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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 pa

• shay_ker 4y ago
  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.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    This is one our of biggest flaws - Being reactive instead of proactive. It doesn't always work.
    • FerretFred 4y ago
      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...
      • eCa 4y ago
        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-ago-lithuania-broke-russian-gas-monopoly-but-at-what-cost https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1111346/five-years-...
  • the_cramer 4y ago
    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.
    • fitch321 4y ago
      • powerhour 4y ago
        This reads like you're looking for a fight by using the least charitable interpretation of the quote.
        • actually_a_dog 4y ago
          Yeah, it's only really "us vs them" in the sense that "they" don't seem to realize they're also really "us."
          • fitch321 4y ago
            Obama would say "we"
      • ARandomerDude 4y ago
        I say "folks" as a 1:1 synonym for "people" and only recently became aware that some folks/people find this in some way derogatory. I think it's a regional thing.
        • mattnewton 4y ago
          I’ve pretty much been using “folks” as a gender neutral “guys” because I find “people” potentially problematic (some constructions like “you folks” or “you all” are pretty much always casual while “you people” can sound charged, etc). I think this is common? Haven’t heard of people taking offense to “folks” before.
  • Workaccount2 4y ago
    Nobody does anything until there are bodies on the ground.
    • CalRobert 4y ago
      Bodies that look like their own, too often.
  • ricogallo 4y ago
    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.
    • actually_a_dog 4y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law
      • ricogallo 4y ago
        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.
    • bmitc 4y ago
      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.
  • fitch321 4y ago
    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
  • iforgotpassword 4y ago
    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.
    • anoplus 4y ago
      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.
      • smileysteve 4y ago
        > 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.
        • raxxorraxor 4y ago
          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.
      • voisin 4y ago
        > 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)?
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    • oezi 4y ago
      Are you trolling? It just requires on the order of 1x GDP to install enough renewables and storage to start reversing climate change. It is totally doable, but people are just trying to skirt the costs of climate neutrality.
      • nspattak 4y ago
        if by storage you mean batteries, are you sure that their production/usage/recycling makes up for the environmental cost of producing/recycling them? I am all in for green energy but we have to be honest and estimate well, otherwise we will simply continue as we are now (if not make matters worst)
        • ben_w 4y ago
          I am certain that is the case for batteries. Recycling is always easier than digging up and processing the rocks which contain a few percent by weight of each relevant element, and they're already a net win (with regards to CO2) even if you do that.
          • ekianjo 4y ago
            > Recycling is always easier than digging up Easier? Most of stuff that is supposed to be recycled ends up in landfills.
        • iso1631 4y ago
          A common trope is "this replacement (nuclear/wind/solar) isn't perfect so lets keep building fossil fuels" Every 1kwh produced by a windmill is 1kwh less of oil being burnt. We don't exactly have an abundance of energy at the moment, there's no excuse not to be diverting vast amounts of planetary resources into renewable production.
      • 4y ago
  • hamilyon2 4y ago
    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?
    • mmanfrin 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_VI:_Gathering_Storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_VI:_Gathering_Sto...
      • prepend 4y ago
        It was also in civ2 as a base feature.
      • iso1631 4y ago
        In all the civ games it's always been manageable relatively easily
    • wishfish 4y ago
      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.
  • danenania 4y ago
    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.
  • mym1990 4y ago
    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.
  • Flip-per 4y ago
    I wonder whether frogs have a tale about how humans behave on a warming up planet.
  • tomp 4y ago
    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.
    • jgb1984 4y ago
      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).
      • CogitoCogito 4y ago
        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_.
    • Tsukiortu 4y ago
      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.
  • pengaru 4y ago
    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.
• spuz 4y ago
  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.
  • bennyp101 4y ago
    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
    • DrBazza 4y ago
      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/weather-and-climate/2022/july-heat-review https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...
      • bjourne 4y ago
        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.
        • 4y ago
• m4tthumphrey 4y ago
  I have noticed this too. The grass usually turns somewhat yellow but this year has been next level.
  • Ntrails 4y ago
    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.
    • cjrp 4y ago
      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.
• biotinker 4y ago
  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.
• cassepipe 4y ago
  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.
  • Workaccount2 4y ago
    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.
    • triceratops 4y ago
      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.
      • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        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.
    • tomrod 4y ago
• DaedPsyker 4y ago
  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.
  • csharpminor 4y ago
    It is a subliminal response to protect oneself from guilt and fear of change / death.
  • revscat 4y ago
    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.
    • tragictrash 4y ago
      Oh no baby got a boo boo. Call the waaaaaaambulance. You don't understand what you're asking for.
    • actually_a_dog 4y ago
      Absolutely. At this point, I'd consider use of force on this matter to be self defence.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • bodge5000 4y ago
    > 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
• philk10 4y ago
  The Guardian had some pictures which really showed it (including one of Greenwich park) - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2022/aug/08/europes-worst-ever-drought-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2022/aug/08/...
  • kergonath 4y ago
    That picture is haunting. I don’t think I have ever seen this lawn anything but vibrant green.
• bmitc 4y ago
  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.
  • benstrumental 4y ago
    > 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.
    • bambataa 4y ago
      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.
    • Glawen 4y ago
      >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.
• SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  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 https://historicdroughts.ceh.ac.uk/content/hot-summer-2003 2012: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17533235 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.
• jialutu 4y ago
  > 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.
  • smileysteve 4y ago
    > 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"
    • jialutu 4y ago
      > 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!
• pjc50 4y ago
  > 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-record-profits-as-energy-crisis-continues/ 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.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    Agreed, quarterly earnings reports will be the death of us, at the present rate the Apocalypse will roughly coincide with record profits.
    • ch4s3 4y ago
      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.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        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/10.1007/978-3-642-28036-8_223 https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-6...
• christkv 4y ago
  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-1975-1976 https://historicdroughts.ceh.ac.uk/content/standpipe-drought...
• _ph_ 4y ago
  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.
• hammock 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
  • hyperbovine 4y ago
    Your point being?
    • short_sells_poo 4y ago
      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?
      • kergonath 4y ago
        > 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.
• coffee_beqn 4y ago
  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.
  • fatherzine 4y ago
    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.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      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.
• stinos 4y ago
  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.
• ab_testing 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWpui1P9cAY
  • michaelt 4y ago
    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.
    • shagie 4y ago
      (discovered from another comment) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2022/aug/08/europes-worst-ever-drought-in-pictures 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
• easytiger 4y ago
  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/weather-and-climate/2022/driest-july-in-england-since-1935 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
• CalRobert 4y ago
  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!"
• verisimi 4y ago
  Not sure how old you are, but there have been hot summers before!
• silicon2401 4y ago
  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