I am arguing for the opposite, but you seem not to have read what I wrote.
> Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already).
Cobalt isn't used in solar panels.
I wonder where they get that kind of nonsense? Do they not check, or they do they just not care?
> The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires
The top 10% is overwhelmingly not billionaires, or even millionaires. The top 10% is basically all of the US except the poorest. And some upper middle classes elsewhere.
> The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources.
Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.
> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.
Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.
> This is an absurd strawman.
Need to read more degrowth fiction then.
> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)
The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.
> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.
"we are never returning to pre industrial times"
We are, one way or the other. It is just a question of the choices we make on the way and how pre-industrial we end up.
There is no a position of leverage, the climate is behaving as modeled and expected. We know what will happen next.
Last post in this thread for me...
We won't go back. That's the thing, the false option. I think you underestimate how much being poor sucks. I personally call this the "it's better to reign in hell" principle.
So if we are dumb and don't cut emissions, we will "reign in hell," and it'll look like a dark cyberpunk dystopia. There might also be some pretty nasty wars and genocides in there.
I think that's the real choice we have. If we reduce carbon emissions enough, we can blunt the effects of climate change and adapt without too much pain. If we don't, we get to LARP Bladerunner with billions taking shelter in air conditioned mega-blocks when the deadly heat waves hit.
Nature isn't happy life in harmony. Nature is suffering and death. It's an amoral Darwinian meat grinder.
Let me make it concrete. I have kids. Let's say you give me a choice.
Option 1: I go to the future where we live closer to nature, more primitively, but my daughter died of a childhood disease.
Option 2: I go to the future that looks like Bladerunner or Kowloon Walled City with killer heat waves requiring air conditioning to survive, but my child is alive because of modern medicine.
I'd pick two and so would most people, which is why we'll never go back. The infant and child mortality rates alone in "wild nature" are enough to turn people away. It's better to reign in hell.
But I don't think we have to do that. We could do things like carbon taxes, provided we stop spending the social and political capital on guilt trip tactics and back to the land bullshit that will just be ignored, which is why I'm wasting my time ranting about this.
It's popular right now because the impacts are visibly getting worse. This weather event in Europe is far from normal, and the trend is accelerating.
If we fail to control it, what will happen is that we'll be reduced in population by an order of magnitude or two. We won't be able to sustain the technology we've created, we'll have mined easily accessible minerals and energy, and there is a real chance we will not return to being an advanced species in the same way we are today.
A simple reduction to greens vs not-greens is not helping anything. We can use more solar and wind. We can be more efficient with energy. We can stop burning hydrocarbons immediately and reserve the for material science and we can replace most car energy sources with electric.
None of this is even difficult, it just hurts some established interests who are fighting it with everything they have. They would rather that the planet get destroyed than to lose their wealth and power.
I'd prefer my kids not live in Bladerunner, also, and right now that's the path we're on.
> They would rather that the planet get destroyed than to lose their wealth and power.
Crazy thing is they wouldn't even lose it. They'd still be obscenely wealthy and powerful.
Bluntly: too late. You'd have to rewind to 2001 or so and go on the strictest measures worldwide. But we are utterly unequipped to deal with global issues, the Ozon layer success notwithstanding.
The problem with people constantly pointing to the Ozone layer is that it was only really addressed because it cost virtually nothing to do so. All we had to do was switch from one bad thing to another good thing, which was already becoming cheaper.
Climate change as a whole requires a fundamental shift from the basis of almost all chemical manufacturing and transport logistics. And doing so will cause cataclysmic changes to the socioeconomic standings of entire regions of the world.
>The problem with people constantly pointing to the Ozone layer is that it was only really addressed because it cost virtually nothing to do so. All we had to do was switch from one bad thing to another good thing, which was already becoming cheaper.
The tin-foil tongue in cheek joke in the refrigeration industry is "how do you know if a refrigerant is bad for the atmosphere?. because DuPont's patent expired".
Which is to say that R12 would've never gone out of fashion if not for big moneyed first world interests who have the ear of politicians whining that the 3rd world was gonna make and sell stuff cheaper and hurt their profits and that protecting the ozone layer only happened because it was good for big business. Subsequent changes in refrigerant are less flagrant but the undertone is still there. C02 never really caught on because you can just buy the stuff at any welding gas supply place for pennies, the entire supply chain stands to lose a source of profit with that as a refrigerant.
> And doing so will cause cataclysmic changes to the socioeconomic standings of entire regions of the world.
We're going to have those anyway. Might as well make them count for something.
Sure but like the guy said we needed to do that 30 years ago. Even now we're basically ignoring the problem. "Look at all these renewables" while we're still building new coal plants. And even still, most people are debating whether it's even a problem, and whether it's anthropogenic.
I'm afraid that is too optimistic a take.
How many humans are worried about getting food on the table today? How many have the mental space to dedicate to climate change in any way? I'd guesstimate more people are worried about short term food security...
Climate change requires building more nuclear power. Which we absolutely can do.
Nuclear is too slow. Not only are you running fossil plants for decades while you build nuclear reactors, you are also emitting additional CO2 during the construction process!
Renewables reduce CO2 emissions today. Building a solar farm takes months, building a wind farm takes single-digit years. They'll have recouped their construction emissions well before the first nuclear reactor comes online.
It is important to remember that the challenge we are facing is not *how do we build a fully-renewable grid", but "how do we reduce CO2 emissions the fastest". Having a 95% solar-and-wind grid with 5% fossil backup 10 years from now is significantly better than having a 100% nuclear grid 20 years from now!
Building enough nuclear to replace fossil electricity generation is both insanely expensive and not enough to fix the problem because plenty of emissions don't come from electricity generation.
Ah yea, let's start that and reap the benefits 2050 when it's already in the shitter.
From the above linked Wikipedia:
>Historically, CMIP models, the gold standard in climate science, show the AMOC is very stable; although it may weaken, it will always recover [...] In 2020, research estimated if warming stabilizes at 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), 2 °C (3.6 °F) or 3 °C (5.4 °F) by 2100; [...] does not approach collapse,
perhaps they can cut a deal with China
Unironically the anti nuclear luddites killed the main chance to be divert climate change that we had over unfounded fearmongering
Antinuclear have and always had zero power to stop nuclear plants. Except for Germany, if nuclear stopped growing was because of its economics. The same economics that stopped solar photovoltaics until it made sense.
Even France, that is heavily pro-nuclear, can't find the economics to build new nuclear energy at decent pace.
Also, nuclear was not replaced by more carbon, except again a for a couple of years in a small country (by global standards) called Germany. Everyone else is planting more clean energy.
What we did: growing China and all Asia at high rates based on coal, for decades. Offsetting by a lot internal combustion engine efficiency by buying bigger and more cars. Buying stupid and useless stuff on the other side of the planet. Everyone first hobby today is "travelling the world", preferably by plane. Being 10 billion people, and richer (more capita and more consumption per capita). None of those thing would be solvable with more nuclear plants.
You're acting as if politics AKA overregulation (first person to say "You think nuclear should be unregulated???" gets a medal) has had no effect on the price of nuclear energy.
Dude, Germany sets the tone for whole EU and then some more (aka Switzerland, they are extremely pushy also in matters which should be completely upon given country, like citizen gun laws).
They are the biggest economic force bar none (at least for now, lets see in few years when their car industry will be mostly a thing of the past). They steer 500+ million continent like a fiddle.
I have to crap on Merkel here yet again - she was horrible, utterly despicable leader. Much of the backlash in popularity of extreme right across Europe is her doing. She killed nuclear which wasn't in greatest shape, but it was well before we had actual replacements. She studied as nuclear physicist. Europe as a continent would be in much better shape politically, economically, militarily and socially if she didn't get so much power for so long. German ADF is completely her doing.
Of course when she met real power dealers like putin she caved immediately so he played her like those proverbial fiddles.
Many of the "luddite" groups were funded, and in some cases entirely formed, by fossil fuel interests.
That's pure fiction. Cite your sources.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/
https://truthout.org/articles/top-oil-and-gas-lobby-spent-mo...
http://climatecoalition.org/how-american-petroleum-institute... (sorry, no https)
Russia has huge influence in German politics. I believe there is connection there as well, but I cannot find any public information to cite regarding funding of anti-nuclear power movements.
[flagged]
I gave you links that support my argument, very well.
I am not sure what else you want. Quotes from each one, inline?
If you don't have the time to read what I posted, and understand how it applies to this thread, then please copy and paste this thread into an LLM chat bot, and ask for clarity. I just tried that, and even an LLM understood my response.
Holy fuck, Batman. No one's interested in that LLM verbiage. You made specific claims. Claim A:
"Environmentalist groups were in some cases entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
It's clear from context that you're talking about genuine organizations and not astroturfing. So far you've not named a single one that was "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
Hence, pure fiction.
This is the most obtuse interaction I have ever had on this website. Is this simple enough?
> In 1969, Robert O. Anderson, an oil man whose long career included a stint as the Chief Executive Officer of Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) (now part of BP, the company formerly known as British Petroleum), gave David Brower $200,000 to start Friends of the Earth (FOE).
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/
You think it is obtuse because your lies are being called out.
FotE was founded by David Brower, Donald Aitken, and Gary Soucie as its Wikipedia page and multiple other sources corroborate. Emphatically, it was not "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests". Hence, your claim is a lie.
Moreover, Robert O. Anderson donated a large portion of his fortune to philanthropic causes. Among them, an art museum and a literary magazine. $200k was chump change to him. Anderson's philanthropy was his own personal interest and had nothing to do with the "fossil fuel" industry.
So unless you want to make the rather dubious claim that Harper's Magazine was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, you have nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson
Successful massive nuclear and renewable deployment at world scale, would it have happened, would have only solved one third of the problem. Agriculture, construction and all carbon-emitting industry processses (steel production) require their own solution too.
One third of global emissions is a staggering quantity we presently can't even dream of, and it would buy us a lot of time.
I'd take it.
Sure, my point is that it would not have been enough to divert climate change, though it would have probably bought a few years/decade and allowed public discourse to move above "nuclear vs wind power" while burning more and more coal, and start discussing other problems. (on another hand, everything that public discourse touches gets politicized to stupidity so I'm not sure if I'd rather have the public choose how to decarbonize concrete production or some magical alternative that does not involve the general public talking about it).
Since uranium at 3x the current price could supply the current world primary energy demand with burner reactors for only about 5 years, diverting climate change with nuclear would have required mass rollout of breeder reactors. These were stopped by their own inherent cost and technical problems, not by greens.
And now, not even the French are pursuing them, sending the strong signal that nuclear is off the table as anything but a minor contributor to stopping CO2 build up.
If environmentalists are so powerful how are fossil fuels, automobiles, and meat still around?
I think it is extremely simplistic to blame the nuclear transition's failed potential solely on them.
1. The fact that nuclear power has been quite safe so far does not mean that it would have been just as safe if its deployment would have rapidly spread.
2. Nuclear energy is unfortunately tightly coupled with nuclear weapons, as well as the treaties and geopolitics that were designed to keep them only in the hands of the few. Quite many late 1900s crises in Europe could have looked different if nuclear material was even more widespread than it was. I don't even wanna think about nations outside Europe that have been extremely unstable in the past and in recent history.
3. Seeing how intensely fossil fuel companies spread misinformation and disinformation about green technology and climate science, it's hardly a far-fetched idea that that same industry had a hand in helping policymakers steer away from an energy source that would unseat it from the throne.
Too much about nuclear safety was based on trust and if that fails the consequences are huge. In Europe we learned the hard way what it means if a plant is not safely build and how bad the communication is when there is an accident.
And then you are also going to trust the same people when they are saying the waste issue is solved.
If your arguments are luddites and fearmongering you have not improved trust in any way.
Nuclear, even with Chernobyl which infamously cheaped out to use an explosive roof, is safer than almost every energy source, only solar is safer per kWh
No nuclear accident has involved a reactor built after the 1960s. Yet we regulate as if a dozen more Chernobyls have happened
No. You can shit all you want over the antinuclear boys but:
* Building nuclear plants is a 5-10 year plan. More if you haven't built them in a while.
* The first economy in the world has quite literally started wars over oil because it wants to keep using it.
* The countries that would be the biggest emitters right now are also the ones doing the most in electrification.
Building more nuclear wouldn't have changed shit: there is an ongoing work to maintain the world dependent on fossil fuels. We can't even get electric cars to properly pick up.
EV only this year became comparable in prices to gasoline cars thanks to massive efforts by Chinese companies to reduce battery prices and improve drivetrain.
With that further changes can be very quick as forcing EV no longer requires reallocating money from other things.
You're overestimating the amount of people that can afford a brand new car. The transition will take 15 years at least.
If 100% of new cars were EVs then there might be feedback loops that accelerate the long tail. Like gas stations becoming leas profitable, less prolific, and more expensive.
You might also see battery prices push the price of new cars well below that of second hand ICE vehicles.
Even if the replacement window for existing vehicles doesn’t change, the environmental impact would run ahead of the adoption curve. High volume use cases like delivery and Ubers would be the first to switch to EVs.
I don't buy it.
Climate change is related to our consumptions, period, focusing only on energy or transport doesn't tackle the whole problem: we consume too much, eat too much (cattle and fish in particular) and destroy too much in our quest for more and more.
Inefficient transport or energy is just one aspect of the whole problem.
But I'm tired of hearing how it is just a matter of energy or transport, it's literally missing the forest for a tree, even if it might be a particularly big one.
"A third of the problem" is fucking huge
Sure, which is why I used the image of "missing the forest for the tree, even if the tree is huge".
But it's our consumption and expectations that feed into it.
And that image is wrong. If the tree is that big then it's okay to focus on it.
Even a huge tree, is still a tree in the forest. You need to look at consumption patterns, not just energy, which derive from the first anyway.
Your chosen forest exists within the even bigger forests of human action and ecology. That doesn't mean we have to focus that wide. When one part of the picture is both specialized and huge, it makes sense to focus on it.
Reading some of these comments is really depressing. Since I can remember we talk about climate change and it's still not in peoples head.
When will it be real? When your home burns down due to a forest fire? When there is no water? When there is no food because everything is too dry? When a storm destroyed your home?
It is likely, never. When all of this happen, a not-so-insignificant percentage of population would still say "it is god's will" or "it is just nature" or "it is just cyclical" etc, will never acknowledge humans caused a big part of it. There is a well funded, well coordinated effort by media, politicians, pundits, businessmen etc that will make sure of it
I find most comments differ from scientific reality in both directions - denial one way panic the other. It's no doubt real and I think most people accept that but it may be dealable with.
For Americans, at lest, it will take that kind of personal tragedy.
Those who are most loudly opposed to universal healthcare switch their story instantly when they or a loved one gets in a terrible accident or develops nasty cancer. The jump to the socialism of go fund me in a heartbeat.
I think it will be the same with climate change. Entire cities or states could be really bad with millions displaced or dying but others will still deny it because they are fine. Once it hits them personally, they’ll be screaming bloody murder blaming everyone and saying they need assistance.
Have you tried talking to people in real life? At least most people here have some knowledge about it. In real life, nobody cares. I understood that 5 years ago, and now I act accordingly
Just in case somebody else wanted a map to see exactly which areas in europe actually experience drought this summer
https://drought.emergency.copernicus.eu/tumbo/edo/map/?prodC...
Why spain is not affected?
I don't know, I am not an expert, but it seems more concentrated in france/uk/central europe and adjacent.
Also in southern europe summer is generally a dry season, and rainfall happens mostly in autumn/spring. One does not expect much rainfall to happen in the summer. In contrast, in central/northern europe summer is often the wettest. Having an overall dry summer is a common thing in the south, but not as you go north. Maybe this factors in on computing drought indices.
Spain itself has very diverse climate, so not sure what applies where there. But other parts of the south had plenty rain in the spring. It is lack of rain/snowfall in the rest of the year that can create problems there more than lack of rainfall in july. And a lot of what people describe, like brown/yellow grass and vegetation, is normal part of the cycle in august in the south already.
The plains
Just came back from a bike tour through rural Bavaria, it's insane how dusty everything is - and that despite a short but intense rain today night. The farmers around here are pretty much screwed this season, and not just the crop farmers but the cattle farmers as well, as they have to buy lots of feed now that they'd only have to buy in winter.
Compared to, e.g. France, this week’s Bavaria looked refreshingly green. Not saying it’s great but it didn’t feel too dry (maybe it depends where specifically?). I didn’t know about the farmers’ struggles, though.
Yeah France got truly fucked over from what I've heard this year. We in Germany only caught the trail of the heatwaves and that already was enough for me, France got fried.
Who could have imagined that after the biggest wildfires registered in Germany, near Bavaria in 2025, millions of liters of water would quit the area?
Forget the farmers, they are concerning signs of large famines potentially coming in early 2027.
Not in the Western world, we got enough food to last us a good while (recent issues with the FDA and food recalls in the US notwithstanding). China is probably also going to be safe, they learned from Mao Zedong's failures and got stockpiles. Africa is going to get fed as long as the Ukrainian and Russian grain exports keep going.
But who is going to get screwed hard is a lot of the rest of Asia, thanks to the Iran War taking out a lot of fertilizer sources...
US corn and soybean crops are looking quite good. The corn harvest is projected to be the 2nd highest ever, the soybean harvest the best ever.
But at least we can talk to search engines now
This has nothing to do with AI really. It's a century of pumping out CO2, not 2 years. Maybe in the future... but you can't blame AI for this year.
I'm totally with you. The proliferation of AI, to me, is a collective choice of convenience over climate. Remember Covid? We can do something, we just won't.
The general population didn't exactly get a choice. AI is forced on us in many apps we were already using, solely because CxOs believe any mention of AI results in Line Goes Up.
The population didn't choose for convenience. The billionaires chose for additional profit.
Do we even want to? AI is in many ways amazing. We should obviously not be powering these data centres with gas, but... that's hardly unique to data centres. America voted for Trump well before AI used any power.
AI has quite a lot to do with current policy. I thought we were going to have carbon emissions peak with electric cars and the like and now suddenly everyone wants to build tens of GW of data centers powered by gas turbines. Although I'm not anti AI, I could back limiting data center build out to available green energy.
But we can blame AI for making it much worse in 5 years instead of making it less bad as everyone agreed to ~10 years ago (until an idiot ascended the throne)
Yea but I bet if you still had beavers in Europe you'd still have water.
The conservation status of the Eurasian Beaver is "least concern" and the population is increasing. Their distribution doesn't cover all of Europe, but there's certainly no shortage of them.
Funny. We have beavers in the Lobau in Vienna. But it's still dry. And yet we want to build a highway tunnel through it. Guess we just need more beavers. It's famous for it's naturism anyway.
We do still have beavers.
Uhm, no.
AI is another symptom, adding up with everything thats wrong.
And eat beef every day.
Who cares if a small burger pollutes more than commuting with a SUV.
I mean, it's just hard to care or do something, these things should be properly taxed, but there's no chance this would be popular.
But it feels we're powerless beyond minor examples we can set something everyday.
I think it often gets overlooked that effective carbon taxing would tax you right out of pretty much all modern convenience. Which would be the point, but people would fuckin revolt if it actually happened. Parent is complaining about 0.00000000001% of the damage done over the last 100 years.
A very gradual carbon tax that could've been introduced a couple of decades ago would've been more tolerable, and would've given the market and consumers more time to adapt.
Make each subsequent generation poorer and less populous.
Aren't we already doing that?
You could carbon tax it, and give people immediately back the equivalent of what they would lose (on average). Then they can keep their lifestyle - if they are truly diehard about it - or they can adopt a climate friendlier lifestyle and pocket the change.
That was exactly the plan in Germany when we finally had a progressive ("center-left") government coalition a couple of years ago. The plan was dragged out and eventually killed by the centrist/neoliberal coalition partner (FDP). It is extremely sad it went this way. Just think of the acceptance the people would've had: Germans might have called for higher CO2 taxes out of pure selfishness...
> effective carbon taxing would tax you right out of pretty much all modern convenience
What tax number do you have in mind for "effective"?
$100 per ton or maybe $200 per ton would have massive differences on industry but wouldn't prevent modern convenience at all.
What's the point if it doesn't change overconsumption?
If would probably reduce it some as a side effect.
But the two biggest points would be that every power plant and tons of factories stop emitting CO2, and the cost of vehicles shifts significantly in favor of electric.
> Who cares if a small burger pollutes more than commuting with a SUV.
Can you give some references basing that?
I would like to educate myself a bit (I'm a vegetarian myself)
I'm not vegetarian, albeit I de facto am 5 days out of 7, I try to stick to the (classical) mediterranean diet.
I wrote a comment here, you can of course fact check all I said and investigate more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49502880
> Who cares if a small burger pollutes more than commuting with a SUV.
This affirmation only holds up for factory farming / intensive animal husbandry.
Extensive pastoralism (aka free-ranging grazing animals) don't pollute per se, and if certain conditions are met (regarding population density), they can have positive effects on (already anthropicized) ecosystems by linking ecotopes.
The beef is not the source of this.
Ruminant meat is the best food there is for humans. (i eat daily as part of ketovore diet)
As you seem to be unaware:
1. a single cow produces 250 grams of methane per day. Methane is insanely more dangerous to the environment than CO2. A single adult cow pollutes in a day as much as a car driven for 165 miles. And that's only for emissions.
2. As a cow does not pollute just what it emits, you need to add the lifecycle: cows need to be fed. 80% of the food we humans grow goes to feed animals, not humans. Beef gets the lion share. So we consumes insane amounts of money, fertilizers, gas, just to feed cows, that pollute like crazy anyway. The amount of water cattle consume (from drinking to the one needed to grow food) is also extreme.
3. Cows produce a lot of waste, that ends up in rivers. Along fertilizers (mostly used to grow food for cattle anyway), it pollutes so much that waters around souther US are essentially dead.
4. By mass, beef alone, outmatches every single land animal on this planet, combined. You could put on a scale every single tiger, domestic dog, rabbit, squirrel, horse, hyppo, kangaroo, etc, etc, etc on the planet. They would weight less than the cows we grow.
4. Red meat is a category 1 carcinogenic. You should eat it rarely. I don't know where you get your nutritional facts, maybe from Joe Rogan?
In essence, you demonstrate fully my point: we humans don't want to know really what our impact on the planet is, and we're happily distracted into the "just buy an electric SUV" trolling.
> Red meat is a category 1 carcinogenic
It is not. There are no studies with simply meat. They count burgers and processed stuff. I literally do 90% carnivore so eat nothing processed. I only put salt on the meat.
> You could put on a scale every single tiger, domestic dog, rabbit, squirrel, horse, hyppo, kangaroo, etc, etc, etc on the planet.
Carnivore animals rarely are eaten. Horse/rabbit are low fat. Beef & lamb are the two most popular that are available nearly everywhere.
> I don't know where you get your nutritional facts
The best diet for mental health is animal based keto diet and carnivore diet (only red meat actually!, maybe some fish which is even more expensive often)
The diet is used for kids/adults with refractory epilepsy & serious mental disorders like schizophrenia/bipolar/eating disorders, diabetes (it's easy actually but there are many potential people for this).
--------
A short example: The only way to do vegan keto diet for epilepsy/schizophrenia/bipolar, is to eat protein powder, because there is no non-processed vegan food that has protein and is low carb.
It feels like speaking with a chatbot.
The focus of the discussion is topic is how dangerous is cattle farming to the planet. The answer is very, I gave you numbers, you're free to debunk them.
The topic of whether red meat is category 1 or 2 carcinogenic is less of an interest to this thread.
If you want to keep your diet, keep it, it doesn't change it has an insane impact on the planet in terms of greenhouse gases production and resource consumption. It kills the planet, whether you like it or not. It's unsustainable.
Beef can be raised carbon negative, it’s just more expensive. Maybe not scalable to 8 billion, I don’t know, but the man buying meat from a butcher buying from small farms raising grass fed cows is not the problem (it’s the corn that makes them fart, can’t digest as well)
Can you explain how raising an animal can be carbon negative?
It just doesn't seem to make sense to me. How can any mammal capture more carbon than they release?
Beef cannot be carbon negative, a single cow, will emit half a pound of methane per day, which is equivalent to 100 pounds of CO2.
There is no way around it.
You feel the same way buddy. We both have no ability to verify what we're saying and just choose who to listen to.
At least I eat healthy compared to you (easily verifiable when you have a health issue like epilepsy or diabetes).
I eat very well, mostly a classic mediterranean diet with lots of vegetables, lentils, etc, and I'm very healthy, thanks for the worry.
Yes, but you're just lucky, or still young, or aren't really measuring, or aren't optimizing.
Which is fine. But it's not nice to tax other people's medicine.
1. There's no evidence that carnivore diet has any long term benefit, as this 2026 article that reviews all of the available literature points out. In fact there's more evidence of the contrary.
> The Carnivore Diet may offer short-term health benefits but carries substantial risks of nutrient deficiencies, reduced intake of health-promoting phytochemicals, and the development of cardiovascular disease. At this time, long-term adherence to a CD cannot be recommended.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12845189
2. On the contrary, the mediterranean diet is one of the most studied and backed with more evidence behind its long term health benefits.
3. In any case the topic is climate change, which agriculture and cattle are very strongly responsible for as cattle farming produces both lots of greenhouses as well as being very resource intensive.
Which is fine. But don't pretend it to be otherwise with your social media diet.
It's not social media diet, it was invented to help children with epilepsy. The same diet works in other scenarios (diabetes 1 & 2, bipolar, schizophrenia, adhd are some examples).
> https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12845189
Again, it's very hard to form correct opinions when you're not in the trenches and just read stuff online.
A (complex) example: are bad blood lipids actually bad when you're very fit? This is being researched, might take some years. It's a complex topic, see "lean mass hyper responder" or "The cholesterol code" documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Z8bUb1P94 . (this is the cardiovascular angle)
> 2. On the contrary, the mediterranean diet is one of the most studied and backed with more evidence behind its long term health benefits.
Yet it doesn't work in any of the scenarios I said.
It's not a bad diet, but it's a random diet IMO, no thought went into it, or some evolutionary design (I live in a mediterranean country and ate it by default).
ps: the mediterranean should work on type 2 diabetes. But what happens if eating even some plain/simple/good carbs/sweets/fruits still triggers your brain so high-carb food remains an addiction in your head? The only solution might be to quit even the "good" carbs, so after some time, you have no triggers/urges for bad food and can live in peace.
Let's cut the chase: if you have medical conditions for which *a doctor* prescribes you a carnivore diet, referring to the original comment, you can be exempt from the carbon tax.
I disagree, I think red meat is healthy in all/most scenarios.
What should be taxed is high carb, sweets, ultra processed.
No, that's your opinion not backed by any science.
As I posted you a comprehensive review of carnivore diet literature there's no evidence of any long term benefit, in fact, there's evidence of the contrary.
You really sound like somebody who takes advice from Joe Rogan and Tik tok instead of going to a doctor.
Continue believing the narratives and data that back your preferences or your anecdotal experience I guess.
There is no literature on carnivore, it's just people who eat more meat while still eating "normal" food.
While carnivore is eating only meat.
Your paper just said that you may have issues with blood lipids and stuff, there's no real measurements if those blood levels end up as real issues.
Example:
> In contrast, a systematic review by Palmer (2025) [12] concluded that the long-term adverse effects of red and processed meat consumption—such as increased risks of type 2 diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension, inflammation, and atherosclerosis—clearly outweigh any potential benefits [12].
Putting diabetes & obesity in there is literally insane! One big issue on carnivore or keto is it's very hard to gain weight, because protein & fat are very fulfilling.
The whole study is always "eating more meat might do this", and never considering real carnivore where you eat nothing else. And even on cases on carnivore, most of the things were extrapolating from the transitory period (hint: staying 30 years carnivore and transitioning to mediterrean also has issues)
Again, it's very hard when you know no details whatsoever.
This is a mongodb moment for you my man (going by marketing), but it's ok, you just don't know better, and don't have the tools or time or ability or the necessity! to try anything else.
I don't think meat is a very serious cancer risk, but:
> They count burgers
Do you think grinding up a piece of cow changes whether it's carcinogenic?
No, ground meat is good, it's also cheap.
But in burgers you get bread, potatoes, seed oils, etc, which are all bad.
Example: its extremely hard & rare to become or remain fat in keto/carnivore.
Heme iron and its link to oxidative stress has been re-evaluated over time.
Vegetables contain non-heme iron (Fe 3+), which is reduced to (Fe 2+) by the body on demand for absorption. In contrast, heme iron is already in its reduced state (Fe 2+). Because of its high bioavailability excess heme iron reacts with peroxides to produce highly reactive free radicals (Fenton reaction).
You can keep on potatoes safely.
potatoes are high carb and no protein/fat, while foods should be high fat and low-to-medium protein (in keto diet that I do).
I was responding to the carcinogenic aspect of meat, not to you personal diet. You can ignore it ("It is not") but it doesn't make Fenton reaction less real.
The "longevity" aspect on both ends of the spectrum is very hard to really quantify to be honest.
On keto/carnivore I see immediate results (weeks) that span over multiple years.
I see many recycled misheard clichés here, starting by the "red meat is carcinogenic" mantra, that nobody serious has proven still, and that at this point is just pseudoscience.
> By mass, beef alone, outmatches every single land animal on this planet, combined
This is most probably false. To start you are repeating a claim that you didn't really understood. One problem is that you are confusing animals with mammals. Other is that you are confusing animals with vertebrates. In fact, we really don't have decent data on most invertebrates, and almost no reliable data in many vertebrates.
> Cows produce a lot of waste, that ends up in rivers
In the real life, most people use this on fields and agriculture, as crop fertilizers.
And the point 2 is missing a couple basic rules of ecology.
1) Big animals use energy more efficiently than small animals on the same category and,
2) Herbivores suffer a lot of pressure to feed themselves accurately. We can't just eat enough zucchini to replace beef, because we can't digest cellulose, because our small gut is not well adapted to this, and because most vegetables are basically water. The day is just too short.
I only listed vertebrated mammals.
80% of the food we humans grow goes to feed animals, not humans.
Do you have a source for this? Everything I can find shows less than half that.
It really is not but I'm glad it works for you today.
It doesn't work in all cases, no medicine does. But when it does it works better than meds (more effect, less side effects).
It has worked for 100 years in epilepsy. I dont see why it has to stop working.
This is an extraordinary claim and it sounds very interesting, do you have any evidence for it?
1. It has the most nutrients that are absorb-able by the body.
2. You can live really well by only eating red meat (& fat). Think eating lamb everyday.
3. It is cheap enough. Some type of wild fish might be better but fish is expensive.
4. It can help diabetes & mental illnesses (IMO biggest healthcare costs).
5. You need to eat low carb & high fat for most of the benefits though.
You need to eat the fat, the fat is actually more important, you need a ratio of 2-1 (2 grams of fat for every gram of protein+carb) for mental issues.
1. Between them, diabetes is very easy. It should heal T2D, and make T1D glucose more stable so you need less insulin. When you've been T2D for more than 7 years becomes harder, might need more time or it's more complex. See https://www.virtahealth.com/ for diabetes
2. Epilepsy depends on what type you have, can fully heal or not work at all, because they have different mechanisms. Has been working for 100 years. https://charliefoundation.org/ for epilepsy
3. Mental issues the same as epilepsy, might work like a miracle, might not work at all, and everything in the middle, depending on the issue & root of the problem. Works surprisingly well in Bipolar Mania. https://www.metabolicmind.org/ for mental issues
This is a nice documentary that covers all cases above ^ including rising complications: Cholesterol Code Movie for complex topics/cases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Z8bUb1P94.
Complications that arise in the documentary above ^ are a bit rare in general population.
The timing of this article is a bit unfortunate. It's been raining here (France) every day for the past week, sometimes heavily.
That's been long overdue. I really doubt a few days of rain would make anyone in France forget the rest of this summer.
I don't know, the last few years have taught me that humans have exceedingly short memories
We'll see whether the heatwaves and drought have been forgotten or not in May...
It was a good amount of rain, but most of it just went straight to rivers as soil is really dry (think if try to get a dry sponge wet again, soil behave in a similar way). It helps but if there are no new rain episodes, water tables will stay low, soil dry in depth and most of the country in a complicated situation regarding water.
We’ve engineered so that rain water goes into rivers and out to sea.
Whereas we really need to slow it down so that it permeates the ground
Forests
Yes, we certainly need to re-wood uplands in the UK, but we also need to make rivers meander, reintroduce marshes and let place live the Somerset levels flood
"Rain every day" is at best millimeters to tens of millimeters of water (depending on the rain).
You need significantly more to properly saturate the earth, especially after a drought.
Yeah they still have restrictions in my area but I don't know how to find out the real situation. I am close to the Seine and I've seen it quite high the other day, but that's probably not a good indication of the general state.
The article is talking primarily about Eastern Europe. It's also not inconsistent to say that it's raining during a drought. That's why we distinguish between weather and climate.
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I said nothing about the drought. My comment was on timing, which affects the optics of those who read it. Imagine going on vacation for 2 months, as they do, then coming back and reading this article while seeing heavy rain outside. With all the fake news you can see how some folks would be skeptical.
I read this article, all of it. I'm still trying to square the circle of how a report about the tribulations of fish-farming on the Danube align with the broader concept of the "Desertification in Europe". To me, it seems like a bs, but credible, AI article about fish-farming challenges on the Danube which met some sloppy editor who simply stuck a more click-baity headline on it - one that was completely unrelated to the content.
Meanwhile the cheapest way to travel are budget airlines.
And cars.
The real costs are externalized.
I live in Portugal, near Lisbon (not in Lisbon, as it has become impossible to afford for locals, even tech workers). Many times it would be cheaper for me to travel by plane to a city like London, than the gas+tolls cost to visit my family that live less than 1h away by car. It takes ~2h30 minimum by public transport.
I find it pretty ridiculous how the carbon taxing is extremely heavy on cars, but pretty much non-existing for air travel here. Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy, depletes the housing stock, and removes local businesses and culture, but the tourists are always prioritized by government.
> Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy
Portugal is heavily dependent on tourism: it's 10% of the GDP. In the EU not even France is that high: Spain is higher but Portugal's economy definitely depends on tourism.
When stats says: "10% is tourism, 40% is services", if you remove the 10% linked to tourism, the services economy does crash too. And so does the 20% that is "construction": a part of that is second effects from tourism.
You can't just say: "We'll just remove 10% of our GDP and we'll be fine". Firstly even at "only" 10% you'd be totally screwed and then anyway the actual number would be much higher.
Here in the Czech Republic it is also very noticeable - rivers are running noticeably low and I've seen smaller streams dry out completely. Many trees ore getting orange or shedding leaves.
Also quite interesting sometimes what plants don't have issue with the dryness - often quite exotic ones originally from the Mediterranean or from Asia.
Everything south of Poland is Southern Europe now.
I must depend on the country because the trend is that some countries, the UK for instance, are receiving more rain as climate warms, but it is becoming more seasonal. This year winter was extremely wet then indeed summer has been a record dry, so not sure how the year will look like overall (plus it's a strong El Niño year).
I expect future summers to be drier and future winters to be wetter. Our gardens are going to look very different. Already I see more people (myself included) rewilding their gardens. I've had a lot more wildlife as a result, but may be due to hotter weather as well.
In the park behind my house a large Goat Willow tree has just mostly toppled over. Completely dry summer, then a week of rain has caused the tree to just collapse.
Yes, we really need big investment in infrastructure. At the moment parks and gardens don't have automatic watering as we expect rain to do its job, and we suffer from hosepipe bans because infrastructure to store water is not fit for purpose.
I just came back to CA from the UK, and the two places looked surprisingly alike: yellow fields everywhere
Ok, summer has been a record dry, as said... not the first time it looks like that but perhaps the longest and driest.
https://archive.is/xXHBw
"But it was hotter in 1976"
The above is a serious threat though. What do you do, in a democracy, with people who are dangerously uninformed?
This reminds me of the story of Noah in Bible school.
The huge swath of people are incentivized to pretend nothing is wrong, and the vast majority can’t do anything about it so also pretend nothing is wrong.
Its a case of technology outpacing our evolution.
Everyone is living in this world where we still depend on each other to survive, but connected through technology that makes it seem like we don't. The problems that people face are magically solved behind the scenes.
As such, nobody really has a sense of community or belonging, so nobody really thinks past the virtue signaling aspects of how to preserve, protect, and grow that community.
And the people that do are forced to inconvenience themselves while they see others that don't care.
where i live in central america, there's normally rain almost every day from may to September. We've had rain perhaps twice in the past 2+ months. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country (and a mountain range), they have had lots of flooding. Crops lost in both cases.
https://archive.ph/xXHBw
Atmospheric injections of Sulphur is going to be the only answer.
oh, yes. Anything but stopping the extraction, trade or combustion of fossil fuels. Even if the workarounds have unforeseen consequences.
Let's say a magical enviro-fascist cabal of superhumans appears tomorrow and are somehow able to completely dismantle and ban all sources of energy that emit large amounts of CO2 while also somehow providing replacement quantities of non-emitting alternatives (e.g. wind, solar, and nuclear).
In this environment we will still need to geoengineer the planet for as long as the carbon we have already burned remains in the atmosphere. We are already way outside the pre-industrial baseline. And carbon capture is very energy-intensive, so no matter how much of our solar energy abundance we put into it, we are going to be geoengineering for decades.
If it’s only decades, we’ve been very, very lucky.
It's too late for that. We had to do it 20 years ago. Plus, you and I have no power over fossil fuel extraction, but we do have the individual ability to put sulphur in the upper atmosphere (with effort). Game theory rules everything.
Sulfur or similar may be more politically viable due to the tradgedy-of-the-commons. They can be enacted without as much consensus, maybe.
In Neal Stephenson's novel Termination Shock it was enacted with zero consensus. I think that there are private bodies working on it right now, too.
I could see countries drastically affected by heat doing it. If they experience mass death, or even in the case of island countries complete elimination, what threat would make them stop?
Any solution relying on collective sacrifice is unrealistic IMO. I believe in geoingineering because it's better compatible with how economy works. Either that or we discover a magic abundant non-polluting energy source, but I woldn't rely on that
Oh, yes, geoengineering, because nothing can go wrong …
Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.
A lot can go wrong, but a long is going wrong already. I think putting effort in trying to do it as safely as possible is more productive than trying to convince nations to become poorer voluntary. Alternative energy is important too, but so far it rather complements than replaces fossil fuel.
But this is one of the classic blunders! "Things are going wrong, so we have to do something! This is something, so we have to do it!"
Well, no, we have to do something that will help. Doing something that makes things worse isn't the answer, and the worse things are, the less we can afford to do so.
"This might help, but also might really mess things up" is not the answer - not in politics, not in economics, and not in climate change.
But I agree with one part of your post. Persuading nations to become poorer voluntarily is not a viable strategy.
We're already doing it and making progress. It's not instant and we still have delayed consequences to deal with, so short-term fixes also make sense.
You can use different metrics for progress, but it looks like world oil consumption has nearly doubled since 2000
It is not collective sacrifice. The war on drugs was imposed worldwide by the American élites and it consisted on banning the production, trade and use of many drugs.
Oil is a drug for the world’s economies. If you remove it, the economy plummets with billions of starving people because everything is grown, produced or transported using fossil fuels
> It is not collective sacrifice.
> If you remove it, the economy plummets with billions of starving people
Sounds like quite a sacrifice to me.
Don't we already have that source in the form or modern solar panels backed by battery storage ?
Nobody is sacrificing anything.
Framing it as such is doing propaganda's work.
How do you do that without completely messing up the supply chains that keep us fed and alive for the next 6 months? The wealthiest people (who also happen to be ones that are a bit more sheltered from the climatic crisis) will still be able to afford food. Billions of poor people would just starve without petrochemical fertilizers and the diesel required for industrial farming and transportation of food. We could've had a smooth transition a few decades ago. Now it's super late and the choice is short term catastrophe vs long term catastrophe. Do you know how much fossil fuels it takes to build and maintain a wind farm or an electric truck? How much petroleum coke is burnt making the cement to build the towers that make walkable cities possible?
The alternative to fossil fuels and the climate crisis is basically an incredibly deadly and uncomfortable step out of the industrialized world. No one is making that decision. It's a fancy trolley problem where the amount of people on the tracks has 10 figures on both sides and blurry timelines.
Just the increase of gas prices due to the iran war is going to cause some fucked up harvests in africa, south america and asia. The poorest farmers aren't able to afford fertilizers. I have a coworker who has ties in Guinea-bissau. The farmers there are basically getting spitroasted by the combination of climate changed caused droughts messing up their cash crops followed by increased oil prices due to wars they have nothing to do with increasing the price of their agricultural inputs. Your simplistic view on fossil fuels will not keep them alive long enough to see the even worst effects of climate change that are coming. If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.
> If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.
Also, if it weren’t so profitable.
Even if we hit carbon neutral tomorrow it's too late.
Thecnosolusionism to the rescue, let's create new problems...
As described in Edward Tenners classic book "Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences", 1996 (oldie but goldie)
We could mire ourselves in nirvana paralysis instead, insisting only problem-free solutions be adopted.
I don't like acid rain, please find something else
We really need to be pursuing Ocean Iron Fertilization https://www.whoi.edu/ocean-learning-hub/ocean-topics/climate... . We need to both drastically reduce our release of GHG emissions and work to pull CO2 out of the air. This is the only method that seems remotely plausible. I agree that I don't like the sulphur seeding because it doesn't actually remove C02, and higher concentrations of CO2 are toxic to humans.
This is all solvable with abundance. We could put together nuclear power with solar and desalination and carbon removal.
Let’s start acting more like a kardishev II civilization.
We're not Kardashev II. We're not even Kardashev I. And nuclear and solar are meaningless if we don't reduce fossil fuel use, which we currently aren't doing (quite the opposite, actually). And carbon removal is a red herring.
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I blame fossil fuel companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
They're the ones who lied about climate change. They also funded anti-nuclear propaganda.
Where did the greens hold power?
Irrelevant.
Here in Italy for example they never held power, but they did a huge lobbying and advertising campaign just AFTER Chernobyl that lead to a referendum whose result essentially forbids nuclear power in Italy.
Holding power is irrelevant
Do you seriously think "the greens" have more power than fossil fuel companies?
The Christian-Democrats signed the end of nuclear power in Germany, not the Greens. Please stop this mindless scapegoating. And electricity is only 30% of our global carbon emissions.
I am not talking about Germany. The world does not revolve around Germany (despite Germany’s never-desisted ambitions).
And 30% is a huge chunk of the emissions
I brought up Germany because it is the example that comes to mind. The greens never held any power anywhere. Anti-nuclear laws have all been passed by right-wing (or ""center"") parties, pushed by fossil fuel lobbies.
You're very misguided in trying to place the blame of the climate crisis entirely on the only ecologists in politics.
Until very recently, all major right-wing parties were insisting that climate change wasn't real and that we should "drill, baby, drill" or burn "clan coal". Do you think they share a part of the blame or is that on the Greens too?
And lastly, building nuclear plants is all well and good, but it is meaningless if it's only added capacity. Same with solar. We have to close coal and oil plants, or all of this is useless. You should start advocating for that instead.
And Angela Merkel held onto the phase-out of nuclear power plants all the way until her final term ending in december 2020.
Some nice (well, awful) before/after aerial photos here:
Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312413
And a great photo gallery here:
Europe's drought reveals medieval buildings, Nazi warships, mammoth remains
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49215432
Just a friendly reminder that Fortune has been owned since 2018 by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a member of the Chearavanont family that controls the CP Group conglomerate. CP Group created Siam Land Flying in 1991 as its in-house flight department for executives. It later added charter (Executive Wings) and air-ambulance services and still operates King Air 350 and Hawker jets.
These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
>These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
Would you rather than they kill stories relating to climate change and pretend everything's fine instead? If not, what's the actual point of bringing that factoid up? Sure, rich people flying in private jets might be bad, but I'm not sure why it deserves extra condemnation just because they happen to own a publication that's reporting on the effects of climate change.
I simply found it comical that they probably make quite a bit of money rolling these articles out while the owners fly around in their private jet fleet. Most people probably don't know that unless someone told them - which is exactly what I just did. Clearly it touched some nerves.
I’m sorry but the gotcha here is that.. the owner is in a family that also owns an air charter business with all of four small private jets and an air-ambulance business?
Give me a break, what does this have anything to do with the content of the article.
> feelings on climate change
That. You can't reach these people with reason, the whole debate, the wholse society and entire law has to abide to their feelings.
paywall
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I read it more as an uncompleted copy-editor’s note, more like (todo: insert dollar value here), than a banal reference.
That does not really make sense. Millions of euros is also millions of dollars. It's not an exact number, why would they have a currency conversion.
Because, when mentioning a monetary value in a US publication, it's always common to show the value in USD next to it.
Well, million euro’s is currently about 1,158,300.00 United States Dollars, so maybe the copy editor looked at the number and didn’t want to offend the sensibilities of their readers .. anyway, the point is, I don’t think this (parentheses) indicates a dumbing down of anything, other than maybe a sleepy editor who didn’t catch its distraction ..
I like to rant about "journalists" just copy-pasting Apple's claims that it's recycling program retrieved "more than 2204lb of gold". So is it no more than 2205lb? And why the specific number? Oh is it because in their "environmental report", they just got round numbers in metric (e.g. here 1000kg) and converted them to imperial? (There were about 10 of those numbers, and they all have the same issue). And the concept of significant figures was missed by the school curriculum of everyone involved?
It's just a monetary conversion and it's in their style guides. How much is "millions of euros" in dollars? Answer: "millions of dollars".
If they'd said "it's estimated to cost 1.5 million euros", they'd have added "(1.7 million dollars)". But since they didn't have a specific value, they just used the units.
I imagine their style guide says non-dollar currency amounts always need to have a dollar conversion. There are lots of Americans who won’t know the current USD-EUR ratio off the top of their heads. It has fluctuated over the years and used to be significantly further from parity, and we essentially never buy goods priced in euros here.
I think you misread. It's not "euros is dollars", it's "millions of euros is millions of dollars", simply saying that conversion rate is close enough to 1:1 that no new number is needed
This is what Europeans are worried about, while thousands of you die from heat warnings?
I don't know what Europeans are worried about. You'd have to ask them. Who's dying from "heat warnings"? Are you trying to make my point about rampant idiocy in my country?
If you were assuming that I'm European for some dumb reason, then rest assured I'm not worried about this passing thought on the writing style of a publication I never read.
Thank you for your concern, but I will be alright.
The article is shining a light on a serious, potentially devastating situation in Europe. You, due to ignorance or misunderstanding, point out that Americans are supposedly stupid because millions of dollars are roughly millions of euros. But the underlying problem is that it is the Europeans that are worried the most about climate change, and are the ones that have refused to implement mitigating strategies that would help overcome the challenge. They lack energy resources, the will to take action, and rely on blaming others for their predicament. But it is stupid Americans with their energy, air conditioning, and water reservoirs.
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Once again, please don't do this here.
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The thing that really worries me is if harvests start failing.
Not quite failing in the UK, but it’s hitting crop quality and yields hard, such that in many cases farmers will end up with a net loss.
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Is Mensa score correlated with intelligence?
Yes. Genuinely smart people don't feel the need to get tested.
Why?
Are you saying that one can't be "genuinely" intelligent AND one or more of the following:
1) curious about their IQ 2) enjoy timed puzzles 3) want to be part of the Mensa community 4) have a friendly IQ competition with friends 5) be an insecure teenager and take the test for validation
Does "genuine" intelligence preclude all of the above?
The comment I was replying to implied that being unafraid of global warming was a sign of low IQ. I am not afraid, and my IQ is relatively high. So I shared that.
Did you not read the parent before it was deleted?
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The 30,000 preventable yearly deaths already remind us of that.
Reality is much of Northern Europe hasn’t needed air conditioning until about 5 years ago
Throughput the summer my phone regular tells me the temperature is 15°C above the average for the time of year
The 2003 European heatwave had a death toll of 70,000. That should have been a warning for us to get AC.
And for the next 20 years been basically unneeded.
How much AC does Alaska have?
This is not a good argument. AC is needed every summer for some years now for much of northern europe, the only question is how many days per year. The last heatwave was not in 2003.
You do not need AC in every house necessarily. You need ACs in public buildings and in places that matter for the most vulnerable population. You need at least places this population can go during the hottest part of the day.
Solutions are known in places where heatwaves are common place, but somehow northern europe takes time to realise that they are actually solvable.
And how does that solve the topic of this article: desertification?
That was the point of my snark, that you completely missed.
But please, tell us how we are supposed to AC the fields, the stables, the forests, the rivers...
It doesn't, this does not mean society should not care about people who are most vulnerable during heatwaves. ACs are obviously no solution to desertification, if anything at mass scale they may even increase temps in dense urban environments.
I reply to different comment than yours anyway, so you cannot interpret my comment as answering at yours.
Yearly - since when?
What's your next beef after that? Should we put cows and sheep under AC? Forests and fields under AC? Iceland should start installing AC? The Magreb countries should live under the surface of the Earth like mole people? Why don't people relocate to the Antarctic, those idiots?
Come on, where they will find a way to express their American exceptionalism these days? Let them have that one.
Who is liable for the deaths caused by extreme weather patterns? Is anyone?
Liability for things like this was traditionally resolved by warfare.
All of us, to the degree that our carbon footprint is above 2 tons a year?
Legally? Almost certainly no one. Ethically? The corporate executives who deliberately covered up evidence of global warming, starting back in the 70s.[1]
1. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
Including executives that still refuse to price in the environmental externalities of their business practices.
Why would they do that? That would make their shareholders angry and give their competitors an edge. (No /s)
And don't forget the politicians and media personalities who knowingly or negligently denied that there was even a problem.
They're winning. They have billions of dollars and very cushy lives.
And since we've all known about this for 30+ years, is it still their fault, or is it ours?
What should I have done about it for the past 30 years?
Voted for the environmental candidate every time.
Already did, we still ended up here, clearly that solution didn't work
Persuade others to vote for them?
Already did, we still ended up here, clearly that solution didn't work
How many did you convince? Did you convince 2s, 10s, 100s or 1000s?
Live a life of voluntary poverty?
And if I had done that, how would the climate be today?
Nothing. My point was simply that blaming people who did something 40-50 years ago is pretty silly.
It's "their" fault, at least according to Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, who is one of "them". His view is that if a specific group, of about 1000 powerful people, chose to address climate change, it would be fixed.
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...
That’s laughable. The number 1 cause of climate change is spread out living. The 0.1+ acre lot with a detached single family home that results in enormous distances required for all the mass to travel.
There is no way people would have or will accept living in Honk Kong style dense living to save the future planet. Hell, they don’t even accept driving smaller vehicles much less changing their whole lifestyle.
Nobody is liable.
How do we get Earth back to something resembling the steady state we know can work long term?
1. Electrify almost everything that can reasonably be electrified.
Move quickly to EVs, and replace anything that can practically become electric with an electric version. Self driving & fleet utilization will push transportation cost per mile lower than ever before.
For the power grid, data centers, and other large 24/7 consumers: solar + wind + battery storage. Deep geothermal also looks interesting.
Build lots of desalination capacity.
Maybe even planes can eventually be electrified. Imagine shorter hops with battery swaps at sea (aircraft carrier sorts of things). Too crazy?
2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.
Cargo ships.
Long haul aviation, if the electric plane idea really is impractical.
For those, we can turn energy + CO2 into liquid fuels, creating something closer to a closed carbon cycle.
3. Remove excess CO2.
CO2 persists in the climate system for 200+ years, so getting emissions to zero does not necessarily return atmospheric CO2 to previous levels.
We will need to remove enough to be net negative & over time bring it back down to the CO2 levels we know worked long term.
That takes energy. Fortunately, solar + wind + storage are cheap enough now & getting cheaper.
4. Find places for all that solar.
Deserts are obvious.
Floating solar could potentially contribute.
Agricultural land is interesting too. Agrivoltaics can sometimes provide useful shading while still allowing crops to grow.
5. Deal with the transition period.
Once we are making a serious transition toward decarbonization and carbon removal, it may make sense to investigate temporary solar geoengineering, such as injecting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, to partially counteract warming while atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are being brought down.
The purpose would be to stop the feedback loops such as more forest fires, thawing permafrost, and loss of ice and other reflective surfaces.
Obviously geoengineering has major risks and should not substitute for reducing emissions. But as a temporary bridge, it seems like something that deserves serious research.
We can do all this.
None of it requires magic. We already have, or can plausibly engineer, most of the pieces.
This all sounds good, but the Government of one of the world's primary super powers (The United States) is currently unwilling to participate in fighting climate change, so any plan seems DOA without a major policy change on that front.
Agreed, and also Moscow sees this as a huge positive change. More ice-free ports, more arable land, plus avoiding action means they get to keep selling their major export.
Europe is now really stuck between two huge enemies, regarding climate. We can do a lot to prepare, we just need to wake tf up.
Our Union gives us many advantages. We just need to use it before our enemies destroy it.
Yep, unfortunately the only fix would be a world government. But that will never happen. So everyone's going to reach for a bigger slice of pie at any expense no matter what happens, no matter how clear the evidence is. (I'm not necessarily saying a world government is a good idea, but it's the only way to solve climate change that I can see)
I don’t entirely blame the government. They are only doing what they were elected to do.
> 2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.
What about wars? Unlikely anyone would completely electrify their armies anytime soon, and that blocks even starting the transition in the rest of economy. Some drones are electric, but you still need to move heavy stuff and many people in denied environments, and stationary electric grids are still more vulnerable than liquid fuels.
If we move to an electric future then the number of cargo ships should decrease
Something like 40% of all shipping is moving hydrocarbons around the globe
We've known what to do for a couple of decades now. But when the world's largest economy is run by a madman who just cares about lining his and his buddies pockets instead of the future of humanity, it's hard to make progress.
0. stop eating meat?
Agreed that would help, but even if everyone were to eat, say, half the amount of meat they would normally eat that would be huge.
Non-issue
No....because it would make no difference.
https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g?si=dAqbVb9JV_uzLRl1
That video is quite biased. Just tell your clanker to critique it. It will point out that those numbers are quite cherry picked, and leaving out important details. E.g. the „GHG would reduce by only 2.6%“ study assumes that all crop production stays the same, which doesn’t make any sense.
I don't think it's biased. I think it makes all the sense in the world.
They have exactly one guy as the expert in this video and he contributes all the facts. That’s bias.
So someone presenting the facts can be biased. Prove his facts are wrong and then I can agree.
Why no mention of increasing biomass of earth? It’s the living systems that buffer the chemical and energetic changes of the climate, and whether or not we can take back the carbon we’ve aerosolized, we can repair ecosystems and slow down changes in weather.
Aren't there way more factors than just energy, industry and transportation?
Agriculture is a huge pollutant, so we should take steps towards alternatives that don't require large scale animal farming.
Fashion is another gigantic pollutant, where fast fashion generates and discards more clothes than it is feasible to wear.
etc.
Silly puny human. It's too late. The planet will grow back and flourish when you are all dead and gone.
6. Jail arsonists and harden the laws to protect natural resources from greed and sabotage.
this tech bro utopia ALWAYS ignores relatively basic solutions. A great example is reliable, regular, and efficient public transit. We don't need self driving cars and all that mumbo jumbo. A bloody train, tram or a bus would solve most of these problems.
This! I live in Western Europe and have never owned a car. I mostly travel by public transport or bike. I rent a car about once a year, but could do without that as well. Before people tell me that I am an exception: I know other people like me in various other places in Europe! It is possible and actually good for your body to have to move, at least to the train station, carrying groceries etc.
>This! I live in Western Europe and have never owned a car.
I'm also in Western Europe and almost always needed a car for my commutes to work, unless I was willing to accept a 1-2+ h public transport commute each way, because tech employers where I live love locating their offices in the sticks where land is cheap because they're broke and cheap, and the city hasn't significantly updated public transport infrastructure in ~30 years, but the population and size of the metro area grew by like 3x.
>Before people tell me that I am an exception: I know other people like me in various other places in Europe!
The thing is, Western Europe is not a country, but a collection of various countries with various economies, cities, and infrastructure, and various people with various housing and career locations, some close and well connected to public transport, some not at all, and from my circle of acquaintances, yes, you are the exception, as most people I know get to work by car.
So, you can't possibly throw such blanket statement over everyone in Western Europe, unless you're massively obtuse or living in a bubble without realizing it.
Like, I'm sure most people in Munich, Paris, London, Madrid, Vienna, etc can easily get to work on the excellent public transport they have, but I don't live there and don't have such amazing public transport, so then car it is for us.
>It is possible and actually good for your body to have to move, at least to the train station, carrying groceries etc.
Bruh, I only need a car just to get to work in reasonable time, not to move or carry groceries.
I get my groceries from the supermarkets 5-10 minute walking distance to my place, but I don't have the luxury of employment jobs within the same distance, so car it is, unless I want to be wasting my life switching connections between slow and infrequent trams, busses and trains which often suffer delays.
And regarding the "body movement" as a pro for public transport, I'd rather have more free time to move in gym and to the workouts my body condition needs, rather than waste my time walking and sitting/standing on public transport, as that's not an actual workout but a waste of time, as all you can do is browse HN on the phone with the hand that's not grabbing the bar. Driving is also a waste of time, but at least it saves me almost 1 hour each way which is massive time save that I can use how I like.
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It was in a much steadier state for hundreds of thousands of years before the 20th century. Don't be obtuse.
It goes through periods of slow change and periods of rapid change, with regional variations. That will never change. The climate cannot be controlled precisely by humans. To think otherwise is just a comforting lie people tell themselves.
The vast majority of people concerned about climate change think there is some paradise we could have kept if only we hadn't been so "climate-sinful". It's uncomfortable to contemplate that the world is changing uncontrollably around you.
There has been no period of "rapid change" that has even come close to matching the speed of climate change in the last couple hundred years.
Wow dude. I'll just assume you genuinely don't understand this... So the TL;DR is that except for events like supervolcanoes and dinosaur-killing asteroids, no it does not go through periods of change that are this rapid.
You might be misled because you can find graphs of global average temperate that swing wildly by like 10C-20C. But look at the X axis, it's in hundreds of millions of years. Stretch it out to 100k years and it will look perfectly flat.
And yes there is some climate paradise we could have kept it we hadn't emitted so much CO2. The one where it isn't 50C in Baghdad and Europe isn't a dust bowl. Could we have kept it for 100 million years? Maybe not! But nobody is saying that. We could have kept it for 100k years, instead of like 100.
It's comforting to imagine it isn't a problem - both from an "I'm smarter than everyone else" perspective and "I don't have to worry about it", but you're lying to yourself. I dunno lots of people are happy to lie to themselves (at least 50% of religious people I reckon) but I can't do it.
Complete nonsense. Even climate chance won't change the amount of rainfall we get over the course of the year. In fact, it will most likely be wetter due to it.
But it will become more uneven, with droughts followed by torrential rains and floods. We simply need to adapt by creating underground water basins that store torrential rainfall preventing floods and also serve as buffers for when the drought comes.
I do believe places like Spain could see more desertification, though. But they were at the brink for centuries in any case, especially inland.
I’ve been to quite a few deserts that get the occasional seasonal torrential rain.
They still remain deserts nine to ten months out of twelve.
The water saturates the soil, can’t percolate to underground aquifers where it could otherwise be stored, and runs into (ephemeral) rivers, washing away some of whatever is left of the soil with it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if two places could have roughly the same yearly amount of precipitation yet look completely different depending on how the rainfalls are distributed over time.
A torrential rain once a year doesn't really make much difference. There's no life on Earth that can survive on one downpour for a year.
You seem remarkably confident about vast, complex topics.
Of course it does, Hungary is turning into a desert. Quite easy to see if you live here. And it's only the beginning.
No fear of desertification while we pump the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses.
"The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000" https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024GEcoC..4902791C/abstra...
"Earth observation data shows that most European urban areas are becoming greener" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642...
Europe is caught in a dilemma: tourism, air travel, and city hopping are its economic lifeblood that keeps the continent running, but these also cause the greatest damage to the environment.
Since they can't fix the real problem are trying to go "green" in counterproductive ways that make things worse: blowing up nuclear plants or taxing cow fart.
EU currently emits only 5% of the globally emitted greenhouse gases.
You can cut all the city hopping you want and it won't make the slightest difference.
More like 6%, roughly in line with its population share (5.4%). Not sure if that includes air travel, international air travel often isn't included in national statistics. https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
Whenever I see those statistics, I always find them very weird. Many of our products are made in China, but those are counted towards China's global emission, not Europe's. It also applies to the need of power generation for delocalized industry or importing food. A country handling a lot of industry will have a very high per-capita emission, but the people living there may actually have very low individual emissions.
They aren't, most emission statistics are counting imported emissions.
China's figure aren't that great on their own, with exportation deducted.
EDGAR assigns emissions geographically to the country where the emitting activity occurs. (so in this case no)
It's actually 12%, not 6%.
EDIT: 12% is all of Europe. This thread is about the EU.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Europe, yes, EU, no. Alde had 5% for EU, I quoted a source for 6% for the EU.
Yes true.
EDIT:
Europe as a whole emits 12%.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
If it's not significant, can I have 5% of your net worth?
If the EU mandated that products imported are made in a carbon neutral fashion, then importers of products will pay attention. Unfortunately it means higher prices, and the governments will get voted out of office by people voting for the populists selling the electoral promise of "Make Prices Low Again!"...
You won’t mind higher prices? Are you rich? Because most of us Europeans certainly aren’t.
I like low prices, but I'm not looking forward to the chaos (political, social, what else) and deaths which I'm guessing will affect me within in the next 10 years.
The chaos is already here for us, the majority who are suffering the higher prices. Why do you think we're voting for the "extremist" parties? It's not because of "Russian propaganda", it's because life for the majority of us, normal Europeans, has become quite dreadful, economically and not only.
Duh and duh...
You're commenting on a comments thread about the possible desertification of Europe, a conversation we're having in the context of the record hot summer.
The extremist parties offer scapegoats and solutions for the unthinking ("The brown people! Remigration! The elite, except we're getting funded by the elite and we'll protect them and fuck you!"), and sadly there's too many stupid people who can't be spoonfed any concept of "think deeper" that like buying those...
By that logic shouldn't petrol be a lot cheaper than it is in Europe?
The EU is responsible for a lot more than that once you factor in emissions in other countries producing goods bought by people and businesses in EU countries.
Those are already included in most statistics
Not in the Edgar linked above
Tourism is 10% of the economy, most of it is domestic or internal to Europe; most of it doesn't involve air travel or city hopping.
Note that this 10% is heavily skewed toward the richest, biggest cities.
In bigger cities, it might be closer to 20-30% of their economy.
Take that away, and it would have a cascading effect through entire countries.
Big cities are not big because of tourism.
Unless you count the historical city center of Venice as a big city I doubt you'd get many big cities getting even close to those numbers
I can't easily/quickly find some numbers but if we want to accept, with a grain of salt, Gemini research on this even in Venice (I think it counts Mestre as well) it's ~15% and that's the highest it found.
Doesn't appear to be true, it's < 10% for the biggest cities (based on cursory research). Rome was 5% pre COVID; less now.
https://assets-global.website-files.com/6329bc97af73223b5759...
10% of an economy is a lot, you don’t need to lose much of that to hit the entire sector very hard.
Droughts are scary and they suck badly. California went through one for 10+ years. However, don’t go off the deep end and think that it’s the “new normal” like Californians did at one point.
All it took was one big rainfall a few years ago, and California has been out of drought ever since then. The reservoirs have been above historic norms and at the end of this summer, it’s only “abnormally dry”. Compare that to a few years ago where the entire state was mostly in an exceptional level of drought.
Droughts and heat waves suck and many people are suffering but nature goes in cycles and it will get better.
People are not scared of individual droughts. They are scared of the patterns. Here in Slovakia, the last real winter with proper snow depths we had was in 2018, if I remember correctly. There is pretty much no snow anymore. All the water comes in form of heavy rainfall, causing massive floods, and the water goes straight to the sea. Nature depends on the water accumulating on the mountains during the winter, and that just doesn't seem to happen, at least in this part of Europe.
Please check aquifer levels and let us know if they're back to historic norms.
It's actually not that simple.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2526041123
Yeah in this case the cycle might be 5000 years long once Milankovich cools things down again.