Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat

More intense rain fall then dry spells.

The high prolonged hot spells, with the wind can really make a lot of the land dry out.

So many dead and dying Field Maples around

This is the challenge of extreme weather, it's either drought or floods, and wild swings from the one to the other. As a kid growing up in Australia, we heard many such stories, especially if the rains came on too suddenly, since then the ground can't absorb the water, and you get flash floods.

As if being a farmer isn't already tough enough.

I must admit I was utterly clueless before watching that show, what an eye opener. I hope Jeremy will be OK regarding his health, he is a national treasure.

He used to mock global warming and its advocates but thats visibly thing of the past once he got off his high ego horse behind the wheel and proverbially smelled the grass/coffee out in the countryside.

The Clarkson who ran a popular car show and for years mocked Greta Thunberg and called her an "idiot" that deserved a "smacked bottom" for raising the alarm on global warming?

Oh, noe, I feel so sorry for him. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

But yes, the intensity and especially the duration of the heat has intensified. I stopped visiting my family in the south of Europe around five years ago, and visit in either fall or spring. Can't really take the heat, it's not worth it.

It sounds drastic, but all I keep hearing is that we need drastic actions, but those drastic actions seem to always be based on diffuse, abstract, and really rather meaningless and insignificant things like reducing energy use, while at the same time driving tens of millions of more people from low energy consumption regions into relatively high energy consumption regions.

But to address your point too, yes, Europe seems too be shifting into a different climate, but it's because based on my theory, Europe has effectively drained it's water cycle of the very moisture it needs. Sure, climate change has warmed things everywhere, but don't you think if Europe had the moisture it drained into the oceans that could evaporate under the higher heat into clouds that both would provide ray reflection/shadow/cooling, and deposit rain into the alps in the form of snow in winter; things would likely look a lot different?

The thing is that the source does not have to be gone, because it is actually not in Europe at all, but you have to kind of "kickstart" the cycle again if that is even possible. The source of European moisture in the European water cycle is effectively the USA and the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean area. The Gulf Stream then drives that moisture by way of the energy in the water towards Europe, where it then is driven inland from the north through the cooling at the poles.

What I am saying is effectively, if you drain your lawn with elaborate drainage systems that suck all the moisture out at a faster rate than you can even water it, you should not be surprised that it still will dry up and die.

There are clearly things going on, e.g., the US has not really had anywhere near the number of hurricanes that keep getting predicted, but I can assure you that the heat is generating a lot of storms and clouds. It's a bit anecdotal, but I am actually oddly surprised at how "cool" the ocean water is this year in particular compared to the past. I hope it's not the other wild prediction scientist have made that he AMOC seizes up and you guys end up wishing there were more global warming, but that's for another day.

May you live in interesting times

It's really not all that complicated when you realize what I am saying and it just seems to proximal for Europeans for some reason, i.e., they don't really seem to have a sense for how things were in the past, based on my experience talking to them, i.e., they think the rivers they have have always been more or less the way they currently are even if they are maybe manicured with banks or something. For additional context; the Rhein was up to 30 times wider than it is today before being straightened.

Here's a decent illustration of that [1] which shows not only how the river was straightened from the meandering oxbow river into the straight red river, but also notice that all of the green area is the historical path of the river and the flood plains it produced which would have been fed by all those meandering oxbows. All of that is now gone with the drainage of Europe having been completed over about 200 years now.

It's really not all that different in the USA either in case you were wondering, but e.g., the Mississippi has only been straightened since the 1930s and is still very much not really fully controlled even though the straightening along with deforestation and soil erosion has also led to the USA being essentially drained. And here too, people are wondering why it's getting dryer more. We have similarly also chocked our country full of way more people that can sustainably be supported in an ecologically sound manner, but liberals and conservatives have one thing in common, they slap the roof of the car and proclaim "this bad boy can fit so many f--king people in it." out of a toxic combination of lust for power, decadence, entitlement, and greed.

[1] https://eucorkarten.ub.uni-freiburg.de/wp-content/uploads/20...

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

Overall the state is 2.56" above normal for precipitation in 2026. Tompkins County is 4.3" above normal.

I dont know

We're going to have those anyway. Might as well make them count for something.

The tin-foil tongue in cheek joke in the refrigeration industry is "how do you know if a refrigerant is bad for the atmosphere?. because DuPont's patent expired".

Which is to say that R12 would've never gone out of fashion if not for big moneyed first world interests who have the ear of politicians whining that the 3rd world was gonna make and sell stuff cheaper and hurt their profits and that protecting the ozone layer only happened because it was good for big business. Subsequent changes in refrigerant are less flagrant but the undertone is still there. C02 never really caught on because you can just buy the stuff at any welding gas supply place for pennies, the entire supply chain stands to lose a source of profit with that as a refrigerant.

It won't work. You can absolutely trim a lot of fat from the modern lifestyle, but then you'll be left with a residual. Meanwhile the developing world will keep developing and we have no right to order them to stop.

The idea that it's not possible is bullshit too, and it's still bullshit even if you ignore nuclear power.

https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/0...

Back in the 2000s there was a ton of discourse around peak oil. As part of that, I recall reading very detailed breakdowns written by actual engineers and scientists arguing why you would never have a mass-market EV with the range of a gasoline car and you would never be able to power more than 10-20% of a modern economy with solar power. I own two EVs, one with gas-comparable range, and California currently gets almost 40% of its total electricity (averaged across day and night) from solar, and climbing. There were whole books on this. I think one was called Power Down. It was all 100% wrong.

I also recall reading detailed analyses by aerospace engineers about how you would never have a reusable rocket, that it was simply impossible or would cost so much it wouldn't be practical. First stage reusability is now routine, and second stage reusability is coming.

Detailed breakdowns of why X is impossible have an incredibly poor track record unless they reduce directly to the laws of physics. Will faster than light travel ever be possible? No, and I believe that, because if it was it would mean a huge part of modern physics (not just relativity) is wrong in very bonkers ways.

There is no first principles physics argument for the limits this guy is arguing.

Of course if you imagine infinite growth on a finite planet, that fails. That's a trivial argument. But that's not happening, probably due to birth rates declining. The question I'm addressing is: can this civilization and its near-future extrapolation be powered without fossil fuels? The answer is yes, and again even without nukes. Throw nukes in there and it just gets easier.

IMO this is 100% ideology and is an example of what I call "problemism." A "problemist" is someone who uses a problem as a stalking horse for one and only one solution that turns out to smuggle in some kind of ideological or social agenda.

I see problemism as a dishonest propaganda technique. It's a way to sell the idea without directly selling the idea, instead using concern over some other thing to smuggle it in.

So you know I'm not just picking on the left: right now there's a big freak-out on the right about birth rates. The problemists there argue that it's why we need to get back to ultra-traditional family structures and take rights away from women. They're not interested in any solution that doesn't do that, because they don't actually care about the problem. They only care about taking rights from women.

This guy and those like him only care about degrowth as part of what is probably some kind of anti-industrial political ideology. If the problem could be solved without it, that would be bad as far as they're concerned, just like how the far right doesn't care about solutions to birth rate decline issues that don't involve reactionary social agendas.

Most of these people are anti-capitalists. Thing is, I don't mind that. I don't think capitalism is the ordained perfect system. But if you want to sell me on an alternative to capitalism, argue for it directly on its merits. The test is: if climate change and fossil fuel depletion did not exist, could you still make your argument for abandoning capitalism in favor of your system? If not, then you're engaging in "problemism" to sell bullshit. Because there is no physical reason that you could not drastically cut CO2 emissions without abandoning capitalism. A simple progressive carbon tax combined with cheap renewables could do it. We just lack the political will.

Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find.

Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all of which are heated and cooled 24/7. How much energy do they use? What is that energy use in terms of average European households?"

I used European because Americans are notable energy pigs and can cut a lot without losing much. Europeans are closer to the reasonable baseline.

The total it comes up with for our gas-guzzling fat cat is 96-97 GWh per year. That's including three homes and a continuously operating jet aircraft. This is a totally ridiculous footprint, of course.

Claude Fable says the average European household uses about 15,000 kWh/year in electricity, heating, etc. That means our fat cat corresponds to about 6,400 average European households.

The population of Europe is around 750 million people.

There's about 3000 billionaires worldwide, and if they all lived as absurdly as my caricature they'd use 288 TWh per year.

That corresponds to around 19.2 million European households, or about 2.5% of the energy use of a middle class Europe.

The vast bulk of energy and resource use supports the middle class, and raising people out of poverty.

Inequality probably reduces energy use. If we improved equality it would mean more people with a basic middle class standard of living. A society in which almost everyone has a European middle class standard of living would consume far more energy than one in which a few fat cats live it up and everyone else is poor.

Personally I agree with the left at least a bit on this. I think we have too much inequality. If we reduce inequality, that will increase energy consumption, so we'd better build solar panels and batteries and reactors at the same time.

Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.

> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.

Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.

> This is an absurd strawman.

Need to read more degrowth fiction then.

> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)

The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.

> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.

Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.

We won't go back. That's the thing, the false option. I think you underestimate how much being poor sucks. I personally call this the "it's better to reign in hell" principle.

So if we are dumb and don't cut emissions, we will "reign in hell," and it'll look like a dark cyberpunk dystopia. There might also be some pretty nasty wars and genocides in there.

I think that's the real choice we have. If we reduce carbon emissions enough, we can blunt the effects of climate change and adapt without too much pain. If we don't, we get to LARP Bladerunner with billions taking shelter in air conditioned mega-blocks when the deadly heat waves hit.

Nature isn't happy life in harmony. Nature is suffering and death. It's an amoral Darwinian meat grinder.

Let me make it concrete. I have kids. Let's say you give me a choice.

Option 1: I go to the future where we live closer to nature, more primitively, but my daughter died of a childhood disease.

Option 2: I go to the future that looks like Bladerunner or Kowloon Walled City with killer heat waves requiring air conditioning to survive, but my child is alive because of modern medicine.

I'd pick two and so would most people, which is why we'll never go back. The infant and child mortality rates alone in "wild nature" are enough to turn people away. It's better to reign in hell.

But I don't think we have to do that. We could do things like carbon taxes, provided we stop spending the social and political capital on guilt trip tactics and back to the land bullshit that will just be ignored, which is why I'm wasting my time ranting about this.

I'd take it.

They are the biggest economic force bar none (at least for now, lets see in few years when their car industry will be mostly a thing of the past). They steer 500+ million continent like a fiddle.

I have to crap on Merkel here yet again - she was horrible, utterly despicable leader. Much of the backlash in popularity of extreme right across Europe is her doing. She killed nuclear which wasn't in greatest shape, but it was well before we had actual replacements. She studied as nuclear physicist. Europe as a continent would be in much better shape politically, economically, militarily and socially if she didn't get so much power for so long. German ADF is completely her doing.

Of course when she met real power dealers like putin she caved immediately so he played her like those proverbial fiddles.

With that further changes can be very quick as forcing EV no longer requires reallocating money from other things.

No nuclear accident has involved a reactor built after the 1960s. Yet we regulate as if a dozen more Chernobyls have happened

What tax number do you have in mind for "effective"?

$100 per ton or maybe $200 per ton would have massive differences on industry but wouldn't prevent modern convenience at all.

I wrote a comment here, you can of course fact check all I said and investigate more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49502880

1. a single cow produces 250 grams of methane per day. Methane is insanely more dangerous to the environment than CO2. A single adult cow pollutes in a day as much as a car driven for 165 miles. And that's only for emissions.

2. As a cow does not pollute just what it emits, you need to add the lifecycle: cows need to be fed. 80% of the food we humans grow goes to feed animals, not humans. Beef gets the lion share. So we consumes insane amounts of money, fertilizers, gas, just to feed cows, that pollute like crazy anyway. The amount of water cattle consume (from drinking to the one needed to grow food) is also extreme.

3. Cows produce a lot of waste, that ends up in rivers. Along fertilizers (mostly used to grow food for cattle anyway), it pollutes so much that waters around souther US are essentially dead.

4. By mass, beef alone, outmatches every single land animal on this planet, combined. You could put on a scale every single tiger, domestic dog, rabbit, squirrel, horse, hyppo, kangaroo, etc, etc, etc on the planet. They would weight less than the cows we grow.

4. Red meat is a category 1 carcinogenic. You should eat it rarely. I don't know where you get your nutritional facts, maybe from Joe Rogan?

In essence, you demonstrate fully my point: we humans don't want to know really what our impact on the planet is, and we're happily distracted into the "just buy an electric SUV" trolling.

The population didn't choose for convenience. The billionaires chose for additional profit.

Portugal is heavily dependent on tourism: it's 10% of the GDP. In the EU not even France is that high: Spain is higher but Portugal's economy definitely depends on tourism.

When stats says: "10% is tourism, 40% is services", if you remove the 10% linked to tourism, the services economy does crash too. And so does the 20% that is "construction": a part of that is second effects from tourism.

You can't just say: "We'll just remove 10% of our GDP and we'll be fine". Firstly even at "only" 10% you'd be totally screwed and then anyway the actual number would be much higher.

Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.

Framing it as such is doing propaganda's work.

Oil is a drug for the world’s economies. If you remove it, the economy plummets with billions of starving people because everything is grown, produced or transported using fossil fuels

Also, if it weren’t so profitable.

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...

I'm also in Western Europe and almost always needed a car for my commutes to work, unless I was willing to accept a 1-2+ h public transport commute each way, because tech employers where I live love locating their offices in the sticks where land is cheap because they're broke and cheap, and the city hasn't significantly updated public transport infrastructure in ~30 years, but the population and size of the metro area grew by like 3x.

>Before people tell me that I am an exception: I know other people like me in various other places in Europe!

The thing is, Western Europe is not a country, but a collection of various countries with various economies, cities, and infrastructure, and various people with various housing and career locations, some close and well connected to public transport, some not at all, and from my circle of acquaintances, yes, you are the exception, as most people I know get to work by car.

So, you can't possibly throw such blanket statement over everyone in Western Europe, unless you're massively obtuse or living in a bubble without realizing it.

Like, I'm sure most people in Munich, Paris, London, Madrid, Vienna, etc can easily get to work on the excellent public transport they have, but I don't live there and don't have such amazing public transport, so then car it is for us.

>It is possible and actually good for your body to have to move, at least to the train station, carrying groceries etc.

Bruh, I only need a car just to get to work in reasonable time, not to move or carry groceries.

I get my groceries from the supermarkets 5-10 minute walking distance to my place, but I don't have the luxury of employment jobs within the same distance, so car it is, unless I want to be wasting my life switching connections between slow and infrequent trams, busses and trains which often suffer delays.

And regarding the "body movement" as a pro for public transport, I'd rather have more free time to move in gym and to the workouts my body condition needs, rather than waste my time walking and sitting/standing on public transport, as that's not an actual workout but a waste of time, as all you can do is browse HN on the phone with the hand that's not grabbing the bar. Driving is also a waste of time, but at least it saves me almost 1 hour each way which is massive time save that I can use how I like.

https://assets-global.website-files.com/6329bc97af73223b5759...

Unless you count the historical city center of Venice as a big city I doubt you'd get many big cities getting even close to those numbers

I can't easily/quickly find some numbers but if we want to accept, with a grain of salt, Gemini research on this even in Venice (I think it counts Mestre as well) it's ~15% and that's the highest it found.

EDIT: 12% is all of Europe. This thread is about the EU.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions