France experiencing worst drought on record | Hacker News Reader

France experiencing worst drought on record

bbc.co.uk

278 pointsksec358 comments

I'll be honest, this heatwave has been an eye opener for me. I've never been a climate skeptic, but I suppose I have been somewhat skeptical towards the more panicked claims regarding its impact.

As someone who lives in the south of England you become used to seeing green grass all year round. But this summer seeing all the greenery turn yellow and die over the span of a few weeks has been a much needed realisation that climate really matters. I guess I knew it before intellectually, but the idea that crops would fail from climate change just wasn't something that I had an understanding of instinctively. Now I do. It's terrifying how dead everything looks just from a few weeks of hot weather, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62432844

This is precisely why climate change policy is so difficult to enact. Folks don’t understand the urgency until they experience it themselves, and by that point it’s gotten really bad.

There’s an analogy with tech debt or old software here somewhere.

This is one our of biggest flaws - Being reactive instead of proactive. It doesn't always work.

Agree, and a big part of the problem is that Politicians will not be proactive and spend money for no apparent visible return. If they're wasting money they're unlikely to get re-elected. It's the same as asking IT accountants to invest in mirroring systems that appear never to fail - until they do...

Exactly. For a simple example, look at the criticism about Lithuania’s LNG terminal[1] a few years ago, built to reduce their dependency on Russian gas.

I think they are pretty happy about that terminal now.

[1] https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1111346/five-years-...

In a german podcast a guy once said: "You won't get them with melting Icebergs and Polarbears. They're too far away".

It's true, nobody* cares about icebergs and other things they've never seen before. Just wait when the drought kicks in and more and more Problems arise. I hope then people start acting themselves instead of shouting into the social platform nirvana.

I feel like we need movies/media that helps things feel more real, personal, negative, close to home.

Not movies that _focus_ and sensationalize climate disasters like The Day After Tomorrow. But movies that exist in the near future where really visceral elements of how climate change played out 10-20 years exist as a backdrop to whatever story is being told (but feel grounded in reality).

e.g. water rationing, abandoned towns/cities, authoritarian responses to increased immigration/migration, food shortages, etc...

> e.g. water rationing, abandoned towns/cities, authoritarian responses to increased immigration/migration, food shortages, etc...

More like Mad Max?

Ya the original is a good example but that's probably still too apocalyptic, one can watch that and scoff saying "it'd never get that bad".

Stuff that's more focused on the immediate, painful changes but still in line of sight from our current reality. Children of Men did a pretty good job pulling some subtle "here's how society has changed for the worse" world building in (obviously all based on it's underlying premise that no more children are being born)

> More like Mad Max?

More like California, Arizona, Utah, South Africa, etc.?

Children of Men feels like a very realistic dystopia of the UK five years from now.

Children of Men doesn't specify the cause for the infertility, I think? Only some handwavy "there were some chemicals", IIRC? At least I'm pretty certain it doesn't attribute anything to climate change.

Russell T Davies's Years & Years feels like a plausible near future. Bananas are extinct, baking systems failing, refugee crises.

I'd say 'Don't Look Up', but on second thought, the venn diagram of climate change denialists and people who don't realize the movie's a satire about climate change is almost a circle.

Polar bears don't work on me, because the provided polar bear population numbers are higher than previous years!

The question for me, is why do people believe that there is a problem? Is it that you just have to state polar bears are in trouble? Does anyone check the claims of the climate alarmists?

You should take a look at Al Gore's film again, and see how well that has aged.

Climate alarmists need to answer the claim that they are just boys who cry wolf, imo.

I don’t agree that the data support your claim. This link seems like a good summary: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-27/fact-check-gina-rineh...

> "people start acting themselves "

There are only 3 'individual' actions avaliable that have any real impact: Voting, Stop eating meat, and pitchforks / civil unrest.

I predict we will reach phase 3 very suddenly and then there will be all these talking head on TV wondering 'oh my god, how did this happen?'.

What about saving energy and not wasting water?

Being a vegan protester is clearly the only way to have any impact

if you live in an apartment, don't own a car and you main use of water is shower.

There are no real energy savings avaliable without cutting back on hygene

Of these, voting has the only real impact, because no action an individual can take (safe for suicide) can make their life carbon neutral. That needs policy.

Nobody does anything until there are bodies on the ground.

Bodies that look like their own, too often.

I actually wonder if humans lack a crucial adaptive advantage if they do not intuitively understand how systems work. But then it occurs to me that some ancient philosophies and religions emphasised the need to be in tune with the surrounding world.

How would understanding systems have been significantly adaptive for humans before a few thousand years ago? I agree with you that humans generally lack this capability. We also lack the ability to understand exponential growth, which I think is partially a cause of our lack of ability to comprehend systems.

My personal theory on this is that it comes from the fact that our sensory systems operate on a logarithmic response curve [0]. Note, for instance, how the decibel scale for measuring sound intensity is a logarithmic scale. Because our sensory systems respond logarithmically, that means an exponential increase in stimulus feels linear, at least until the point where the stimulus is damaging or so intense as to be uncomfortable. The end result is that we think "it's not so bad" until it's really bad.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law

I find your perspective interesting, but have the feeling that you are not thinking in systems (!). The sensory systems are perceptual systems, but they are subsystems of a larger "cognitive" system, and we cannot be sure that it exhibits the same logarithmic response behavior.

We don't understand complex systems well at all.

I think the more defective part of humans is our near complete inability for long-term thinking and planning, especially collective long-term thinking and planning. Just look at our daily lives and jobs. When are long-term plans every truly engaged and acted upon? Almost none. There is much too much self-induced noise in society and the economy, and there's a hyper-focus on short-term results and concerns.

I am thinking more of an automatic ability to see how things are related. Chinese language(s) ↔ Taoism, in the context of a holistic approach to worldview [0]. I know I am exaggerating, but maybe some meditative training could help in this regard?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/04iht-6sncult.1.10...

I think you hit the nail on the head.

The Bible says: “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” —Jeremiah 10:23.

According to this, humans were not created to rule themselves.

We do a poor job of governing other people and solving global problems.

To me, it's just clear at this point that this is our core problem.

Source: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102019005#h=15:0-16:0

> The Bible says: “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” —Jeremiah 10:23.

It doesn't matter what the bible says. You can thump it all you want. It won't reduce climate change, excuse inaction, or absolve religious fatalism.

And I will never respect your policy for you lack the self-awareness required to acknowledge its risks, and they are enormous, like stalin era population displacement high.

I won't go on Nazino

I think it's with everything that doesn't have an immediate, graspable impact. Nobody would smoke if cigarettes killed you after a few months with a 50% chance. If they increase the likelihood of a stroke or other complications decades down the line, it's much easier to brush it off, tell yourself you're more of a Helmut Schmidt kind of person. Or just think it's a worthy tradeoff for the benefits you get from smoking today.

Same thing with child labor regarding smartphones, clothes, you name it. It's far away. If you had to buy it right at the factory at a counter where you could see the working conditions, it would have a vastly different impact on you.

And I'm not claiming to be smarter or superior to the average Joe here. This pattern strikes all the time, for everyone.

It is all about tangibility. That is why we install car reverse parking sensors. If people had glasses that see air pollution, they would revolt. If people had access to a very accurate live and high-res computer simulation of climate-change, or anything, they would take it more seriously. People are spoiled with regard to the level of accuracy and tangibility they require to be convinced.

> If people had glasses that see air pollution, they would revolt.

I've ruined a couple of people's perspectives by sharing the the reason LA sunsets are so beautiful is because of the pollution particulate.

Heh, a small oil film on the water is beautiful as well. Or if chemicals give water a nice green or red shade. There are bright sides to everything.

> It is all about tangibility.

What if every weather app showed, next to actual temperature, what the temperature is modelled to be if climate change had been avoided (kept CO2 ppm to 1950s levels, say)?

So totally not a climate skeptic, but part of the reason for this is because models are often wrong, and the more complex the system, the more likely it is to be off I think.

So to be fair to humans, skepticism is often rational, in the sense that science of complex systems can be off.

The part I have not totally understood is that there are good reasons to be more energy efficient and ecologically sensitive even in the absence of climate change per se.

I think the thousands of scientists who have been studying this phenomenon for the last 40 years have a much better picture than just about every skeptic that has muddied the waters with their hasty rhetoric.

If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging. Many predictions made in early IPCCC reports were in many cases too lenient. Feedback systems, impacts, and rate of warming have been happening on track or faster than reported. I suspect many knew but they didn’t want to be labelled as alarmists.

> If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging

And then new's outlets take that cautious wording and turn it into extremely alarming headlines. It's exhausting.

And yet the top of this thread begins with the claim that it's hard to alarm people (my words) appropriately enough to act. Ironic.

Yes humans individually are absolutely horrible at long term thinking, it’s just part of our nature.

I wonder if we’re evolving to get better at that, if ever so slightly

Assume the models are wrong: Why is that reason to believe that things will be better than the model predicts instead of worse?

Smoking is probably a good analogy. In all ways. Because it took decades before we reduced the impact once we knew the dangers. And centuries before we even realized the dangers.

And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.

But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.

Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.

And even now that the dangers are widely and indisputably known we still have a hard time passing regulations to curtail the behavior because of addiction and entrenched profit motives.

I sometimes wonder if we released civilisation game where climate change is a harsh unforgiving price for using coal and oil, would it change anything? Is it too late for such a product?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_VI:_Gathering_Sto...

It was also in civ2 as a base feature.

In all the civ games it's always been manageable relatively easily

It's been a big feature in the later games. But it's been there since the start. Civ 1 had a simple mechanism where highly industrialized cities would create polluted tiles. You could clean up the polluted tiles with settlers. But if your settlers didn't clean it up quickly enough, there would be consequences. Plains tiles would turn into desert. Coastal tiles would turn into swamps.

I also apportion a fair amount of blame to the media.

There is a major 'boy who cried wolf' effect--because literally everything is maximally exaggerated and sensationalized to optimize engagement and revenue, people are numbed to the constant alarmism and there is no way to get through to them and convince them that this time the crisis is a real one that they can't afford to ignore.

I think this is the case for many of the catastrophic scenarios that a human/humans can face. Think about people smoking, or eating really really poorly, or driving drunk. And the worst thing is that in many cases people will revert to the old behavior provided they survive.

I wonder whether frogs have a tale about how humans behave on a warming up planet.

No, the reason is that people pretend that their favourite freedom-restricting policy is “against climate change”.

Ban meet. Ban non-private flights. Turn off hot water. Ban nuclear. Ban bitcoin. Ban aircon.

All fake, authoritarian “solutions”.

The real solution is simple: tax fossil fuels. That’s literally all that you need to do to solve climate change? And also the only thing you can do.

Tax fossil fuels? When I fill my car with benzine at 2 euro/liter would you like to guess how much of that is taxes? Same for the gas heating in my apartment. And the electricity that powers my PC. The cost of the actual fuel or energy is only a fraction of the price I pay, the rest is taxes (plain old taxes, or taxes masquerading as operating / distribution costs).

I didn't read tomp's post as saying that taxes weren't already being assessed. I'm pretty sure tomp was arguing that the taxes need to be _higher_.

I live in the country, and a lot of farmers and even workers who have to commute would probably be hit quite hard by any spikes in fuel prices. We had already felt it when the prices were going up recently. It doesn't help that a lot of jobs that can be remote still aernt or still don't even give the option to be. We also aernt feasibly able to switch to electric at this point, as I can't tell you any nearby gas stations that allow for electric car charging.

It doesn't help that everyone's constantly being lied to by sensationalized hyperbolic news from the mainstream media.

We've been conditioned to assume everything's bullshit until it's objective reality on display before our own eyes.

What part of the south do you live? I'm in the south-east and I'd estimate most of the summers I've experienced the grass in our parks has turned yellow. It doesn't seem unusual at all to me. And by the way, just because the grass is yellow, does not mean it's dead. It usually recovers quickly as soon as we get rain.

I’m south east too, the last few years the lawn has gone yellow - but this year seems … extra crispy?

I don’t remember the garden at my parents going yellow and crispy 20 years ago.

The “covid heatwave” still had water in some streams, but this year they look positively parched.

There’s a large bucket in my garden in the shade, this year it is dry - it usually has water in it

I grew up here and in nearly 40 years I don’t remember it being this different

It was pretty much like this in 1976 (yes, I'm that old). We've had localised droughts too. 2003 sticks in my mind - Faversham held the record for just under 100F, and the London Jubilee line had everyone clustered round the windows, and no-one holding the rails as they were too hot (the trains stand outside at the depot near West Ham). My part of the world had lots of crispy grass, burning fields, and dried up streams and ponds, pretty much like now.

I suppose this is probably the second significant drought I've experienced in SE England. It's something like 3 months of sunshine and no rain. Given our summers are usually wet and mild, careful what you wish for...

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...

According to Wikipedia, the peak temperature I'm England in 1976 was 35.9C. In 2022 it was 40.3C. Maybe it was as dry in 1976, but 2022 has been hotter.

I did say drought twice rather than heatwave. It seems 1976 is still drier than 2022. At the moment that is.

I have noticed this too. The grass usually turns somewhat yellow but this year has been next level.

It's weird. The hosepipe ban has literally only just happened, and for a while they used to be almost yearly. I've definitely seen the park grass go this colour before - it certainly isn't the first time.

I'm not disagreeing it's hot, and it's much more consistently hot than I remember from previous summers. However the GP suggests impact is noticeably different to usual, and i'm not sure that resonates so well.

I wonder if we're better at conserving the water we have (more reservoirs, less leaks, etc.), which avoided those frequent hosepipe bans. Until now that is.

Like so many large-scale processes, things change "slowly, then all at once" with the climate.

During the slow change, things aren't immediately obvious, but can be reversed easily.

Once the rate of change starts speeding up, it becomes pretty clear what's happening, but it's far more difficult to prevent the change to whatever future stable state the system winds up in.

What is terrifying to me is that I have been sharing this planet with people who are not willing to change anything to their mode of life and won't even vote for parties that actually care and want to do something about the issue. Because those are also the parties that are for a better redistribution and allocation of resources. And I know the rich would rather rant all day long in their newspaper mouthpieces about communist dictatorship rather than being taxed/renouncing to take the plane for all their trips. The idea that I am going to die by starvation because someone liked to play golf and prefers driving around in an air conditioned metal boxes in concerete and tar hell is killing me.

I have know about climate change since I was a teenager some twenty years ago. How some people may not have had the memo about impending doom is beyond me.

Part of the problem, likely a major part, is the first world has to go and stop the emerging world from emerging like they did. Europeans who clear-cut europe to industrialize into a first world society are having to go tell Brazilians "You must stop cutting down the Amazon!", preventing them from industrializing.

Basically: Rich people telling poor people that they cannot do the things that make people rich.

Or rich people can pay for poor people to industrialize in a climate-friendly manner. It's going to cost a lot, but the alternative is worse.

Part of the Kyoto Treaty did exactly this. Seems to have been a bit of a mess for various reasons, China and USA opted out, the money from EU got diverted by a recession.

I think overall, carbon fees and getting tech to cost parity via local subsidies, then ensuring corporations/kleptocrats don't conspire in developing nations may work better.

Correct. Because to do so threatens humanity and many other species. The solution then is to share the existing wealth and build better rather than go hands off, right?

We can simultaneously support development without killing all future generations.

I agree with you so much. Britain was basically stripped clear of wood and concerted recovery only began after WW2 because at some point there was a serious risk that there won't be any timber supply.

> their mode of life and won't even vote for parties that actually care and want to do something about the issue.

The other issue is that boomer-style green parties in the EU are completely counterproductive as far as limiting CO2 emissions. Both EELV in France and the greens in Germany are responsible for raising our electrical carbon emissions from closing nuclear plants, when we have no practical solutions for using solar/wind with storage today (it’s fairly obvious to me now that I live in California, where the sun shines almost all the time). I really hope some of them are secretly paid by the oil industry because that’s basically what they have caused us to do, burn more oil and gas.

It wasn't the greens.

While you can indeed make an argument about shutting down nuclear power plants while there are coal power plants in operations, the green party was part of the government which targetted the mid-20ies for an end of nuclear energy in Germany - many power plants would have had to be shut down of age anyway. But they also set energy politics onto a trajectory which would have meant to mostly run on renewables by now. It was the Merkel government which first prolonged nuclear power plant run times and then cut it down quicker than the initial plans after Fukushima. All of that could be rationally argued, but not that they mostly killed the deployment of renewables. If they had pushed that properly, we still would be fine. Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that.

> they also set energy politics onto a trajectory which would have meant to mostly run on renewables by now

The idea that we can run not just our current demand on “renewables”, but peak demand after electrifying everything from cars to stovetops, was and remains an absolute fantasy.

No, absolutely not, it is entirely doable. By the way: stovetops are already almost exclusively electric in Germany, and electrifying all cars would mean about 10% more electricity consumption. Doing so would add about 2 TWh of storage capacity in the cars alone, which would be very helpful for the grid.

> No, absolutely not, it is entirely doable.

No, it’s clearly not, and we’ve wasted decades chasing the utopian impossibility of energy with zero-downside — all while continuing to dump pollution into the atmosphere.

> electrifying all cars would mean about 10% more electricity consumption

Not at peak load.

> Doing so would add about 2 TWh of storage capacity in the cars alone, which would be very helpful for the grid.

Come again?

You want people to donate the limited lifecycle of their very expensive car batteries to provide inefficient backup power to the grid?

This is why the OP said greens hold significant responsibility for the mess we’re in. This kind of magical thinking has been a gift to the fossil fuel industry.

> Not at peak load.

So, what is your alternative? Nuclear plants for that peak load? Just burning gasoline and diesel forever? Please explain.

Yes, it clearly is.

I don't know what you mean by "peak load", but it is 10% more electricity consumed. Electric cars rather help than load the grid, as their charging can be easily controlled to help balance the grid.

And yes, a small part of the battery capacity won't be "donated" but rather rented to the grid in exchange for much lower prices. VW is about to roll out a corresponding project, owners can expect much cheaper charging up to even free charging.

And no it isn't the Greens who are feeding the fossil fuel industry but those who hold back renewables and the electrification of transportation.

> Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that.

I live in California, we have 59% renewables. The last 31% is exponentially harder as you actually need electricity sources that are reliable. Nuclear is reliable / suitable for base loads, wind/solar aren't. There are zero grid that use solar/wind as base load today.

I am pretty sure both EELV or the FI, if they were in power would actually not target Nuclear (even though they say they would) but would probably just stop investing in it (which may be a problem). No head of state is going to shoot itself in the foot by removing such a profitable energy whose costs have already been paid for. I think it's just signalling on their part. The alternative are the rich people parties (I count the far right in, even though they pretend they work for the people when they are effectively in power they attack workers rights among other nasty things) that absolutely won't shake any preestablished interests status quo.

> No head of state is going to shoot itself in the foot by removing such a profitable energy whose costs have already been paid for.

Both the French and German governments did just that in the last 10 years. The Belgian one as well, though they seem to have second thoughts now, it’s just a shame that it is not a decision you can reverse.

> I think it's just signalling on their part.

I don’t think so. Besides, it is a very dangerous idea to rely on. There are several examples in the world in the last 5 years or so of governments implementing absolutely stupid policies for ideological reasons. That’s how one end up with Trump or Brexit, and later whine that one did not know that they were going to do what they told they’d do.

Often, it turns out that the face-eating leopards actually do eat faces.

Those parties you mention are often just as unserious as our current crop of "leaders", which can be seen from the lack of support for nuclear and the lack of acknowledgement that to complete the green transition we need MORE fossil fuels in the short term, not less. What do they think is going to power the factories/infrastructure that make all the solar/wind/battery/nuclear stuff at the scales required? Where do they think plastic comes from?

We also need a lot more mining. We need more lithium, more cobalt, more copper, more aluminum, among others. It's not a matter of "just pay for it", the material inputs for a GLOBAL green transition do not presently exist at any price without more mining. But mines are environmentally damaging and require fossil fuels to get started, so those same parties often ignore the need. Hell the good people of Maine recently voted down a measure to import clean hydroelectric power from Quebec because they didn't want to destroy a small stretch of forest to build the transmission lines. That bullshit FernGully flavor of environmentalism has to go extinct

If we're going to be serious about de-carbonizing the economy, then we need to purge the various environmental factions of their nature-worshiping ideologies and focus on the dry, economic, technological, sometimes nuclear, localized-nature-destroying methods that will actually do it.

Not that i have any faith in political parties, but i disagree with your analysis entirely. Green capitalism is not gonna get us out of this dire situation. For the reasons you point out, techno-utopist solutionism is actually making the situation a lot worse (extraction/refinement of more minerals, more overall industrial activity to achieve the transition, extra hardware we don't know how to recycle).

The more we try to make it look like industrial society can be green, the more everyone is going to consume and that's not sustainable in the long run. We need actual degrowth now, if not yesterday. And i'm not saying we global northerners should moralize countries like Brazil or India about their industrial practices: no, we need to develop our own self-sustenance for food, housing, and medicine in the here and now... and stop pillaging/exploiting the 3rd world as our industrial backyard where all chemical atrocious pollution is permitted.

Nuclear is part of the tech pipe dream that the oligarchy is promising us, of an ever abundance of free/clean energy. But the reality on the ground, from mining sites to storage facilities, looks very different. And who cares where your electricity comes from if even the most mundane devices come with electronics and batteries? Can't i buy a fucking car without having at least a 100 micro-controllers inside?!

If you want to save the environment, make it a criminal offense to sell a product without having at least minimum 50y warranty/service. That's how you change things: the planet doesn't care if your energy has more or less carbon if you keep on producing disposable phones that's gonna be broken/obsolete two years from now. We have to stop this madness. The same goes with the housing industry and many other industries, believe it or not: the Romans and the Aztecs built low-tech structures that will outlive us all, and multi-billion dollars corporations can't even build stuff that stays in decent shape for more than 10 years (or rather, they won't for financial reasons).

So fine, be angry all you want at people like me who promote actual environmentalism. Maybe we're too much "nature-worshipping" to be heard by the psychopaths in power who already ruined everything. I personally have zero faith in the system and structures that have taken us so far, and have made sure that every attempt to diverge from the worst possible timeline has been sabotaged. I come from France, where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk by secret services, and the COP21 mass demonstrations were all canceled using the indecent pretext of so-called "terrorist" attacks and State of Emergency... The people in power will never help us save the planet: we have to make them.

> Nuclear is part of the tech pipe dream that the oligarchy is promising us, of an ever abundance of free/clean energy. But the reality on the ground, from mining sites to storage facilities, looks very different.

This could not be further from the truth. Nuclear power has the lowest rate of deaths per unit of energy. Uranium mining does have environmental impact, but it's so energy dense that very little of it has to be mined.

If "actual environmentalism" means rejecting industrialized society then we're doomed. The Romans built a stable society, sure. But it was a society with a huge portion of enslaved people, and little opportunity outside of the elite. If I have to choose between climate change and reverting to an agrarian preindustrial society I'll pick climate change without hesitation.

Degrowth? Luddite movements have a pretty abysmal history, mostly because they tend to produce comparatively awful living conditions for those who follow them. Those low-tech structures you prize consumed a lot of forests to heat, all with low energy density, high carbon-emission, high cost of labor wood. Never mind all the other downsides of pre-industrial society.

I agree we should refocus the economy on more durable goods and housing, that's part of the solution. I'm not sure where your criticism of Nuclear is coming from though. It has the smallest mining footprint, all the nuclear waste dumps in the world could fit in an incredibly small area compared to waste products from other power sources. Small modular reactor designs basically solve the waste issue by being self-contained for their entire lifetimes. Nuclear is also incredibly safe statistically speaking, and produces no pollution in its power generation.

Your last paragraph is telling as well. For those who think like you there's a social-revolution element to combating climate change. You see things as "already ruined", and have declared the "psychopaths in power" the absolute enemy standing in the way of "saving the planet". So you have all the resentful psychological license you need to burn the house down, with the rest of us in it, just to stick it to the psychopaths, and that's your primary objective.

I'd rather save the house, with everyone. I'd like the psychopaths gone as much as anyone, but if you think de-industrializing will get rid of them, you haven't read much history.

For me what was eye-opening was the amount of digging in and denial of it.

I thought with it literally right there in your face that the denialists would come to some sense. No instead we got, "you can tell you weren't around in 1976, it was worse then", which it wasn't and a basic check would clearly show that's a lie. "Oh the climate is always changing", not at this rate. The usual 'snowflake' ad hominem attack thrown in too. I don't even understand what even is the point of this head in sand strategy.

It is a subliminal response to protect oneself from guilt and fear of change / death.

We will not survive if we wait to convince the unconvincable. We must take actions that will anger some. When it comes to climate change, the use of force is vitally necessary and wholly justified.

Absolutely. At this point, I'd consider use of force on this matter to be self defence.

Oh no baby got a boo boo. Call the waaaaaaambulance.

You don't understand what you're asking for.

> I don't even understand what even is the point of this head in sand strategy.

It varies.

A lot of the time when you see it happen, the other side isn't exactly being polite either. Its a battle of "snowflake" vs "moron". In those cases, theres much more at stake admitting your wrong, with much more permenance. You're essentially admitting that not only were your theories on climate change wrong, but that the oppositions view on you is correct, you are a moron. Neither side means this, of course, but thats how it ends up being.

In more polite arguments, denial could down to fear of change, fear of being wrong (essentially the same as the less polite argument, but with the loser thinking that of themselves), or perhaps even just simply not being convinced for whatever reason

There are people denying climate change in this thread. I don't think psychological analysis of their comments or views accomplishes anything.

I'd hardly call "if you're rude to people, they won't want to accept your arguments" a psychological analysis. I'm not even sure why it accomplishes nothing.

> what even is the point

I have yet to hear anybody actually describe what they propose to do to cool down the planet and (supposedly) make it sustainable. I have heard a lot of people insist that we need to raise taxes and redistribute wealth to social justice causes in the name of combatting climate change, though.

You haven't heard people say we should burn less fossil fuel, and use more solar, wind and nuclear energy? That people should have better insulated homes? That we should fly less and eat less meat? That we should plant more trees? That large corporations exploiting externalities should be better regulated?

If that's the case, you might want to read "sustainable energy without the hot air" [1] which is available free online. It's slightly dated with regards to the cost of solar panels, but a good introduction to the area IMHO.

[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/

Be warned that is way out of date now.

> I have yet to hear anybody actually describe what they propose to do to cool down the planet and (supposedly) make it sustainable.

Plenty of people did just that. You can start with the IPCC reports. A lot of think tanks also published reports focused on specific countries. Not knowing is not an excuse, particularly when so much noise has been made on the subject and so much information is available.

> I have heard a lot of people insist that we need to raise taxes and redistribute wealth to social justice causes in the name of combatting climate change, though.

We (the rest of the world) by and large do not care about your culture wars. The fact that saving the goddamn climate we rely on is somehow controversial is maddening. You collectively sound like children arguing about who started and who’s the meanest.

I believe that you believe that we're in imminent danger of extinction. I'm still a bit skeptical, in part because of the number of people in actual power who say they believe same thing, but then propose to "fix it" by raising taxes and then not doing anything climate related with all that new tax revenue.

You can believe governments are inept while still believing that climate change poses a direct threat. It's not an either/or situation.

We're in imminent danger not of extinction, but of our planet becoming a much less nice place to live, also with the upheaval (social unrest, migration, wars) that is likely to come with that.

> I believe that you believe that we're in imminent danger of extinction.

I do not believe that. I believe that other species are at risk of extinction, or indeed extinct already, but I think we have enough of a technological and intellectual advantage to avoid extinction. Probably not casualties in the hundred of millions, though.

> I'm still a bit skeptical, in part because of the number of people in actual power who say they believe same thing, but then propose to "fix it" by raising taxes and then not doing anything climate related with all that new tax revenue.

“I am doubtful because politicians do not take it seriously” is not really sound. What your experience shows (rightly, in my opinion) is that a lot of politicians are opportunists with flexible principles, not that the situation is not serious.

> I'm still a bit skeptical, in part because of the number of people in actual power who say they believe same thing

And if Roosevelt sat around waiting for all the unconvinceable to be convinced, and didn't enact lendlease, maybe UK and USSR would have fallen and US would face the Axis alone.

Many Americans felt the same way about Hitler and Japan while the Holocaust was happening. It wasn't untill Perl harbour that the penny dropped.

> We (the rest of the world) by and large do not care about your culture wars. The fact that saving the goddamn climate we rely on is somehow controversial is maddening. You collectively sound like children arguing about who started and who’s the meanest.

Trust me, it gets annoying to a lot of us over here too.

There's good reason for that, of course.

Poor people are more affected by and less able to adapt to climate change.

Poor people increasing their wealth, are doing so by starting to burn fossil fuels. If you don't give an alternative, they're going to scale up their fossil fuel burning as fast as they can

I think it's because climate change is used as a formal issue disguising the actual desire of acquiring power. It's being used to legitimize power acquisition and force and is often full of things that won't actually make a difference.

This is a circular argument - anyone proposing policy must aquire power to enact that policy.

Right, but the formal issue of solving climate change is wrapped in passion and other meaningless notions (boarding on religious) from the point of view of real actions that we can take that are practical and achievable under the actual conditions of society and the world.

Those are never put in front because that’s not the point. The entire point is to use an issue to acquire power and there’s no reason to believe that power will be used the way you think it will. Especially since it is never described precisely how the problem will be solved. Just “green energy”.

The real issue isn’t how we solve climate change. It’s who gets to control energy policy - tax credits and subsidies and those nice things. And who can mix in their pet issues whine they’re at it. Suddenly solving climate change becomes climate justice because it’s maybe a better formal issue to obtain power with. It’s still bullshit.

Look at the latest bill and it’s climate change parts. It essentially gives rich car owners a bigger refund on buying rich people cars. Go figure - the powerful have managed to serve their own interests and the plebs who put them there cheer them on.

Good point, let's do nothing different and drill more.

I was there in '76. In the UK. I was in school. I remember the water rationing, the half-days at school to conserve water, the longest and hottest summer in my memory. The past 20 years in Southern California have not dulled how blisteringly hot that summer of '76 was. And yet this year, I'm seeing numbers that would make my memories of '76 seem like a mild summer day.

The Guardian had some pictures which really showed it (including one of Greenwich park) - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2022/aug/08/...

That picture is haunting. I don’t think I have ever seen this lawn anything but vibrant green.

The bad thing is is that it’s too late. From this point forward it’s about adapting where we can.

This is the downside of climate change deniers and the inability of humans to recognize existential threats. Climate change and global warming was never about it just getting hot and that’s it. It is about extreme weather popping up more and more frequently.

In my location, we had a weird winter. The snowfall was above average but it only snowed on like three or four separate days. This summer has seen a heat wave and serious drought. When it rains, again only one like three days all summer, it’s for like 10 minutes. We actually just had a major storm, and it rained violently for about 5-10 minutes. That does little to get the ground soaked again. Even the ferns are dying, which are typically robust.

> The bad thing is is that it’s too late.

Too late for what exactly? Majority of climate scientists agree the situation is dire, but there are many actions that can be taken to reduce the short-term and long-term impact, via both adaptation and reducing carbon emissions.

When climate change was far away enough that we could have solved it with incremental changes, skeptics in the media mocked and denied it.

Now things have got bad enough that we would need more radical changes to keep to 1.5-2 degrees. But radical changes are just the kind of thing that swing voters don’t like, so we probably won’t do them.

I doubt we will come together and implement radical economic changes or geo-engineering solutions. More likely in my opinion is every country for itself, the rise of new, authoritarian governments and 3+ degrees of heating. I would take some kind of corporate tech bro dystopia.

>Majority of climate scientists agree the situation is dire, but there are many actions that can be taken to reduce the short-term and long-term impact, via both adaptation and reducing carbon emissions.

Am I the only one thinking that it reminds me of a bunch of priests in ancient time who claim to speak to the gods and tell us what we shall do? I'm no climate denier but I hate how everything is framed to induce panic and fear.

Well, there were books and papers warning about the societal, emotional, economic, and environmental impacts of a technocratic society as far back as 50-100 years ago. Don't you think that a little fear and panic, at this point, are justified?

And aren't there enough religious people inducing fear and panic into society still today?

I once heard that you will not meet a more dejected and depressed person than a climate scientist. Imagine warning about things for literally decades or your entire life, being ignored the entire time, and only to be asked in the present "why didn't you warn us?!" or "what's going on?!".

Fear is justified because we honestly don't know about some of these things. Dynamic systems with bifurcations, chaotic behavior, and tipping points are difficult to understand even when they're laid out in front of you, much less when you're trying to figure out what the dynamic system is (in the case of the climate and environment, although we do know a lot). Does it even make sense to continually push the boundaries to see what we can get away with? Do humans realize that this Earth was not made for them and that there were times that humans could not be supported by the Earth's environment? In our daily lives, we stress certain behavior of planning and restraint, but we are incapable of doing so collectively.

Literally the simplest thing in the world to do is to restore lawns and grass areas with native plants (wildflowers, bushes, trees, etc.), and yet no one is doing it. In fact, we're still destroying habitat. And then people write articles like "where are the bees and butterflies?".

I believe earth will survive anyway, and if we die in the process so be it. Either we find a way to be in harmony with Earth (not consuming more than what it can generate), or we die. Currently we are in a path where the majority of us are going to die, that is self regulation from Earth.

Restoring lawns with native plants is just like sacrificing your elder child to appease Gods, you thing it will help where in fact we just need to go back to the a sustainable equilibrium (which noone knows precisely).

It's never too late to stop making things worse. And much worse awaits us if we don't change.

Just to clarify, I don't believe it's too late to make changes, and I am trying to do my part. But it's too late for these changes to prevent what we're currently and about to go through. The climate and environment are massive, dynamic systems.

It's just dangerous. For example, native plants are absolutely imperative. There is very little movement for this. All of my neighbors are cutting down trees, replacing it with lawns that do nothing but sit there (and for this summer die or take on disproportionate amounts of water) and also plant non-native plants that also require a lot of water.

I planted native plants, but the new plantings are struggling due to the severe drought we are going through (with not much end in sight). It's clear that the native plants that are doing well are helping, because the pollinator activity is insane around them, but it's not enough. One household out of a thousand isn't going to help. This is the systematic nature of things that show this can't be solved by flipping a switch. We need drastic measures, and I just do not see us enacting solutions until things become very serious.

I think many underestimate just how short-term humans are. It's never too late until it is.

To be fair, the UK has a "grass turns yellow" style drought once every 10 years

2003: https://historicdroughts.ceh.ac.uk/content/hot-summer-2003 2012: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17533235

Of course, the heat records and the drought are worse in 2022 than either of those.

And grass turning yellow doesn't necessarily mean that it's dead. It can regrow from the roots when conditions improve. Assuming that the drought is not too long.

> the idea that crops would fail from climate change

There was a massive drought in England about 10 years back, where farmers had to change the types of crops back then to accommodate for the drought, which was then proceeded by a large flooding. Why would say this time is different from 2012? Especially given that there had been talks (and sometimes actual) hosepipe ban every single year since.

> Why would say this time is different from 2012?

There are records from 2012 and 2003. even 1962 (60 years referenced)

From the title "worst drought on record"

> From the title "worst drought on record"

Great, I am not talking about France though, I am talking about England. Unless England now is part of France, which last time I checked, is definitely not the case!

> It's terrifying how dead everything looks just from a few weeks of hot weather

But think of the value created for shareholders! https://www.offshore-technology.com/news/oil-majors-report-r...

This is a real problem; whereever there's an unowned resource, such as the atmosphere, there's a profit to be made by looting it or dumping externalities into it, and as long as people are profiting from this it's difficult to get them to care.

This includes pensioners, by the way, not just a narrow billionaire class. Almost everyone with a private pension ("401k" in US speak) is probably a beneficiary of this unless they've taken steps to avoid that.

Agreed, quarterly earnings reports will be the death of us, at the present rate the Apocalypse will roughly coincide with record profits.

This never made sense to me as an argument. Climate change is driven by transportation, electricity, and energy primarily. We burned fossil fuels because until recently there was no better alternatives. Sure, had we known in the 50s and 60s about the potential harms of ICEs we might have build out cities pretty differently and transportation would be a smaller slice but we'd still need electricity, heating, and industrial goods. Maybe we could have built more Nuclear and electrified more things, but Nuclear was in decline before the science on climate change shaped up.

Moreover, trying to drive quarterly earnings is what is now causing wind to displace coal.

They key term is 'externalization' and in this case a more interesting form called 'temporal externalization'. The idea is that in order to achieve short term financial gain the downsides are spread either in space (to the rest of current society or some faraway place) or in time (by moving the bill to the next generation).

Climate change is the posterchild for both of these. Other examples are pollution, resource depletion etc.

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-6...

Well its wise to keep it in perspective. Found this page with a list of historic droughts.

https://historicdroughts.ceh.ac.uk/content/standpipe-drought...

Here in Germany we were used to pretty much "English" weather, especially in the middle regions where I grew up. A drought is something which happened once or twice in my youth. There was a bad one in 2003 and since 2015 we had a lot of too dry years, the ground never recovering from them, especially the years 2018 and 2019. As a consequence, many forests were damaged and fell to some bugs, so a lot of regions are deforested already.

This year I was in shock when in the quarter I am living in, about half of the trees already lost their leaves, looking like late October.

The 2003 heat wave claimed over 90,000 lives in Europe. It was nearly if not just as bad as this one. We didn’t then have quite the sensationalized global news apparatus that we do today, though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave

Your point being?

It may well be counterproductive to normalize drawing conclusions from singular events.

We don't know whether this particular drought is due to the human induced climate change. It's great if it will finally convince those who are in denial about climate change, but in some sense they are being convinced by what is likely to be a random event.

In other words: the fundamental issue is that there's a very large mass of people who are resistant to rational argument.

So the climate change proponents get "lucky" this time as they get a single but painful event in their life and they can go to deniers and say "do you see now how bad climate change is?" but this is a single event. For all we know, there may have been many similar ones 500 (or 1000) years ago before detailed meteorological records were kept.

What if this drought is followed by 5 subsequent years of completely normal weather? Would we want the deniers to start claiming everything is fine based on a handful of events?

> It may well be counterproductive to normalize drawing conclusions from singular events.

We are not doing that. But we have a lot of statistical data and measurements, which demonstrate a noticeable increases of both frequency and magnitude of these events.

> We don't know whether this particular drought is due to the human induced climate change.

This is the kind of arguments some people use when they want to muddy the waters. Because, sure, someone is going to say that it is caused by global warming and then someone else will say “gotcha, climate is statistics and an event cannot be attributed to a single cause”. So let’s not go that way again.

This event is unprecedented in recorded history in Western Europe. Whilst indeed no single event can be attributed to a single cause, again, we do have data showing that the trend follows exactly what was predicted by the models 30 to 20 years ago. This behaviour is completely inconsistent with the situation of our planet, which should otherwise be in a mild cooling cycle.

> So the climate change proponents get "lucky" this time as they get a single but painful event in their life and they can go to deniers and say "do you see now how bad climate change is?"

Nobody is lucky, certainly not the dead or those whose house went up in flames, or those boiling at home. This attitude is juvenile and unmoored from what actually happens in the real world.

> For all we know, there may have been many similar ones 500 (or 1000) years ago before detailed meteorological records were kept.

I don’t know why you lament people being generally irrational and then come back to this sort of arguments. Let me repeat: single freak events are not caused by a single cause, but we do have data, including concerning the last million of years. The things we see now, with rapid sea level rise, collapse of ecosystems, mass extinction, and regional cataclysms, are things we can see in the fossil record.

> What if this drought is followed by 5 subsequent years of completely normal weather? Would we want the deniers to start claiming everything is fine based on a handful of events?

Except that it is not the case. We keep accumulating heat records, and what used to be centennial droughts are not every 2 years. People already said that in 2003, and yet it keeps getting worse.

Overall, I am not sure why I spent so much time replying. You do not sound half as smart as you seem to think you are. I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.

You may be correct about everything you've said here, but I expect the tone is counterproductive.

If you're intent is to blow off some steam for your own sake, feel free to disregard. If you're intent is to make a difference, it seems likely that this kind of discourse moves the needle in the opposite direction you would presumably like for it to go.

> I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.

I would encourage you to consider the impact of words like this before posting them. What was gained here? And what was lost?

Edit: It's like in a game of billiards. The people who win games are the ones that are precise. Each turn results in many of the balls being in a more beneficial position. Less skilled players slam the balls in the general direction of a pocket, and something might go in occasionally, but the overall table state is a mess turn to turn.

> You may be correct about everything you've said here, but I expect the tone is counterproductive.

I think you’re right. I realised after 5 minutes that it was the same tired tropes and mistakes again and the OP really sounded like bad faith by the end, and that no discussion is going to be productive anyway. Let’s be fair: all these points are very well documented for anyone interested in understanding them.

> I would encourage you to consider the impact of words like this before posting them. What was gained here? And what was lost?

You’re right again, but this bit was cathartic. It is difficult to stand the people who act like they are the reasonable ones when they use dodgy logic and faulty premises.

I was surprised by the downvotes I got for this, so I wanted to clarify my point.

If you have a cause that you are interested in, making a public statement about it will either help or hurt that cause, depending on how that statement is received by your audience.

Some people don't realize this, but being correct (or passionately believing you are correct) has little bearing on how your argument is perceived. You can be right, but if your delivery is abrasive, the world (assuming your cause is just) would have been better off if you just kept your mouth shut.

Statements like the one I originally replied to are (imo) examples of people being harmful to their own cause. Insulting, shaming, browbeating, etc, will rarely gain you any ground, and will likely actually galvanize people against you and your cause.

> You do not sound half as smart as you seem to think you are. I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.

Thanks for the ad-hominem attacks. That always makes discussions more productive and people amenable to consider your arguments. I may not be half as smart as I think I am, you on the other hand are coming across as an angry, immature and rude person who can't respond in a civilized manner or assume a shred of good intent from their counterparty.

> We are not doing that. But we have a lot of statistical data and measurements, which demonstrate a noticeable increases of both frequency and magnitude of these events.

And yet this thread is full of people saying that finally with this draught, this specific event, climate change is undeniably here. Again, I'm not arguing against climate change. I know it's happening. I'm trying to say that approaching from this angle is an argument on tricky grounds and may backfire when confronting opponents.

> This event is unprecedented in recorded history in Western Europe. Whilst indeed no single event can be attributed to a single cause, again, we do have data showing that the trend follows exactly what was predicted by the models 30 to 20 years ago. This behaviour is completely inconsistent with the situation of our planet, which should otherwise be in a mild cooling cycle.

Nobody disagreed with this.

> Nobody is lucky, certainly not the dead or those whose house went up in flames, or those boiling at home. This attitude is juvenile and unmoored from what actually happens in the real world.

You know perfectly well I didn't mean it that way. Again assuming malice and producing a strawman.

> Except that it is not the case. We keep accumulating heat records, and what used to be centennial droughts are not every 2 years. People already said that in 2003, and yet it keeps getting worse.

Again, nobody argued against this.

I'm not saying I agree with this but I think the point might be that what's happening now isn't completely out of the ordinary but we're being made to believe that it is.

the problem is that this is going to be one of the coldest summers in the next 20 years

I'm with you a 100% on this. I was just providing what I thought was an explanation of the other person's point.

There are bodies hitting the ground, and, still, nobody cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32398122

Germany is extremely likely to have the driest summer on record (the summer goes to end of August, but unless we have some pretty extreme rain in the next three weeks we are never going to catch up). The amount of rainfall is about half of 2003 and significantly lower compared to the second lowest which was 2019. So there really is not much presedence. Let's not even talk about the fact that all the extreme events have been in the last 20 years (and most in the last 10). We are past the point where we can say we can't blame single events on climate change. We are pretty much in the territory where all events now are.

2003 was nowhere near 2022. A lot of things were improved after 2003 to reduce the number of heat-related deaths so yeah, the toll could have been higher this year. But looking at aquifer levels and the effects on vegetation, it is much worse than it was 19 years ago, which was already quite bad. Also, 2022 is not over yet, and Southern Europe will still be very dry until September at least.

> We didn’t then have quite the sensationalized global news apparatus that we do today, though

That is not helpful. It was very widely reported in 2003. From Europe, I would not say that the coverage is more sentationalised than it was. I grant you that it was not as global as today, because Americans don’t care about what happens in non-America and it wasn’t a hot issue back then in American politics. But it was definitely seen as a catastrophe and it spurred a whole bunch of laws and regulations to help mitigate the consequences of such an event (not the likelihood of an event, because we’re lemmings with 5-minutes attention spans).

Living in Seattle with a similar always green weather. It was quite scary when we had our big heatwave last year and a lot of the plants around my house died even if I watered them.

The scary part was reading about the damage done to the croplands East of the Cascades. At some point the global trade system will fail due to insufficient supply. It's going to get rather ugly.

Depending on where you live it's not 'going to get' but 'is'. The future not arriving everywhere at the same time goes for this as well.

But this summer seeing all the greenery turn yellow and die

I know it's probably just a matter of speaking since you use 'all' while you're likely well aware it's not really 'all', but with respect to the dying: a lot of these plants aren't dead yet.

In case of grasses the root system is still ok, similar for roots and part of the stem for herbs/trees. It works like a first aid in coping with drought: get rid of the stuff which evaporates the little water which is still there, so that by the time water is available again it might not too late to recover.

Actually depending on the plant there are even earlier stages of such mechanisms; for example the leafs of some plants have a pale, almost white, underside and when drought kicks in the'll turn there leaves upside down to reflect more light and absorb less heat.

Doesn't the UK have sprinklers in front of major places like Parliament Square, Royal Naval College or even in Golf Courses. Here in the US, we are building new golf courses in the desert (Utah, Nevada) and use either ground water or the Colorado river even though their level has been falling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWpui1P9cAY

Rarely.

The UK gets enough rain that grass generally grows on its own - so you only need a sprinkler system during periods of drought. And periods of drought generally come with hosepipe bans, which means you can't run the sprinkler anyway.

Most venues choose to show 'leadership' and 'solidarity' by following any hosepipe bans, rather than trying to get an exception.

Sprinklers are used occasionally though - for example, establishing newly seeded grass. Golf courses might use them on the putting greens, but rarely on the fairways.

(discovered from another comment) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2022/aug/08/...

The third picture of the set shows the greens but not fairways.

> A view of the greens and fairways on a golf course near New Romney in Kent on 5 August, as parched parts of England face a hosepipe ban ahead of another predicted heatwave. Months of little rainfall, combined with record-breaking temperatures in July, have left rivers at exceptionally low levels, depleted reservoirs and dried out soil

Well it was drier than this in several previous years. 1855, 1877, 1933, 1935. Were those also climate change?

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...

The hosepipe ban aspect comes from catastrophic failure to build more resivoirs for the last 40 years. A couple coming online "soon" - same with energy. We wanted to build more nuclear but the NIMBYs killed it

As someone who moved to the area (Ireland, admittedly, not UK, but similar climate) it drives me fucking crazy to see people who have spent an entire lifetime not considering that the sun isn't always your friend.

"Historic heatwave incoming :-D 8-) break out the ice cream!"

Not sure how old you are, but there have been hot summers before!

This is why I don't have faith in humans making serious change until after driving head-on into a wall. There have been countless documentaries, youtube videos, books, seminars, activist movements, government campaigns, grassroots campaigns, etc etc etc to educate people on how serious climate change is and why it's a big deal. But the average person, even the educated person, has an extremely difficult time taking things seriously unless (1) they personally take interest, or (2) shit hits the fan and they realize the risks were serious. If I weren't personally interested in the environment, I'd probably be just as ignorant. I don't think there are any _viable_ politically correct solutions to the issue, so we'll just have to wait and see how bad we let things get

This headline will likely be recycled frequently over the next century, perhaps once every 5-10 years. It's right in line with predictions dating back to ~1980: midlatitude warming in regions reliant on summer snowmelt for a good portion of their water supply results in warmer winters where: more precipitation falls as water instead of snow, there's faster spring snowmelt, and soil and vegetation moisture gets reduced over the summer months (the latter being implicated in enhanced fire seasons). Here's another article about this, a bit more comprehensive:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/08/the-new-...

> With surface soil humidity the lowest ever recorded and July rainfall 85% lower than usual,.. more than 100 French municipalities have no running drinking water and are being supplied by truck, green transition minister Christophe Béchu said, adding: “We are going to have to get used to episodes of this type. Adaptation is no longer an option, it’s an obligation.”

The summer rainfall factor is a bit more random, for example Germany was hit by record-breaking massive flooding at about this very same time in 2021. This is because of the nature of water vapor increases, if the atmosphere is loaded up with water vapor (a CO2 increase feedback effect) then that can drive either extreme heating ('clear air water vapor') or massive precipitation depending on whether the condensation threshold is hit or not.

It is not going away and it will get worse. The tipping point has come and gone.

When thinking and planning for the future, it is important not to think of this summer as one of the hottest within recorded history, but as one of the coolest for the next 100 years.

Consequently, an appropriate response to this summer should far exceed what is required to cope with the droughts and heatwaves that we have just seen.

Meanwhile the west's governments are prioritizing short-term inflation curbing rather than addressing climate change in their campaigns. We are all screwed.

Not sure my government can do much about coal plant construction in Africa. Would rather they focus on things in control like inflation, to be honest.

If europe had built enough renewable energy over the last 10 years to provide its energy production it would have tackled both problems at once. - International energy prices wouldn’t be a major problem.

Yeah, but that wasn't in line with German plans of controlling the EU with Russian gas so had to be rejected on policy grounds.

Controlling the EU with Russian gas? Is that the conspiracy theory de jour, then?

Hardly a conspiracy when the German chancellor openly signs an agreement with Russia and then joins Nord Stream and Gazprom to implement it and bypass other EU countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Relation...

I still don't see any evidence for your claim "controlling the EU". The Nord Stream II stuff is well-known, but how does Germany getting gas from Russia let them "control the EU"? They are also far from the only EU country with big bets on energy from Russia (for example, Austria, Hungary - the latter not wanting to change a thing even now).

Dependence of European countries on Russian gas, oil (data until 2020):

Gas: https://www.statista.com/chart/26768/dependence-on-russian-g...

Oil: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1298031/dependence-on-ru...

how does Germany getting gas from Russia let them "control the EU"?

It's not getting gas that's indicative. It's getting gas intentionally bypassing the other EU countries and Ukraine with Nordstream 1&2. Thus enabling Russia and Germany to squeeze eastern EU.

Honest question: do you generally follow world events and not know this? I always wonder what the political and historical consciousness is in the west.

You're still not saying how this lets Germany "control the EU". If anything it sounds like you want Eastern Europe to control the access to gas in order to have an inordinate amount of influence over Germany. So basically what Russia is doing now.

Being independent of Russian energy resources would also "bypass" Poland and Ukraine. Germany should and could have been there ten years ago, hopefully we will be ten years from now.

Russians and Germans built very expensive Nordstream 1&2 to route around nominative German allies. This is basically official Russian doctrine that Germans, including personally their chancellor, joined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falin-Kvitsinsky_Doctrine

The goal was not to be independent but to become a hub of Russian gas to resell.

The current burst of inflation is global and is caused by a global pandemic that unleashed global shocks to global supply chains. There isn't much any one government can do, other than continue to push the Covid-19 vaccine out to as many people as possible.

False. The current inflation is the result of over a decade of growth fueled purely by money printing which has been accelerated since the pandemic when they shifted the money printer into afterburner. Like what did you expect would happen when the fed doubles the amount of money in circulation over the span of just two years?

Russia invading Ukraine and China pursuing a zero COVID policy, threw a spanner in this monetary house of cards the west economy was based.

Maybe we in the west should focus more on being more energy independent from hidrocarbures and more manufacturing independent from China instead of just focusing on increasing the price of stonks and housing.

You're being downvoted but you're absolutely right. QE was a policy of very very dubious merit already in 2008, and by the time the pandemic ended it was still going (and after Mar/2020 it went into turbo mode). The economy has NEVER went back to normal after 2008; in many regards we're still in the aftermath of the 2008 catastrophe.

The inflation was perhaps "triggered" by covid and the Ukraine invasion, but it was not "caused" by it. It was caused by monetary policy designed to keep asset prices inflated (and shaft the working class as a side-effect).

Don't forget a war, sanctions, impacts on trade and many important resources (foodstuffs, energy).

Similar to 1973/1982 when the price of crude oil went up 5X.

I don't like the idea that monetary policy is the only determiner of prices.

Sure they can: via large-scale economic mobilisation (New Deal-like), build renewables to generate enough electricity to avoid the need to import dirty energy from elsewhere. With limited grid storage, ~2-3x what we have today, >90% of Europe's energy could come from renewables.

Impose severe sanctions on any state or business providing funding for fossil fuel electricity generation.

Subsidize carbon free electricity generation in developing countries.

Help women in developing countries access education and family planning => reduces population growth and so energy requirements.

Simple enough, but there is absolutely no will to do it.

lol simple, says xe/xi

do it then

I don't think that's the best way to put it. Just because a solution can be simple doesn't mean the procedures in the way to enact it inherently are. Not that I agree with either side here, just dislike that way of thinking of “do it then.” In most governments, even if someone wants a change, it doesn't mean it's easy to enact even if that change is simple itself. Due to democracy requiring you to get people into agreement, you can't just waltz in and go yeah I want this changed and have it done.

Those are all happening, so it's not all doom and gloom.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-u-s-is-pr...

Your government was likely funding construction of them till a few months ago, and probably is still funding other fossil fuel projects:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/g7-countries-agree-s...

Are you suggesting that coal plants in Africa ate the main issue driving climate change? Aren't US and China still the biggest emitters, and not doing much about it?

This outlook of apathy is why we are screwed. Let's focus on inflation because the world falling apart is inevitable? Inflation is going to be the least of your worries when you are too hot, too cold, hungry, etc. The impact of climate change is waaay bigger than inflation.

Don't lump "West" like that. Germany has a green party in the ruling coalition, in France that stuff is taken somewhat seriously and the second biggest coalition in parliament (that the government has to rely on to pass laws) has an explicit green component. During the election cycle (president and lower chamber of parliament) this spring green and social issues were the main topics of discussion and main component of most campaigns.

You mean the "green" party that relentlessly fear-mongered nuclear and got Germany addicted to russian fossil fuels? The one that is going to be forced to start burning coal again?

No, you are mistaking them for the CDU and SPD which got us addicted to russian fuels and at the same time curbed the deployment of renewal sources. The Greens is the party whose minister Harbeck has now to clean up the mess left to him and on short notice, Germany has a reasonable amount of coal power plants which can be reactivated to prevent blackouts. But this is only necessary due to Russia not delivering the agreed amound of gas.

(And ironically on the French nuclear power plants failing due to wear and heat, so that Germany had to produce an additional 20TWh of electricity to keep the grid alive)

Germany isn't a barren desert with copious wind and sun. Demonizing nuclear will be looked back upon as cataclysmic fuck-up fueled by pure ignorance.

Germany has enough wind and sun to cover all electricy needs. And the fact that the nuclear-friendly France is not able to replace their aging fleet of power plants shows, that nuclear isn't such a simple or cheap solution. If Germany would push renewables, electricity would be carbon neutral before the first new nuclear power plant could come online.

The issue is that neither wind or solar provide baseline generation.

Frances issue aren't with nuclear, but with funding.

Storage to address the intermittency of renewables will still leave renewables cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear is just that bad.

How much storage are you talking about? With the impacts of climate change causing more serious events, can you guarantee you will have enough storage?

As much as is needed.

Rare events can be backed up with hydrogen-burning turbines. A simple cycle turbine power plant has 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant of the same output, so this doesn't cost much compared to the all-nuclear solution.

How much is as much as needed? 1 week worth? 2 weeks? A month?

If we are going to have hydrogen turbines how much should we have? Enough to cover a quarter of a city?

The time required just dictates how large the underground storage caverns should be, not how much the turbines cost. There is enormous space for these, and they can be very cheap. As you may know, natural gas demand is seasonally leveled using such caverns.

You never answered my question. How much do we need? 1 week worth? 2? A month?

Well, natural gas storage is months worth, so that capacity would be there if we needed it. It's going to depend on latitude.

We can look at a model to see how much long term storage is optimal (under various cost assumptions) to deliver a constant output, using historical weather data.

https://model.energy/

For the US, the minimum cost model using 2011 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions uses 6 hours of battery storage and 106 hours of hydrogen storage. For someplace at high latitude, more hydrogen gets used, since it becomes economical to save energy from summer to winter. In Finland, for example, the optimal solution has 2 hours of batteries and 275 hours of hydrogen. On the other side, the solution for Saudi Arabia uses 10 hours of batteries and 48 hours of hydrogen.

Please spare me, the Green party in Germany (and Austria) did more harm than good by pushing for renewables which underdelivered and hidrocarbures over nuclear which they were vehemently against.

Just because you call yourself green doesn't mean you know what you're doing.

And let's not forget how several former high ranking German and Austrian politicians are on the boards of various Russian oil and gas companies, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence and not in any way related to the countries' energy policies. /s

Sorry, but no. Yes, the greens pushed for exiting nuclear, but it was the Merkel government which hastened it and at the same time cut down the deployment of renewables. Germany could be much further ahead without that. We still are at 50% renewables in the mix, while nuclear was at its peak below 30% like 20 years ago.

The ranking German politician is former chancellor Schröder and indeed, this is very much critisized throughout Germany.

Just because Merkel nailed the final nail, doesn't mean that the greens didn't build the coffin and nail 3/4 of the nails.

Stop trying to shift the blame off the greens.

Stop blaming the greens for what they are not responsible.

Merkel (or rathr her minister Altmaier) shortened the life time of nuclear and more importantly curbed the buildup of renewables. Of course the exit of nuclear can only work with enough renewables being built up and that they not only failed but held back. Add to that the complete one sided dependence of Russian gas - they even sold the German gas storage to Gazprom. Guess why the German storage happened to be empty just at the beginning of the invasion of the Ukraine.

Maybe the greens shouldn't have been pushing for things that wasn't practical at that point in time? The greens are at least partially at fault for this. Why push to get rid of nuclear and not build new nuclear before you are ready for alternatives?

The alternatives where ready many years before the proposed end of nuclear. Solar buildup peaked in 2012 at over 10GWh/year and fell to 1 GWh/year due to political influence. Without the actions of the Merkel government, we would have 5 more years of nuclear and be way further ahead on renewables. So please stop blaming the Greens.

I have a few questions.

Where are you getting this 1gwh number? I am seeing 5gwh in 2021. I also am not seeing 10gwh any year. Perhaps I am not looking at the correct numbers?

If solar had its peak in 2012 that means it had its peak under Merkel's time as Chancellor? Which policy do you think Merkel was involved with that caused the drop? I assume you will say the change in feed in tariff? If so then why did the peak occur after years of the tariff continually dropping?

If it is the tariff, then why didn't we see a similar continual decline in the US when the tax credit ended at the end of 2016? There was a few year decline, but solar adoption is now higher than ever.

Would 5 years been enough that nuclear could have been shut down without causing any issues? Nuclear appears to be a large supplier of power in Germany. It doesn't seem likely that 5 years could have allowed solar to displace nuclear. Germany would still be having issues.

Do you have proof that roll out of solar would have continued at the same rate without the change in tariff (or whatever you are blaming Merkel for)?

If you look at this graph: https://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/EE/Redaktion/DE/Bilder/G...

You can see that solar collapsed from 8.2GW/a[1] in 2012 to 1.2GW/a in 2015. Wind collapsed from 4.9GW/a in 2017 to 0.9GW/a in 2019.

I cannot exactly "proove" which decision was exact killer, but of course any decision takes some time to have the full impact, as larger installations usually are planned years ahead, so any change in politics will take years to take full effect. But the collapse of both wind and solar are difficult to miss - and we rather should have a steady growth in both rates or at least maintain the peak rates on a constant level. At minimum one can blame politics not to have acted to keep up with installations. But there were a lot of decisions taken which were clearly impacting the roll out of renewables. And that with a known deadline for the nuclear power plants.

Some decisions taken I can remember:

- the feed in tariff was lowered. Even if that is a constant process, when it crosses the threshhold of no longer being profitable, there will be a steep drop in new installations

- solar started to recover in recent years, probably because due to the cells becoming cheaper so it began to be more profitable again

- as far as I know there was an upper limit for any subsidy, so another reason for a stop of new installations

- for wind power the whole system was changed, leading to a deep decline. Subsidies were auctioned off, but unfortunately not including a time limit for actually installing new capacity. So many projects "won" auctions and were never realized.

The 5 years alone wouldn't probably not suffice to replace the nuclear power plants, but you have to count in as well all the missed capacity after 2012. If we had just continued at 8GW/a and above, solar capacity would almost be double of what it is today. Pretty much the same with wind.

[1] Sorry, might have mistaken the total number on top of the solar bar with the number on the bar. But over 8GW/a is still pretty much it.

The Democrats just passed a major climate change bill https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/07/politics/senate-democrats-cli...

To be rolled back when the people elect based on short-term economic change.

The US is so corrupt, so in the pockets of industry I honestly have little confidence in this bill being in good faith toward climate action.

* https://www.xrebellion.nyc/news/statement-on-inflation-reduc... * https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/manchi...

Virtually all of the CO2 output growth in my lifetime has not been "the West":

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/04/Global-CO2-emissi...

and no party seems to push for shutting down imports from Asia, etc.

When you very oddly specify "growth" you're suggesting that the "West" that has had high emissions throughout your entire life, and almost certainly cumulatively more in that period, are not to blame because other nations slowly increased to output roughly the same amount but still less per capita?

That's harsh.

No, I'm commenting on OP implying the west is not doing enough now on the climate. This is not some commentary on fairness or other political topics.

Ok, but the west isn't doing enough and could very easily have done more, and in doing so would have made it easier for everyone else to do more.

The latest spending bill in US Congress is at least paying lip service to climate change.

Surely not enough, but it's a start.

US Democrats have just passed a huge bill involving climate change mitigation. Republicans are using it as a whipping stick to tell Americans that Democrats don't care about them, climate change is hogwash, and we should instead be focusing on cost of living involving inflation (which Democrats are already doing in tandem).

I think a big problem in the US is the terrible separation. Nothing will ever get done with everyone so far to sides and refusing to compromise with each other, always trying to get ahead. Both sides are guilty of it, and It's what made me grow tired of even taking part in the politics here.

This is mostly about lack of rainfall and not temperature.

Climate change causes more extreme weather, that doesn't imply this summer will be one of the coolest for the next 100 years?

> This is mostly about lack of rainfall and not temperature.

Higher temperature air has less capacity to carry water, 7% less for every degree Celcius IIRC. So there could very well be a link.

EDIT: Nope, I had it completely backwards, which makes much more sense too. Colder = less capacity for water. I need a drink. Can't delete my misinformed comment unfortunately.

What? Absolute humidity at saturation increases with temperature (at fixed pressure). At 100 C (and 1 bar), the air becomes entirely water vapor.

Oops, I had it the wrong way around.

That is incredibly backwards. Which is why when the temperature drops the water literally comes out of the sky.

Yep, you're are right, my bad.

Generally, though, hotter weather means more water evaporates, and regardless of whether the air can hold more or less water, over time the same amount that goes up will come down, meaning total precipitation will increase as the earth gets warmer.

That doesn't mean that this increase will be uniform. The rain may very well come in Sahara, Arabia or Central Asia.

Owning up to mistakes is better than hiding them, IMO. I have much for respect for someone who can say yeah I messed up like you did than someone who deletes it (Even if you can't).

Well, I'd delete to remove the disinformation, not to hide my mistake. Effect is the same of course.

Right. But still the expectations mostly are, that it might be, as warming continues. The only exception would be a failing of the gulf stream, which for central Europe would be a huge reset in temperatures with a more Canadian climate.

my understanding is more extreme weather with a definite tendency towards increasing heat.

Meanwhile the boomer generation in the UK is shouting how the drought of 1976 was worse and they survived without making a fuss (ergo anyone who makes a fuss is "soft", a "snowflake" or has been fooled that climate change is real)

There is no reasoning with them; they see this as a one-off and it'll be 50 years before the next summer like this.

Generalising about generations (one of the most absurd ways of dividing people up) is not helpful. Some of the people making/distributing those dumb 1976 memes on TikTok (and elsewhere) look like they were barely alive in 1976. Conversely, look at the various climate change protests and there's plenty of "boomers" there.

But it is frustrating because boomers are basically the law makers and voting majority in 2022.

I have the same experience with so many boomers as the parent. "Hottest summer on record? Aw, I love hot weather". "When I was a kid, it was so hot the tar on the road would stick to me feet?!" etc.

It is however true that the boomer generation has held the electoral power during the years that mattered most and refused to do enough. I don’t think it’s chance that their most popular papers were all the most strident climate deniers.

Younger people should vote more but tbh by the time I was old enough to vote it was already too late to avert what’s happening.

I don’t see any sentiment of “whoops we got it wrong, let’s do what we can now!”. (Or any gratitude for the sacrifices younger people made during lockdowns, but I digress…)

>but as one of the coolest for the next 100 years

I'd not predict the future like that. No one knows certainly what will happen if the Gulf stream collapse

Your response took a terrifying turn at the end there.

Are there any examples on the climatic record of the Gulf Stream collapsing to help shed some light on the potential outcomes?

Rumors are and ice age, which seems ironic.

"Wow and those stupid libs were saying global warming! Idiots!"

I can already hear them screeching.

Yeah some people lack brains to understand that a global change doesn't imply local changes going the other direction. The example I give them is usually: Your neighborhood can get richer and you can loose your job.

The easier path is global warming -> more energy in the atmosphere -> more extreme weather.

This is so simple and eloquent. And equally terrifying.

What if? (name of the channel I found)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzCvY0ENrhk

I remember a geography teacher talking about this decades ago at school. He said to compare Europe's mild climate to Canada's at the same latitude, and that Europe might be a lot colder in winter with the Gulf Stream halted.

It would be. Coastal zones (say within 100 km of open sea) would still see some tempering effects but not on the same scale and further inland it would instantly be the same climate as you saw in Poland or Russia 40 years ago. And further East it will be worse still. The Gulf Stream is what keeps Northern Europe habitable.

The thing people really have to understand about climate change is how unprecedented the impact of many of the changes coming are. I mean if you look at a globe you should immediately see that most of Europe is North of the United States. The reason it's comfortable to live there an agriculture is possible is the Gulf Stream.

But forget the Gulf Stream, you should learn more about the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC)[0], which also could be shut down. There is geological evidence that such a shut down would turn the Atlantic ocean anoxic, literally turning the ocean toxic.

This isn't some wacky, doomer fantasy scenario, this has happened multiple times in Earth's history when CO2 levels and temperatures have risen and been responsible for multiple mass extinction events[1]. It's also worth pointing out that the AMOC is already showing evidence of weakening [2]

A good overview of this paleontologist Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

2. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz4876

Thank you for my daily dose of existential dread. I can now safely logout of the internet.

To show how long this has been known and ignored I offer this somewhat manic sci-fi short story [0] written by my grandfather 101 years ago, in which a megalomaniacal ecologist has shut down the Gulf Stream by choking it off between Miami and the Bahamas.

[0] http://www.angel.net/~nic/jegers-mentoen-annihilator.html

Total aside, but that's a very nice piece of family history. And a neat short story, too! Thanks for sharing it.

I think it's a reasonable prediction on a global scale, but as you correctly point out, that might not be a useful scale for individuals living through it

Shit that is environmentally unsustainable at scale:

- Air travel: The carbon footprint per person is similar to burning your trash for a full year. Did you recycle bottles for a year, planted a tree, donated to WWF, rescued a bird from an oil spill then traveled to an environment conference on another continent? Congratulations, you now pollute more than someone drives monster trucks to work and on burns all of their trash.

- Pollution holidays: Wow, it's that non-descript holiday again. I need to buy lots of single-use decorations made out of plastic and then throw them away days later. For this, I will go to a party store that sells only those items. Most of them are made out of toxic stuff like phthalates, PVC, vinyl, and stuff that will poison me, but hey... It's the non-descript holiday again! If I do this, people will encourage me to do the same every year because I am contributing to the creation of trash that will not degrade for thousands of years, and I will do the same for Halloween, my birthday, Christmas, and every minor holiday in the calendar including my dog's birthday!

- Technology: Oh, look, this hardware runs 5% faster than my current one. I need to dispose the one I have and buy the new one for an absurd amount of money, then discard it again when the next one comes out. It's all sealed and glued inside so that you can't repair it, and no replacement parts are sold. That's a really good idea. I am going to support the companies that do this so that they can continue to sell things that cannot be repaired and will become trash in less than 5 years! Look how fashionable I am with my soon-to-be piece of trash! Surely software companies will make the most out of my new hardware by rewriting everything in BloatedScript to save development costs and adding useless eyecandy that requires a supercomputer.

- Burning man. Need to deal with your emotional problems in a pyromaniac way? just watch a video of a previous burning man burning instead of burning shit every goddamn year, or get into a Minecraft game in VR (preferably your own server) and set all shit on fire, or, even better, work for the fire department and see shit burning all the time, how about that? Fuck...

Edit: corrected wrong info about leaded fuel in aviation. Thanks for the correction

Jet fuel (including that burned in turboprop planes) is not leaded.

yes it is

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/leaded-aviation-fuel-and-enviro...

No, it's not. That article is clearly about leaded aviation gasoline, not Jet-A.

> Avgas is a specialized fuel used to power piston engine aircraft

The vast majority of airplanes in operation - be it per passenger numbers or cargo tonnes - aren't piston engined but turboprops, turbofans and turbojets.

The link says "Jet aircraft and turbine-powered, propeller aircraft do not use avgas, but instead use fuels very similar to kerosene, which does not contain a lead additive."

So I think the reply was accurate.

That’s not jet fuel.

Only piston-powered air travel uses leaded fuel.

Overwhelmingly, anything that you bought a ticket for (and certainly anything that you took to another continent on a ticket) is burning Jet-A, which does not have a material amount of lead content.

What's wrong with not traveling?

Oh no, I won't be able to spend the money I don't have to impress people that do not care about me in the slightest via Instagram.

Oh no, I won't be able to attend that conference that's 100% recorded and available in video format where I see the material and the presenter in better detail than in person with the ability of replaying, pausing and resuming at any time I want, where 90% of the time the content talked about is an abridged version of what can be learned from a used book, free online documentation or a PDF I can buy for a few dollars.

Oh no, I won't be able to visit some random distant place while there are plenty of nearby places that are just as nice.

Oh no, I won't be able to visit some snobby establishment that sells overrated products such as fermented fruit juice that I don't even really like that much and can't even distinguish from a boxed product sold at 1/100th of the price at my local grocery store.

Surely in 2 generations where everyone is living in a ruined planet eating diseased vermin people will care about my pointless traveling. I am such an important person! I am surely more important than the environment that sustains the life of everyone in the planet that's why I am so entitled to such things.

You should consider giving travel a try, though. When done right, it has so many benefits that I cannot recommend it enough.

Among them: it gives you a better perspective on life, it gives you a better understanding of what is there to improve in your own community that you didn't notice before because "we have always done it this way", and it tends to make people less judgemental and/or racist.

People won't care about droughts in Africa they see on TV, but if you could bring them there and see it with their own eyes I can guarantee you they would.

> it has so many benefits

... but that's true of everything that we could ever consider banning in the name of combatting climate change.

The majority of benefits you mention are absolutely not applicable to the majority of travelers, specifically those only visiting countries for a short time in areas designed for tourists. Also doesn't take into account repeat tourists (e.g. masses in North/West Europe going south by plane every summer).

There's a humongous difference between your average Ibiza tourist and someone visiting Asia to study the culture. From experience, the majority is far closer to the former than the latter.

When done in a purposeful way, sure.

But for 99% of the people it's like:

- "white sand good. clear water good. sun good."

- "yum, food."

- "tee hee. disney."

Not all travel is frivolous, and demonising ordinary people as if they’re doing it for no reason is unhelpful.

There are those who move to new countries and have an entirely reasonable desire to still see their families from time to time.

For business deals and diplomacy, meeting in person remains a far more effective way of building rapport and good working relationships than anything tech can provide just yet.

And travel for tourism, while arguably unnecessary, does contribute to producing more educated & empathetic segments of the population who are more likely to see themselves as part of the world rather than identifying only with their tiny corner of it. It’s a difficult one to quantify, but something we’d notice if it ended. There are also parts of the world that would become much poorer if not for tourism.

I’m all for finding ways to reduce the need for travel, asking people to travel less where possible, and of course pouring investment into decarbonising aviation. We’re at the point where it’s one of the necessary actions society needs to accept.

But don’t pretend these are not very real and in many cases very painful sacrifices we’re asking people to make.

You can mention all reasons you want. But travel has to adapt to the needs of a healthy environment and not the other way around.

If that means you have to travel on a donkey for 5 years to make it to a really important conference then so be it. If that's too much then do it online.

You have spectacularly missed the point, and that’s not a good faith response.

No, you miss the point.

My point is attacking the central belief in this civilization, which is that human convenience is more important than everything else.

What is more important: a) the extinction of a mammalian species, or b) a few people not being able to see their family? To me the response is very clear: a)

If a) is more important then if 2% of humanity cannot see their family that's OK. It's the cost of sharing the planet with other species that also need to survive.

I don't care if a few million people cry at night, that's better than a species going extinct. Extinction is forever.

In perspective, none of the stuff you mention really matters. Your convenience is not as important because there's 8 billion of you. You are not as special as you think.

That is, again, not what was argued.

Your comment claimed all travel is ‘pointless’ and without any reasonable justification. It was filled with invective for anyone who might have chosen to travel at some point. It was an argument lacking in perspective or empathy.

You’re now trying to turn this into a question of whether these might be justifiable sacrifices but that was never a point of contention. In fact, it’s something I raised first.

As I said, not a good faith response.

Humanity has to downsize its expectations and ego. Cutting most passenger air travel is a key part of that. Next we should ban most non essential plastic objects. Then slam a sticker in front of every product with its carbon footprint.

All beings on Earth will go extinct at some point; it’s a matter of when. Extending that significantly has merit, but must be traded off against many factors, including convenience and quality of the lives lived until the point of extinction.

Perhaps we should ration the population to 2 Billion or so, to give everyone who lives a better life, mean, median, and mode, than we can at 8 Billion. Perhaps 8B is OK, but only if those 8B each make deeper sacrifices than the 2B would have to…

Starting by eliminating all expectation that it is normal for a human being to travel frequently on planes.

Is that the optimal first step in terms of return for the environment over delta-convenience, delta-fun, and attention budget?

I’d expect that other improvements sort far, far higher on the return over expense scale, but are not as symbolic.

Convenience? fun? Dude... there's a literal extinction going out outside.

It's true that some planes fly on leaded fuel, but commercial airlines generally do not. It's only piston engine planes that fly on leaded AvGas, all jet aircraft including tubroprops fly on fuels like Jet A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel)

Cargo ships produce upwards of 30% of all NOx pollution, 10% of sulfur dioxide and 3% of all CO2.

When almost everything (except food) that you need to buy comes from China, it is impossible to not be a part of the problem.

> When almost everything (except food) that you need to buy comes from China

When almost everything (except food) that you want to buy comes from China

I'd love to buy UK-made stuff but the country sold out to cheap sweatshop nations decades ago

Or buy used stuff that's usually better quality and built to last.

NOx and SO2 are (primarily) local pollutants, and get broken down over time. Cargo ships is a relatively small contributor to greenhouse gases for most items. (I would not be surprised if a few hundred km by truck causes larger greenhouse gas emissions than around-the-world by ship.

That is an out of date factoid intended to stop the transition to EVs by making ICE pollution seem minor. Even when it was popular it ignored the work being done to fix that problem.

Fortunately, we moved to EVs and now all but the particularly resistant to reality accept they are better than ICE, in quality, efficiency, cost and carbon.

Meanwhile, we also passed some regulations to stop the cargo ships burning really dirty fuel which we were just letting them do for no good reason.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/at-last-the-shipping-industry...

> Public health experts estimate that once the 2020 sulfur cap takes effect, it would prevent roughly 150,000 premature deaths and 7.6 million childhood asthma cases globally each year.

> “There are very few examples of air quality regulations that have as broad a reach of benefits as this one,” said James Corbett, a professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware, who has conducted seminal research on international shipping emissions. “This is going to benefit children and adults in coastal communities located along major shipping lanes — not only [near ports] where ships are delivering cargo.”

So now cargo is both efficient and clean. And people are working on ways to make it even better, usually involving global regulations.

Might be easier to say 8B people wanting to live the developed country lifestyle most people desire.

Certainly, the upcoming nuclear winters will be a lot cooler.

It was over 30 degrees in May here in [redacted] this year and since then we have been several degrees above historical norms pretty much every week.

The heat wave of 40 degrees a few weeks ago was intense not just because it was 40 degrees but because the night time temperates did not drop by much.

Usually in [redacted] while we have some very hot days once the sun goes down temperatures drop to the low 20s or even high teens so we can open the windows and our homes cool by heat exchange and it isn't too uncomfortable (without AC).

However recently we have had nights where it is still 28 or 29 degrees at 2am meaning it is still hotter outside than inside (indoor temperatures in my home without AC on is usually 25-26 even when it is high 30s outside) so opening a window just lets in warmer air. Without some kind of air cooling you end up with a hotter ambient temperature in your home which is horrible night after night after night.

And of course warmer rivers make nuclear power plant cooling more difficult.

I am from the UK originally so follow what is happening back in my home country too and the heat there has been insane as well. Highest recorded temperatures, way above what anyone can consider "nice" in a country with homes designed to keep as much heat in as possible and almost nobody having AC.

It is changes like we see here that worry me a lot for the future my son will be living in when he is my age. Really sorry state the world is in these days :(

Hey, I'm 100km from Lyon ! This situation is insane... This is the fourth wave and I guess there could be more...

> Usually in France while we have some very hot days once the sun goes down temperatures drop to the low 20s or even high teens so we can open the windows and our homes cool by heat exchange and it isn't too uncomfortable (without AC).

IMHO this kind of thinking contributes to the problem. Again, IMHO, what you all should be saying is this:

> in France we *used to be able to* open the windows and our homes cool by heat exchange and it wan't too uncomfortable (without AC). *now we have* nights where it is still 28 or 29 degrees at 2am meaning it is still hotter outside than inside (indoor temperatures in my home without AC on is usually 25-26 even when it is high 30s outside) so opening a window just lets in warmer air. Without some kind of air cooling you end up with a hotter ambient temperature in your home which is horrible night after night after night.

This isn't like summer, where it's hot, but after a few months you go back to fall and winter. This is like history, where things happened one way in the past and they won't be like that again.

> It is changes like we see here that worry me a lot for the future my son will be living in when he is my age. Really sorry state the world is in these days :(

Big part of why I'm not having kids. Even if I wanted them for my own sake, I don't want to bring people into the world as it is today, let alone whatever it'll be in 20, 50, 100 years.

The only saving grace about the heatwave in France right now is that it's a very dry heat, almost desert like. Obviously, that leads to some brutal drought like conditions and is still dangerous, but I find even 30 with a lot of humidity feels significantly worse than the heatwave in Lyon a couple weeks ago. Shade at least offered some relief. When the humidity is super high, even shade doesn't really help.

It was pretty crazy in Lyon though, I did not expect 40+ degrees during my holidays there.

This is basically what life is like in South Florida half the year. We have the benefit of ubiquitous air conditioning, but going outside feels gross from April to October.

There's a government website that lists all locations with water restrictions (and the map is a mix of yellow, orange, and red) [0]

Heat is also one of franceinfo's (national news broadcast) main topics [1]. Issues include: fires, no more cooling for nuclear reactors, no more water for our dams, and a village that cuts its main water pipe 8hrs/day [2].

[0] https://propluvia.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/propluviapub... (this site is extremely slow, I'm not sure what kind of potato they use)

[1] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/meteo/canicule/

[2] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/environnement/crise-climat...

Bit strange to link to the children's news article, when there is a 'proper' news article from the same source which has already been submitted:

> France drought: Parched towns left short of drinking water > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32359896

Yeah, when I read this article, it seemed very strangely written to provide almost no info whatsoever. Guess it makes sense if it's supposed to be for kids.

For me, the question isn't even about climate change, it's about managing variable levels of rainfall. Whether or not the manmade part is significant, the truth is we always get fluctuations in weather and sometimes it is really dry.

Instead of arguing about climate change, we should already be slowing down rivers, pumping cleaned sewage output much further up the water tables so it can get reabsorbed, plant many more trees to hold soil and therefore moisture, stop paving over everything forcing rain into drains instead of the ground etc.

The article doesn't mention it, but the most immediate problem is the nuclear power plant cooling. I've seen reports of tap water not being drinkable in some areas, but I suspect a very small number of people are/have been affected.

Agriculture will have a dip in production too, but at this season is mostly corn for livestock and fruits.

They already implemented measures to allow higher discharge temperatures than usual for certain nuclear plants.

Soon it won't just be France but all of Europe (and by soon I mean the next few weeks). It's crazy how quickly global warming is showing its face.

Yes, it's here too: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/09/uk-braced-fo...

The day with 40.8c (105F) was bad enough, London is not built to cope with that record. But also it hasn't rained since.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...

we've known for 35+ years at this point, it's nothing really new

Even The Netherlands, one of the wettest countries in the world is experiencing drought right now. This is not good.

Bangkok is flooding, though:

https://floodlist.com/asia/thailand-floods-july-2022#:~:text....

I wonder how well we will get used to this. For farmers these water shortages mean a lot for their production. A few months ago there were some videos posted in nos.nl about our soil, and how it’s becoming more and more difficult to grow decent crops. These farmers better choose “eggs for their money”[0] soon…

[0] https://context.reverso.net/vertaling/nederlands-engels/eier...

> This is a big concern for the French government, as if there is less food for people to eat, the price of food might go up as a result.

Interesting, if there was less food, lack of food for people to eat is what I would worry about.

Famine is by far the thing that scares me the most with global warming

Famine, and water scarcity. We don't even have a word for the water equivalent of "famine"; that alone should tell you how unprepared we are for it.

I think drought might be the word?

The prices will go up a lot before lack of food is a problem. French people also eat a lot of meat, which uses a lot of food to feed the animals. The more expensive prices may reduce the meat consumption.

Prepare for it at it is going to happen. The production in Europe will decrease, and we will export less food. The famine will be in countries which are not self sufficient and which do not have strong allies.

We are seeing it already with Ukraine and Russia barely exporting grain, many countries knocked on the door of France to secure food.

> The production in Europe will decrease, and we will export less food.

France depends on Russia/Ukraine sunflowers right, and was the world’s third largest food exporter in 2005. Now it’s mostly a deficit end: debt and food exporters https://www.leparisien.fr/amp/economie/exportations-l-agricu...

> Famine is by far the thing that scares me the most with global warming

This and thirst. I simply cant imagine not finding water to drink. Nightmare stuff. But whats really sad is that we have the tech to secure water and to switch to green energy almost over night (a few years), but whats blocking is greed and stupidity. And it affects us all.

Water will be available since we could do desalination, it may just be expensive.

and poison a lot of places with the brine

It's not over yet, but we can already see a lot of trees are struggling to get water. I'm from the North-West side of France, where rain is usually frequent, and this year all I'm seeing is dead trees alongside roads and fields.

I guess, I'll be growing drought-resistant trees now.

Or cactuses.

I live here and am very angry.

At the blue cloudless sky, at the once powerful river turned to a stream and consequently at many people's life style.

As I write this, millions of cars are criss-crossing France to spend a few days here, a week there.

I live very modestly. Small studio, no car, no TV, no AC, no e-bike, computer made of 2nd-hand parts. To buy food, I grab a bag and walk to the store even 2km away. It's free and good for health.

I would be very happy like this if all had gone reasonably.

But no, people made choices that fry the ALU in my brain. Built a home far from the city to be 'in the country-side' ? Now you drive everywhere, like your neighbours, making the 'country' a noisy racing-circuit. Oh! and you realize you lack exercise so you drive to the gym or such and do useless efforts.

So I judge people, I fucking do. The boomers in particular. 'You shouldn't generalize!'. Oh yeah? then how do you reason about classes of people ? It's not boolean logic, but rather perceptual statistics. And I'll tell you : the boomers are very chiefly to blame. Not the poor ones, the masses of middle+ ones. The ones I know and the ones through official data.

They're massively owning second houses where they go on holiday and leave empty most of the year, turning villages into ghost towns but with prohibiting estate prices ! Oh, and they go driving their new car. The median age of new car buyer in France is.. 62 years old.

When I hike, I keep bumping into them on e-bikes, 'enjoying nature'. Did you know a bus is following them from hotel to hotel, carrying their luggage ?

Oh and they massively vote for whoever guarantees their fat pensions. The average income (not counting possessions...!) of retired boomers in France is superior to the one of working people !

I feel a solid resentment for them, to say the least.

take a deep breath. I agree with you with boomers which are being completely selfish and have the nerve to patronise us.

However making us in Europe going back to travel by horse, living all in the same family house and sleep with cows to keep warm like the good old days won't solve anything to the global warming issue.

I think you have a bit of a point though you know very well that most people will never voluntarily choose your lifestyle and you make some contentious statements. However - we do have the largest population of humans ever, often located in dense cities and we've covered our Earth in concrete and asphalt to an extent such that its mass (since 2020) now exceeds the total biomass on Earth including ourselves (our bodies). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5.

Our attention to the problems of providing appropriate infrastructure to support this desired expansion is evidently very patchy. That's certainly true for instance with the issue of the water shortage in the UK which is certainly a political failure.

In view of the above why do we expect the environment to adjust itself with a view to our best interests and why are we shocked when it doesn't?

> then how do you reason about classes of people?

In my experience: By using a "defensive approach" when formulating such statements. Like "The majority of boomers are very chiefly to blame.", even if you think 99% are responsible.

Yes, this has the "risk" that people who should feel called out are telling themselves "oh, but they don't mean me!". In the end, you probably will never win the hearts and minds of those people anyway with such statements, so it doesn't matter. But you prevent offending and driving away people who are not "guilty", boomers who don't show the behavior you described, who tried to prevent this whole desaster in the 70s and 80s, those that no one listened to, the (at that time) poor. Ostracization is one of our primal fears, our brains are very boolean in that regard and emotions are often not processed with the highest precision.

IMO that's an okay tradeoff and more effective than to only weaken a generalisation with additional statements afterwards. What do you think?

I agree with your text, btw, and am in almost the exact same situation you described except that I live one country to the north-east, have a used laptop instead of a PC and only have to walk 1.5km to get food :)

  IMO that's an okay tradeoff and more effective than to only weaken a generalisation with additional statements afterwards. What do you think?

I think you're right. I shouldn't write when angry. My point still stands, with all the obvious nuance that 'boomers' is more than an age group.

You speak of living in the city as somehow being better for the climate?

My dream is to live in the country side so that I can grow my own food, have animals and take water from the earth and not being as dependent on a big functioning society.

Partly because I believe this life is way better to simply live but also partly because I think it is better for the environment. I grow my own food so that I get more nutrient dense food and don't contribute to the monoculture that is the case of all agriculture today. Also, I will never use any chemicals on my food that destroy the environment. I salute the insects and the animals and thanks to not having a monoculture I can grow food without it being destroyed.

I will host bees in my garden and raise my own animals which I then will slaughter and eat. They will live as good of a life they can, I won't support the horrible practices of many meat industries.

I will live pretty far from a big city though, not by choice but because I can't afford to live closer and because all the municipalities focus on building big apartment blocks where crime is high and you are super dependent on society.

Also, since I have my garden I will not have much waste since animals eat most of the food waste and the other I can easily recycle.

Sure I will need a car to get into town but I plan for it to be electric and I will also utilize my electric bike whenever I can. Not by choice but because there is no stores nearby.

I am not a boomer, so I guess your anger is not directed towards me, but you should be more careful of hating on people in which you don't know.

  You speak of living in the city as somehow being better for the climate?

I wasn't but I'd think yes it's better. Collectively more 'efficient' w/ infra & logistic scaling.

  My dream is to live in the country side so that I can grow my own food, have animals and take water from the earth and not being as dependent on a big functioning society.

Me too! Dearly. While trying to minimize driving around, and live the most 'organic' possible (Self water, dry toilet. etc..)

  I will live pretty far from a big city though, not by choice but because I can't afford to live closer

Can't blame you.

  I am not a boomer, so I guess your anger is not directed towards me, but you should be more careful of hating on people in which you don't know.

'Boomer' is mainly a lifestyle. I'm not rabid at an age group. I perfectly know some boomer-aged people are well aware and caring and acting. For the others, there is no time anymore to be 'careful'.

People will do whatever is nice and economical. If you want people to make certain choices, the easiest way is to make the "wrong" choice uneconomical.

> I wasn't but I'd think yes it's better. Collectively more 'efficient' w/ infra & logistic scaling.

I completely disagree. People used to live on the country side and take care of both earth and tools. Today, labor is expensive and materials are cheap so people will toss away stuff. City life is all about just consuming and it will automatically lead to people getting disconnected from the stuff that truly matters.

What bothers me most is when I travel outside my country and realize there is practically no recycling, even if it is very easy to do so.

Time to build some seawater desalination plants. Power them with solar and/or nuclear.

I was surprised that there was no serious backslash against golf courses which somehow managed to get exceptions in water saving.

When nobody could water plants (including farmers) they were allowed to water the courses (or parts of).

It is August, nothing is happening so I thought that this would be the topic of the month (with the wild fires) and ... nothing.

Where is our revolutionary soul? Where are our yellow jackets? Where are the protests "this is Macron's fault"?

On a serious note, this is insane.

Reading people's reactions to this makes me think there's only these possible outcomes to trying to get people to act on something that is super important but not immediately obvious:

Trigger: knowledgeable people sound the alarm!

Response action 1: people act immediately and well, leading to...

Action 1 outcome: problem solved before it manifests, leading people to complain about how ridiculous the alarmists were and the over-reaction to the issue e.g. Y2K.

Response action 2: people begin to act, but not quite enough, leading to...

Action 2 outcome: problem still manifests "a bit", leading people to argue over the alarmists and whether more action is warranted or not.

Response action 3: people ignore the alarm, leading to...

Action 3 outcome: worst predictions start manifesting, leading people to complain that the alarm wasn't loud enough or targeted well enough to make them act.

I feel we're experiencing a mix of 2 and 3.

Is the amount of rainfall across the world constant? If so, are there places getting above average rainfall.

Generally, global rainfall has been increasing for over 100 years. From epa.gov:

> Since 1901, global precipitation has increased at an average rate of 0.04 inches per decade, while precipitation in the contiguous 48 states has increased at a rate of 0.20 inches per decade.

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

Broadly speaking, most climate change theories would suggest a wetter world, not a dryer one. Of course locally conditions might be very very different. The southwestern USA is trending dryer. The northeastern USA is trending wetter.

Similarly (last I looked and I haven't looked much at European trends), precipitation is expected to increase in northern Europe and decline in southern Europe.

If you live in the United States you may also be interested in the drought changes over time, and where those droughts/excess wet are happening: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

> Broadly speaking, most climate change theories would suggest a wetter world, not a dryer one. Of course locally conditions might be very very different. The southwestern USA is trending dryer. The northeastern USA is trending wetter.

Trend or not, the northeastern USA is also experiencing a drought currently. But the last couple of summers have been fairly cool and wet. Maybe we just got unlucky with this one (weather), or maybe pinballing between drought and wet is the new normal (climate) and agriculture here needs to adapt to that.

Yes I'm in New Hampshire in that very unfun drought right now. But droughts like this were the norm. Now they're more rare.

On drought.gov if you scroll below the map and click 1895 - Present in the graph at the bottom of the page, you'll see just how common droughts in NH used to be compared to the much high "abnormally wet" conditions of today.

https://www.drought.gov/states/new-hampshire

try clicking D3 / W3 or D4 / W4 also to get a good picture of how it's changed.

Post 2000's NH has had the most extreme wet and the least extreme drought of any time period (except maybe the 1970's)

The world is becoming both drier and wetter; it depends on where you live: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/24/climate/warme...

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stra...

Also this: The recent eruption in Tonga has apparently had unusual effects on water in the atmosphere. Has this affected the situation in Europe? I'd love to know. Japan also skipped a monsoon season this year.

Yes, South Korea: https://twitter.com/koryodynasty/status/1556620987814522882

(this is in jest ofc)

If one person's house floods because everyone else's water got cut in order to flood it, nothing is fine due to the same amount of water being used.

These headlines are become so frequent that there is already a sub-reddit dedicated to all these "faster than expected" record headlines.

/r/FasterThanExpected/

I watched the movie "don't look up" about the end of the world from a celestial object and it shocked me because of the parallel with the climate crisis. I've the same feeling as some of you, it's too late to avoid major disasters. And it's freaking me out

Also upcoming insane electricity prices: https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1556998118922665984

Obligatory Theodore Roosevelt quote for Americans, but I sense applies wider in this case: “Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.”

We need to build a lot more renewable energy projects and start converting sea water.

> July was France's driest month in more than 60 years, according to the national weather service Meteo-France.

Am I correct to infer from this and headline that they've only been keeping records for 60 years?

Yet, there probably were worse draughts within past 200 years. Tree rings and river bed markings can easily prove this. `On Record` is a little deceiving.

"Good news", with the number of 200 or 300 years old trees that are currently dying, we will be able to check all records when we'll have them cut down.

Two things,

- There are many research available that used tree rings to determine past draughts. And yes there were much worse and prolonging ones. Some research goes as far back as a millennia.

- Yo do not need to kill a tree to get ring information. A drill is sufficient.

Refs to actual peer reviewed many articles please

Search for `tree ring XXXX`, `historical droughts` etc.

This may be useful too http://drought.memphis.edu/OWDA/

paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1500561

“It’s the war on Ukraine Or Tchernobyl warming us” /s

Will the super rich and powerful finally care and do something once they can't get any Taittinger or Moët?

They probably consider Moët far too cheap and plentiful today, since even poor people can afford Moët. Once the droughts get worse and more regular and Moët production dries up to a trickle, only then will prices reach a level where it can become a truly desirable drink.

I've been wondering about olive oil. The biggest producers are all around the Mediterranean. Olive trees can live in very dry areas, but I'm sure they can't survive fires.

South America is going through a surge in olive oil production, but it will take a long time to reach Spain alone.

When their huge collections of vintage bottles increase in value like this?

I am currently in France and there's been a shortage of mustard (as in you cannot find it in any supermarkets). It's blamed partly on hot weather: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-09/mustard-shortage-in-f...

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