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Europe's new climate in seven charts
- Natfan 3mo agoto me, these heatwaves feel like the start of the end of human existence
- inigyou 3mo agoPeople one or two generations before you felt that about the cold war.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoThe cold war never heated up. Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal.
- xienze 3mo agoWon't the climate change naturally even in the absence of fossil fuels? Like it has during all of history? What's "normal" is based on a small slice of human history, which itself is a small slice of the planet's history.
- DFHippie 3mo agoIt isn't the fact of change but the rate of change which is anomalous.
- sfn42 3mo agoYour question betrays the fact that you simply don't understand the scale of what's happening. Imagine a line chart. It displays average global temperature over millions of years. It goes up a little, it goes down a little, it fluctuates over time. That's the natural change. It occurs over thousands and millions of years. Looking at the last few decades on that chart, you'll see a wall. It's going almost straight up compared to the rest that just meanders lazily. You can see a few other similar peaks on the chart many millions of years in the past, they generally correspond with things like apocalyptic meteorite impacts etc. And even then the change occurs much more slowly than what we're seeing now. It's honestly insane to me that we're watching the world end and half of people are like "but are we sure this isn't normal?" Yes we're sure. We double checked. Just look at any "global average temperature" chart and try to predict where it's going. This isn't the stock market it won't just randomly start doing something else. The movement we're seeing is directly correlated to our ghg emissions, and there's a lag - the effects of current emissions won't be fully seen until up to two decades from now. So even if we stopped right now it would continue warming for decades. Warming also releases more GHGs. As poles and permafrost thaws, enormous amounts of methane are released that was previously trapped, further accelerating warming and acting as a positive feedback loop on top of our steadily rising emissions. In short were fucked, we know it, and anyone who doesn't know is not paying attention.
- tasuki 3mo ago> it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal No. There is no such thing as "normal" climate. It's ever changing. We're just making the change a whole lot faster.
- simmerup 3mo agoReplace 'normal' with 'optimal for humanity' then., I'm sure the lizards will love the new normal though.
- gitaarik 3mo agoWhat's "normal" really? You could argue the climate has never actually been normal, or it always has been and always will
- notrealyme123 3mo agoI think thats the wrong level of abstraction. The cold war ended, but clima change will not end.
- iso1631 3mo agoNuclear winter may cancel it out.
- underdeserver 3mo agoIt can change, if we get to net negative emissions. Not probable but possible.
- phreeza 3mo agoOr solar geoengineering? Which is scary but becoming more likely it seems.
- adrianN 3mo agoIt will just take at least three or four generations to get back to 90's climate, provided we don't trigger any irreversible tipping points, like the melting of the permafrost, in which case the climate is messed up for millennia.
- blooalien 3mo agoThe melting of the permafrost is already underway and it's not looking good for any hope of it slowing down, and that's only one (of many) irreversible tipping point we're facing right now. But hey, it'll be fine because it's all just "fake news" anyhow. (I wish that were actually true about it not being real, but it's crystal clear to anyone with an IQ higher than a houseplant that the scientists were right all along and we really should have started acting on all this stuff decades ago.) :(
- epgui 3mo agoThe word abstraction does not mean the same thing as the words analogy or comparison.
- freetonik 3mo agoWell, they had a point, and we've got pretty close to that outcome. It didn't happen, thus today we're able to discuss the fact that it didn't happen.
- IneffablePigeon 3mo agoThe conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. Despite what the carbon capture techno optimists say.
- joe_mamba 3mo ago>The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. During the covid start lockdowns when everyone was forced to WFH and nobody was driving to work for a couple of weeks, we saw a massive decrease in CO2 and emissions. So it can be reversed, we just don't want to because we gotta keep the GDP hamster wheel moving
- rsynnott 3mo agoWe did not see a massive decrease. We saw a short-lived drop to levels normal in the mid tens. It is barely a blip on the graph. WFH won’t save us, unfortunately.
- joe_mamba 3mo agoMy bad, I was only talking about the readings in my city, not the whole planet. I assumed it would scale to the whole planet in that period.
- rsynnott 3mo agoAh. I’d consider _city-level_ readings an absolutely useless metric here, because, particularly if it’s a city with a large commuter hinterland, a lot of people were simply not present in the city, but still existed out there somewhere, running their heating/cooling/etc. Daytime populations of large cities generally dropped during the covid wfh period, so yeah, no shit CO2 emissions dropped; people were off emitting CO2 elsewhere.
- sfn42 3mo agoIf you actually look at the numbers of carbon capture its entirely obvious that it can't work. It's honestly strange to me that they even waste money on it, personally I think it's a distraction - "look we're working on a fix, now let us just pump up the rest of this oil in the mean time and we'll definitely fix it later". In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture facilities equivalent to the largest one we currently have. For comparison, the number of power plants in the entire world is a few tens of thousands. So we'd need maybe like 50 times as many capture plants as we currently have power plants. Like it's not even in the neighbourhood of realistic, it's just completely infeasible and I am sure engineers know that. You basically need to suck the whole atmosphere through facilities, and there's a lot of atmosphere.
- iso1631 3mo agoThere's a lot of worry about the future, and has been since world-ending threats became apparent However while apocalypse scenarios (Nuclear war, asteroid impact, AI powered biological warfare) are low likelihood, extreme impact, climate change is extreme likelihood and high impact, not just the immediate effect on places like Europe, Canada etc, but also from the conflicts that climate change will drive, which in turn may escalate to those extreme impact nuclear wars. On a 5x5 matrix, grand extinction events would be a 5 for effect but a 1 for likelihood, putting them in a "medium-high" category Climate change is a 3-4 on effect but a 4-5 o likelihood, putting them in a "very-high" risk category
- graemep 3mo agoSpace weather that would bring down our systems is not such low likelihood. I am not convinced nuclear war or biological warfare are as unlikely as you think. We have historically had narrow escapes from nuclear war.
- hyperbovine 3mo agoClimate change also greatly increases the chance of a huge global conflict breaking out.
- graemep 3mo agoIt might raise the chance of some conflicts (e.g. over Antarctica or Russia's border) and some land grabs, but I cannot see it leading to a world war.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoThat largely depends on to what degree food production collapses in newly-tropical regions. A whole bunch of staple agricultural production isn't going to survive widespread drought and heatwaves, and everyone dependent on those food sources is going to end up very hungry, and taking a hard look at cooler neighbouring regions...
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- yde_java 3mo agoResearch past heat waves in Europe. Did your grand parents felt the same as you?
- maipen 3mo agoEvery year people complain about the cold, heat and allergies. Even if they live 200 years, it would always be the same. People get use to it, it goes away, cycle repeats. Nobody remembers exactly unless they had a near death experience.
- Yokolos 3mo agoWhy don't you research past heat waves? We're literally setting new heat records nearly every year. This year the heat record in Germany went from 39 degrees to 42. We're even setting night time heat records because of how bad it is. I don't understand the impulse to ignore what we're experiencing right now. What do you gain by sticking your head in the sand?
- yde_java 3mo agoAsk your grandparents about "Die große Dürre 1947" in Germany. Near entirely dried-up rivers and reservoirs, lakes three meters below normal, roughly half a million cattle emergency-slaughtered in Bavaria, hydroelectric shutdowns forcing power rationing, and forest fires along the Bavarian–Austrian border. Sure we have an all time high now, but currently there's still too much water as one could stick their head into the soil of the Elbe and Rhine.
- abroszka33 3mo agoThat used to be once in a lifetime event. Now we have temperatures like that two or three times every decade and soon it's going to be a normal summer temperature.
- freetonik 3mo agoWhy does it matter how humans _felt_?
- 3mo ago
- xienze 3mo agoSerious question, are you doing a simple extrapolation and assuming in 10 years Europe is going to have 60C heatwaves or something?
- pillefitz 3mo agoThis doesn't sound like a serious question
- xienze 3mo agoIt does when people start talking about a heatwave as being the "start of the end of human existence." It strongly implies that these trends will wipe out humanity in very short order. Perhaps even within the lifetimes of people in this thread. What I find most amusing is people somehow think climate change will end humanity faster than what's _actually_ on track to do so, and quickly: people having children well below replacement levels.
- inigyou 3mo agoBoth are temporary. Hopefully the reduction in population leads to a more sustainable humanity that changes the climate less. BTW both of these have been predicted since the 80s.
- swiftcoder 3mo ago> people having children well below replacement levels You do realise that the global population is still increasing? While birthrates are falling, we aren't even predicted to hit the peak for another half-century. Even pessimistic estimates put it in the 2200s before we fall back to current population levels. Which is ~100 years longer than current estimates give us before the effects of climate change starts taking a bite out of the world population
- intended 3mo agoI too am curious as to why that is the feature they are concerned about. As I recall there was a UN survey that found financial security was the most common reason for adults across the globe to choose not having children. Income levels are highly dependent on the degree of stability and monthly expenses that households can expect.
- pjmlp 3mo agoIf we don't nuke ourselves first.
- abroszka33 3mo agoYeah, that seems like our only realistic solution to the climate crisis.
- pjmlp 3mo agoWe were somehow on the good path after covid, then world leaders decided killing each other folks was more relevant goal, followed by making big tech bros even more rich with AI centers. Meanwhile paperstraws, and glued bottle caps, are supposed to save the planet.
- A_D_E_P_T 3mo agoNah. It's really as simple as this: Southern climates are moving north. (In the northern hemisphere.) If you want a vision of the future, consider a New England that looks more like the Southeast. There will be winners and losers. As climate zones move toward the poles, weather patterns and agricultural viability will shift with them. This will eventually turn current breadbaskets into deserts while warming up northern/southern regions for longer growing seasons. Various regions will cross ecological thresholds, causing sudden, dramatic shifts in local climates. For example, a warmer Earth could bring monsoon rains back to the Sahara and Arabian deserts, turning them green once again. In general, a warmer world is a wetter world due to increased oceanic evaporation. Sea levels will gradually begin rising, but perhaps at a rate of 1-2" per year. It takes a lot of heat to melt glaciers. Human existence is not in doubt on account of the climate alone -- our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with -- but there could be mass population movements and alterations in how agriculture is handled globally. Current political structures are not up to this challenge.
- mike_hock 3mo agoClimate change itself is not gonna endanger humans as a species, but secondary effects might. Such as wars resulting from dramatic shifts in the value of territories and wars over resources.
- A_D_E_P_T 3mo agoWar won't end human existence. If there's one thing you can learn from the recent wars in Iran and Ukraine, it's that conventional air-bombing has acquired a terrible cost:efficacy ratio that cannot be sustained, that drones have leveled the playing field on the ground, and that attackers generally appear to lack the stomach for mass mobilization and mass casualties in war. Again, there'll be winners and losers. Some in fortresses; others in famines and droughts. It is, of course, imperative that we do what we can do now to mitigate this. But the continuation of the human species is, I am sure, not in doubt. Our ancestors in prehistoric times have, assuredly, gone through FAR worse, including real population bottlenecks.
- khurs 3mo agoRelax, it's just the start of more Air Con sales in Europe.
- mike_hock 3mo agoBuy aircon stocks now!
- gh2k 3mo agouk here. I've been trying to by a portable AC unit for a couple of weeks and every single retailer is sold out nationwide.
- Aachen 3mo agoDon't get the portable ones. I made the mistake in 2019 and the thing is abysmally loud, barely gets the temperature 2 degrees lower in a single room, uses twice as much electricity as the rest of the household combined, and you still can't work from the heat and noise. That's with a window replaced by an insulating panel with a round cut-out for the hose, not a cracked window like you see most people needing to do. I've compared about two dozen units in a spreadsheet and this one was clearly the best buy, so I don't think it's just my unit I totally recommend airco but only the split units that actually provide relief. Still a lot of energy but I feel differently about that consumption when it's not mostly wasted The mobile ones are nice to aim at you though, I'll give them that much. For the effect they give, you might nearly just as well run it outside (anywhere in the shade) and aim it at you. Then the noise also doesn't reflect off the walls so that's more bearable, too Btw the split units, as a bonus, can usually also heat the room(s) they're in. The UK has quite a lot of (planned) wind power year round, so reducing gas consumption will also cut back on the fuels that are causing this
- khurs 3mo agoA lot of people are renting in UK now, so they will need permission to install a perm one?
- ricardo81 3mo agoThe prophecies always were about water stress and food security. How that plays out, I don't know. If it's anything like the recent energy spikes it means burdening future generations of wealthy countries with subsidised amenities while others go without.
- newsclues 3mo agoWhen food and water become scare, conflicts arise.
- ricardo81 3mo agoyes, essentially. But gets hidden behind wealthier countries tucking away the debt.
- est31 3mo agoThere is a lot of desertification of farmland going on, including in the USA. It gets abstracted away for richer countries as they can outbid the poorer countries for food. In developed economies, most of a particular piece of food's price is not the costs that go to the farmer, but costs that come later in the process, so that cost increasing is also felt less. Heatwaves on the other hand affect the western countries directly.
- kubb 3mo agoLet's keep going. I almost have enough for _.
- graemep 3mo agoWhy such short term graphs? One of them only goes back 1991, and the longest term only goes back to 1946.
- realo 3mo agoYes... why!! Let's go back... ah, I see mile-high glaciers over London. Global warming did occur in the past as well.
- graemep 3mo agoHow is that a reason to exclude it from the graph? Surely including it in the charts would strengthen the case for regarding it as a long term problem? Excluding it subtly suggests that global warming is a short term phenomenon.
- rsynnott 3mo agoI’d assume lack of quality high resolution data. Weather stations all over the place, with records preserved indefinitely, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
- petesergeant 3mo agoIf you’re wondering who to blame, as little as ten years ago: “Republican Senate environment chief uses snowball as prop in climate rant”[0] It’s an interesting plot twist in Termination Shock, where the popularist right shifts overnight from “it’s fake” to “real, but the liberals/globalists/experts betrayed us by doing nothing useful”. A reframe from environmentalism into grievance politics, which is already becoming real in France[1]. 0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/26/senate-james-inhofe-snowball-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/26/senate-james... 1: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gyqldl3p5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gyqldl3p5o
- stinkbeetle 3mo agoUSA is around 18th country in CO2 emissions per capita, and has reduced emissions per capita around as much as the combined EU since 2000, or a little more. Can't see how some random politician is "to blame", that's pretty absurd claim, and not supported by the claimed evidence.
- defrost 3mo agoAnd the consumption habits of the USA are responsible for how many more tonnes of CO2 emissions that are not onshore within the USA ? The USA was far and away the very worst global source for a very long time, that only changed by offshoring the processing and manufacture that feeds US consumption.
- stinkbeetle 3mo ago> And the consumption habits of the USA are responsible for how many more tonnes of CO2 emissions that are not onshore within the USA ? Probably quite a few thanks to globalist politicians among all major political parties to offshore production to countries with fewer regulations and much higher emissions intensity of production. But it would not be the highest emissions per capita. Much the same as the EU. The handwringing and self-flagellation still does not suffice for actual evidence for blaming one idiot politician in one country performing a political stunt. You clowns think this is a Captain Planet cartoon where there's a few evil moustache twirling dudes setting out to wreck the environment and you just need to defeat them and everyone around the world joins hands and its smooth sailing for the rest of eternity. You must be forever bewildered about the state of the world and shocked at the news of completely normal and foreseeable things happening, like energy being very valuable, and people wanting to buy things cheaply. I can assure you if Mr. Snowball here had never been born, there would be absolutely no difference to the current situation. If the North American landmass did not exist at all, fossil fuel use would still be causing the same kind of global carbon pollution. > The USA was far and away the very worst global source for a very long time, that only changed by offshoring the processing and manufacture that feeds US consumption. Petrostates have been much worse by emissions per capita.
- bilsbie 3mo ago[flagged]
- jplrssn 3mo ago> It kind of feels like these countries rediscover summer every year. The graphs in the article somewhat disprove that.
- bilsbie 3mo agoWould they include graphs that didn’t?
- gh2k 3mo agoyes. every summer the records are broken again because it was warmer than the previous one. That's why the news repeats.
- thewhitetulip 3mo agoWhy is it that aggressive climate action is not taken still?
- mike_hock 3mo agoTragedy of the commons.
- titzer 3mo agoBecause rich people want more money. They keep saying it's for the good of humanity and some useful idiots keep repeating that. A more balanced tax policy, regulation of financial markets, incentives to renewals, stopping investment in fossil fuels, increasing energy efficiency, and rewilding could all help, but we won't do a lick of it, because every single one of those things goes against the billionaires who own the political class.
- makapuf 3mo agoI'm 100% behind it, but would regulation of financial markets and balanced tax policy do for global warming ? Sure heavy regulation of industries and fossil fuels usage but financial markets, im not sure.
- inigyou 3mo agoFinancial markets are the reason nobody has top-down control, because the market has control. I don't remember where I read that where employees in companies think AI is stupid but their manager wants them to, the manager also thinks AI is stupid but the CEO wants them to, the CEO also thinks AI is stupid but the board wants them to, the board thinks AI is stupid but investors want them to, and when they interview some investors, they don't give a shit about AI, why would they. Nobody is steering the ship. It's just drifting aimlessly in random self-perpetuating cycles. That's because financial markets are steering the ship but they don have any brains. If we put humans in charge of the ship again, we might be able to actually steer it and then we could steer it away from the iceberg that is climate change before we hit that iceberg.
- bob001 3mo agoAnd yet many Europeans will still argue that ACs are evil and they shouldn't have them despite an estimated 175k heat related deaths per year. Although maybe this heat wave will change some minds.
- Sharlin 3mo agoAlways fun, having to fight a problem caused by X by doing more X. At least there’s the silver lining that solar production and the need for AC go hand in hand.
- bob001 3mo agoYes, all that CO2 generated by nuclear power plants and renewable energy is terrible. But I guess if enough people die then Europe's carbon emissions will also go down so it's a win! And thank you for proving my point.
- Sharlin 3mo ago~50% share (in some countries much higher) fossil-based electricity is still 50% fossil-based electricity.
- stavros 3mo agoThen don't do that.
- bob001 3mo agoThat tends to happen when you spend a couple decades shutting down the non-fossil fuel energy sources. Germany used to be 30% nuclear up to 2005 so well past climate change is real times. Now it's around 1%.
- Sharlin 3mo agoI know. But it is what it is now.
- makapuf 3mo agoWhat strikes me is the relative sharp change. CO2 has been rising since, what 250 years ? However real effects of global warming seems to be felt since, like 10 years old ?
- inigyou 3mo agoThe year-to-year fluctuations are much stronger than the overall trend. We notice only the record-breaking years and then we feel like the change occurred in the past year.
- adrianN 3mo agoIt helps that every other year is a record breaking year.
- Sharlin 3mo agoThat’s very characteristic of highly nonlinear systems, and weather/climate is the textbook nonlinear system.
- Dumblydorr 3mo agoKeep in mind total emissions grew much much faster in our lifetime (let’s say 1980-2026) than in the prior 200 years, which was before most of the recent huge growth in Chinese and Indian emissions. Also the ocean and arctic were absorbing the majority of the heat. The arctics been going through these heat waves for 10 years, its white albedo decreasing and potentially permafrost melting making more effective emissions now. We must act. Stop eating beef. Stop taking trips if possible. Vote for those who care about climate, not bugaboos like immigration. We have real problems like climate, and jump-scare tribal problems like immigrants and foreigners, which are actually good for a nation. Saying this just having emerged from a heat dome, New England forest is not built for feels like 105F. Many living things in my own backyard are now heavily stressed by climate. We. Must. Act.
- inigyou 3mo agoWhat action will you take to ensure next year it's only 85F?
- k__ 3mo ago"Europe's rapid warming is partly the result of [...] a drop in the number of tiny polluting particles in the air. This means that less of the Sun's energy is reflected back into space, leaving more energy to heat the Earth's surface." Hmmm...
- rsynnott 3mo agoThis is a fairly well-known phenomenon, and sometimes comes up in geoengineering discussions. It’s dangerous ground; thing about fine particulate matter is you generally don’t want to breathe it.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoIdeally we would want a fine particulate that stays high in the atmosphere, and doesn't come down where we need to breathe
- astral_drama 3mo agoFine particulates aren't a problem if you wear a gas mask though.
- illiac786 3mo agoYay.
- mike_hock 3mo agoRevs the coal-rolling truck's engine. "Once and for all." "But ..." Revs the engine again. "ONCE AND FOR ALL!"
- dofm 3mo agoThis is now quite well-studied because we have had two periods in our own lifetimes (OK I guess maybe not in the lifetimes of some HN readers!), where we have cut air pollution radically almost overnight. 9/11 and the COVID pandemic transport shutdown. In both cases, the pan evaporation rate went up; in the case of 9/11 it went up very noticeably in a short period of time. Essentially: clean air == less "global dimming". Whether any really recent changes like the increasingly successful rollout of electric cars is yet having an effect, I don't know.
- comrade1234 3mo agoDon't worry. The AMOC is already collapsing. I live in Zurich, about the same latitude as the north tip of Maine. Winters here are pleasant - you have to go to the mountains to get snow. Once the Atlantic current that keeps Europe warm collapses maybe the glaciers can start growing again.
- Havoc 3mo agoYeah London was genuinely rough. Everything is built for cold not heat
- graemep 3mo agoA lot of older building worked a lot better. The downstairs of my Victorian terraced house in Cheshire stayed cool throughout the heatwave. A friend's far older house with very thick walls is extremely good at maintaining comfortable temperature in the summer.
- nemo44x 3mo agoTime to get AC in homes. Especially in the Uk Where homes are generally terraced/attached, small, and decently insulated. The costs to operate wouldn’t be too painful. Secondly, much of Western Europe (except Norway) needs to figure out how to bring energy costs way down. It’s so expensive compared to the USA and Canada and people take home significantly less money.
- jmyeet 3mo agoIt's hard to compare a shift in a probability distribution because people will hang on to outliers. We hear this every winter: "all I hear about is Global Warming but look at this record snow". But I do believe the empirical evidence for all this has gone well beyond statistical significance. The Wire is one of my all-time favorite shows in part because it's a story of institutional failure at every level. The police, the ports, the media, the schools and the city government. That's really what's going on here. Utility companies (in the US at least) prefer fossil fuels because they're more profitable. The wealthy prefer fossil fuels because a mine or an oil well is and always has been a massive wealth concentrator. Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity. There are far fewer profit opportunities so it doesn't happen. So fossil fuel companies have money to throw at politicians to enshrine their rent-seeking behavior. But most depressing is how many ordinary people buy into this system with some hand-waving about "jobs" even though renewables will be strictly better in basically every way at this point. Spain could become the energy powerhouse of Europe here. It's one of the most southernmost European countries and has plentiful sunshine. Additionally it has a lot of otherwise degraded land. According to Google, 200,000+ square kilometers. You build endless solar farms and UHVDC transmission lines across the continent and you could massively diminish the dependence on natural gas. All the tech for all of this already exists. It can be added incrementally. There's no 20+ year construction cycle like there is for any nuclear project. As an added benefit, this would likely help regenerate the soil as China has done. It's worth adding that the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s was a massive problem. Every utility in Europe should be nationalized. It's easier to subsidize energy shocks when you own the companies that are profiting from them.
- graemep 3mo ago> The wealthy prefer fossil fuels because a mine or an oil well is and always has been a massive wealth concentrator. lots of wealthy people are anti-fossil fuel. > Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity. it needs land. It increases the value of land. Wealthy people own lots of land. The main objections for switching to wind and solar are variability in output and the cost of building all the new stuff. > Spain could become the energy powerhouse of Europe here. It's one of the most southernmost European countries and has plentiful sunshine. Fine if you are Spanish. Not so good if you are from the north of Europe or somewhere with less spare land. > It's worth adding that the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s was a massive problem. Every utility in Europe should be nationalized. It's easier to subsidize energy shocks when you own the companies that are profiting from them. I think it would have the opposite effect. Its tempting to sustain the profits when you get them. I wonder whether the British government would be so keen on moving away from fossil fuels if it still owned BP?
- IshKebab 3mo agoAnd yet there are still climate change deniers here. Look at any BBC article about this where they enable comments and about a quarter of the upvotes are for denier comments. Absolutely insane.
- Luc 3mo agoIt's a damn shame that the EU's plan to reduce our already low emissions (<6% globally) to zero by 2050, at great cost to our collective wealth, will result in a reduction in global warming of less than 0.02 C (1). That is if industry doesn't just move to India, China, Indonesia, etc. (1) Based on the IPCC rule of thumb of 0.45 C increase per 1000 GtCO2 emissions, see e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/climate-change-2021-the-physical-science-basis/summary-for-policymakers/8E7A4E3AE6C364220F3B76A189CC4D4C https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/climate-change-2021-the...
- metalman 3mo agoUnfortunately, the headline, like ALL of the rest for decades, is woefully conservative and fails to address the real situation, and more probmilmaticaly the failure modes of intense climate change. The current (daily) charts and maps as all in record teritory, with changes so extream as to suggest that there could be unmanageable conditions in our imediate future. https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/ https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/ https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/ edit: The charts shown in the article, show the institutional insanity, by greying out Ireland, speaking of "europe", but showing only data for England.
- BrandoElFollito 3mo agoI don't get the chart with the tropical nights. It is not as if there was a heat dome that is specifically sitting on the cities. It is more because the cities are so bad in heat control that they get tropical night via inertia.
- yread 3mo agoNot that it invalidates the article but the previous record for Czech republic was 40.4 not 39 degrees (see VIII/August below) https://www.chmi.cz/namerena-data/historicka-data/historicke-extremy-pocasi https://www.chmi.cz/namerena-data/historicka-data/historicke...
- hdgvhicv 3mo agoThese are June records. Yours lols like an August temperature.
- morgengold 3mo agoHumanity has decided we can't be bothered with this climate thing. We are busy making money and can't be distracted. So welcome everyone! I'll be a hell of a ride.