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Comment by snicky | Hacker News Reader

I just came back from Hungary and Slovakia and it really caught my attention that the grass everywhere was just yellow. I wasn't sure if it's normal by this time of the year, but truely, both countries look like Greece now.

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Same in Northwest France: I've never seen the grass so yellow, and now the ground is even becoming bare brown. Some tree species are yellowing/browning. With the prolonged lack of rain and extreme heat for the region, it's a summer like I've never seen before. And it's probably one of the coolest of the rest of my life.

Same in Ireland. I think the country grass is fields or near woodlands or rivers is still holding on to its green but urban grass in parks is scorched. I've never seen this before.

Ireland is fundamentally a wet country and always has been.

This also happened in 2018, but yeah it's crazy.

Same here in NL. A few drops of rain today, for the first time in a long time.

Hello from Slovakia. Yellow grass by the middle of august is not that exceptional here. The current drought is much worse though; the trees are already shedding leaves and we've had wild swine come to our appartment building (in the middle of the capital city) to drink water from lawn irrigation, which has never happened before. Most of the smaller creeks and rivers are completely dry. We didn't have much wildfires luckily but that's just a question of time I'm afraid.

Same in Switzerland. Trees have started yellowing a month before autumn.

In Spain I drove past fields of sunflowers that were all wilted. Formerly grass fields are totally yellow and crunch underfoot.

Southern Slovakia and a large part of Hungary are fucked if it keeps getting warmer, and given their governments there is 0% chance they will even try to adapt their agriculture

why are they fucked? you can just switch to plants grown previously further down the south, you can already now grow figs, lemons, etc. for instance, let alone tomatoes/peppers

> you can just

No you cannot "just" do things like that sadly... you still need water, as much as 10L/day/sqm during a heat wave. Also you need proper night/day temperature cycles, a reasonable early/late frost timing as to not kill your new plants, the soil has to match what you want to grow, etc. it's a whole dance between many many factors.

Flowers and pollen also get absolutely fucked by high heat, tomatoes stop growing when it's too warm. I know a farm where they lost most of their tomatoes, they cooked on the plant and fell to the ground.

Though the rest of the year will be hot and dry, the winters will still be freezing, which limits what you can do, and late spring frost which kills fruit buds is very common.

We should just turn some fields into PV plants...

Yes, I've been told the U.K. looks like California now.

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