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Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
- hasanpiker 1mo ago[flagged]
- ghurtado 1mo ago[flagged]
- MomsAVoxell 1mo agoI read it more as an uncompleted copy-editor’s note, more like (todo: insert dollar value here), than a banal reference.
- tracerbulletx 1mo agoThat does not really make sense. Millions of euros is also millions of dollars. It's not an exact number, why would they have a currency conversion.
- MomsAVoxell 1mo agoWell, million euro’s is currently about 1,158,300.00 United States Dollars, so maybe the copy editor looked at the number and didn’t want to offend the sensibilities of their readers .. anyway, the point is, I don’t think this (parentheses) indicates a dumbing down of anything, other than maybe a sleepy editor who didn’t catch its distraction ..
- gwbas1c 1mo agoBecause, when mentioning a monetary value in a US publication, it's always common to show the value in USD next to it.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- drstewart 1mo agoThis is what Europeans are worried about, while thousands of you die from heat warnings?
- ghurtado 1mo agoI don't know what Europeans are worried about. You'd have to ask them. Who's dying from "heat warnings"? Are you trying to make my point about rampant idiocy in my country? If you were assuming that I'm European for some dumb reason, then rest assured I'm not worried about this passing thought on the writing style of a publication I never read. Thank you for your concern, but I will be alright.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- yostrovs 1mo agoThe article is shining a light on a serious, potentially devastating situation in Europe. You, due to ignorance or misunderstanding, point out that Americans are supposedly stupid because millions of dollars are roughly millions of euros. But the underlying problem is that it is the Europeans that are worried the most about climate change, and are the ones that have refused to implement mitigating strategies that would help overcome the challenge. They lack energy resources, the will to take action, and rely on blaming others for their predicament. But it is stupid Americans with their energy, air conditioning, and water reservoirs.
- rafram 1mo agoI imagine their style guide says non-dollar currency amounts always need to have a dollar conversion. There are lots of Americans who won’t know the current USD-EUR ratio off the top of their heads. It has fluctuated over the years and used to be significantly further from parity, and we essentially never buy goods priced in euros here.
- netsharc 1mo agoI like to rant about "journalists" just copy-pasting Apple's claims that it's recycling program retrieved "more than 2204lb of gold". So is it no more than 2205lb? And why the specific number? Oh is it because in their "environmental report", they just got round numbers in metric (e.g. here 1000kg) and converted them to imperial? (There were about 10 of those numbers, and they all have the same issue). And the concept of significant figures was missed by the school curriculum of everyone involved?
- NooneAtAll3 1mo agoI think you misread. It's not "euros is dollars", it's "millions of euros is millions of dollars", simply saying that conversion rate is close enough to 1:1 that no new number is needed
- beej71 1mo agoIt's just a monetary conversion and it's in their style guides. How much is "millions of euros" in dollars? Answer: "millions of dollars". If they'd said "it's estimated to cost 1.5 million euros", they'd have added "(1.7 million dollars)". But since they didn't have a specific value, they just used the units.
- MomsAVoxell 1mo agoJust took a train ride from Vienna to Budapest for a few days, and couldn’t help but notice how very, very dry everything is .. as an Australian living in Europe for a few decades now, I’ve always been intrigued by just how green everything is, literally something growing in every single crack in the pavement, or endless rolling green fields of prosperity during spring - whereas, where I’m from its year-long spinifex and grass shrubs and wattles with the occasional bush flower bloom, barely hanging on out in the desert, mostly reds and blacks and greys, not much green - so the vibrancy of European fields and the abundant diversity of countryside flora have always been pleasant to my eyes .. During this trip, I was kind of shocked that things felt a bit more Australian to my eyes .. the grasses are dry and barren, the beautiful city parks of both Budapest and Vienna dustier than usual, the Danube water level definitely noticeably lower than I remember ever seeing. I’ve long been encouraging my European friends to not take the abundance of growth for granted, and now we see it in the environment, plain and clear: the worlds’ weather is changing. A week of sweltering heat is predicted for us again in Vienna, and as we get started on September and then October so close, two thoughts are on my mind: use this opportunity to go for more dips in the Danube, and .. I wonder what the floods of late-autumn will bring, because .. inevitably .. this super dry summer means there will be heavier rains in October. Might be we look back in a month or two and wish we had this dry heat back again, who knows .. Either way, neither city is particularly comfortable in the heat. A hundred or so years ago, the heat retention was a feature. Now it’s a bug.
- touwer 1mo agoIt's so dry, even in tne Netherlands and north of France. Amazing how quickly it goes
- MomsAVoxell 1mo agoI can’t imagine what the Netherlands would look like if desertification would occur. It seems implausible that those flat, flat lands would ever turn brown and grey and dusty - but I won’t be surprised if things turn that way in a few years. I hope the Dutch have a solution, they always seem to when it comes to water control ..
- sehw 1mo ago[dead]
- pmpmpmpm 1mo agoWho is liable for the deaths caused by extreme weather patterns? Is anyone?
- GolfPopper 1mo agoLegally? Almost certainly no one. Ethically? The corporate executives who deliberately covered up evidence of global warming, starting back in the 70s.[1] 1. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
- strictnein 1mo agoAnd since we've all known about this for 30+ years, is it still their fault, or is it ours?
- inigyou 1mo agoWhat should I have done about it for the past 30 years?
- bethekidyouwant 1mo agoLive a life of voluntary poverty?
- inigyou 1mo agoAnd if I had done that, how would the climate be today?
- Symbiote 1mo agoVoted for the environmental candidate every time.
- inigyou 1mo ago
- touwer 1mo ago[flagged]
- forinti 1mo agoThe thing that really worries me is if harvests start failing.
- simonh 1mo agoNot quite failing in the UK, but it’s hitting crop quality and yields hard, such that in many cases farmers will end up with a net loss.
- gghackernewsgg 1mo ago[flagged]
- inigyou 1mo agoIs Mensa score correlated with intelligence?
- crote 1mo agoYes. Genuinely smart people don't feel the need to get tested.
- gghackernewsgg 1mo agoWhy? Are you saying that one can't be "genuinely" intelligent AND one or more of the following: 1) curious about their IQ 2) enjoy timed puzzles 3) want to be part of the Mensa community 4) have a friendly IQ competition with friends 5) be an insecure teenager and take the test for validation Does "genuine" intelligence preclude all of the above?
- gghackernewsgg 1mo agoThe comment I was replying to implied that being unafraid of global warming was a sign of low IQ. I am not afraid, and my IQ is relatively high. So I shared that. Did you not read the parent before it was deleted?
- sdcfgy 1mo ago[flagged]
- DataDive 1mo agoEurope is caught in a dilemma: tourism, air travel, and city hopping are its economic lifeblood that keeps the continent running, but these also cause the greatest damage to the environment. Since they can't fix the real problem are trying to go "green" in counterproductive ways that make things worse: blowing up nuclear plants or taxing cow fart.
- morsch 1mo agoTourism is 10% of the economy, most of it is domestic or internal to Europe; most of it doesn't involve air travel or city hopping.
- simonh 1mo ago10% of an economy is a lot, you don’t need to lose much of that to hit the entire sector very hard.
- DataDive 1mo agoNote that this 10% is heavily skewed toward the richest, biggest cities. In bigger cities, it might be closer to 20-30% of their economy. Take that away, and it would have a cascading effect through entire countries.
- morsch 1mo agoDoesn't appear to be true, it's < 10% for the biggest cities (based on cursory research). Rome was 5% pre COVID; less now. https://assets-global.website-files.com/6329bc97af73223b575983ac/645e653ff3cac0968031bb6f_RomeEIR_.pdf https://assets-global.website-files.com/6329bc97af73223b5759...
- arlort 1mo agoBig cities are not big because of tourism. 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- reenorap 1mo agoDroughts are scary and they suck badly. California went through one for 10+ years. However, don’t go off the deep end and think that it’s the “new normal” like Californians did at one point. All it took was one big rainfall a few years ago, and California has been out of drought ever since then. The reservoirs have been above historic norms and at the end of this summer, it’s only “abnormally dry”. Compare that to a few years ago where the entire state was mostly in an exceptional level of drought. Droughts and heat waves suck and many people are suffering but nature goes in cycles and it will get better.
- alphabeta3r56 1mo agoYeah in this case the cycle might be 5000 years long once Milankovich cools things down again.
- lukaslalinsky 1mo agoPeople are not scared of individual droughts. They are scared of the patterns. Here in Slovakia, the last real winter with proper snow depths we had was in 2018, if I remember correctly. There is pretty much no snow anymore. All the water comes in form of heavy rainfall, causing massive floods, and the water goes straight to the sea. Nature depends on the water accumulating on the mountains during the winter, and that just doesn't seem to happen, at least in this part of Europe.
- ElProlactin 1mo agoIt's actually not that simple. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2526041123 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2526041123
- et-al 1mo agoPlease check aquifer levels and let us know if they're back to historic norms.
- mytailorisrich 1mo agoI must depend on the country because the trend is that some countries, the UK for instance, are receiving more rain as climate warms, but it is becoming more seasonal. This year winter was extremely wet then indeed summer has been a record dry, so not sure how the year will look like overall (plus it's a strong El Niño year).
- kkylin 1mo agoI just came back to CA from the UK, and the two places looked surprisingly alike: yellow fields everywhere
- mytailorisrich 1mo agoOk, summer has been a record dry, as said... not the first time it looks like that but perhaps the longest and driest.
- domh 1mo agoI expect future summers to be drier and future winters to be wetter. Our gardens are going to look very different. Already I see more people (myself included) rewilding their gardens. I've had a lot more wildlife as a result, but may be due to hotter weather as well. In the park behind my house a large Goat Willow tree has just mostly toppled over. Completely dry summer, then a week of rain has caused the tree to just collapse.
- mytailorisrich 1mo agoYes, we really need big investment in infrastructure. At the moment parks and gardens don't have automatic watering as we expect rain to do its job, and we suffer from hosepipe bans because infrastructure to store water is not fit for purpose.
- gniv 1mo agoThe timing of this article is a bit unfortunate. It's been raining here (France) every day for the past week, sometimes heavily.
- throw-the-towel 1mo agoThat's been long overdue. I really doubt a few days of rain would make anyone in France forget the rest of this summer.
- anonymars 1mo agoI don't know, the last few years have taught me that humans have exceedingly short memories
- Iridescent_ 1mo agoWe'll see whether the heatwaves and drought have been forgotten or not in May...
- fasterik 1mo agoThe article is talking primarily about Eastern Europe. It's also not inconsistent to say that it's raining during a drought. That's why we distinguish between weather and climate.
- boudin 1mo agoIt was a good amount of rain, but most of it just went straight to rivers as soil is really dry (think if try to get a dry sponge wet again, soil behave in a similar way). It helps but if there are no new rain episodes, water tables will stay low, soil dry in depth and most of the country in a complicated situation regarding water.
- youngtaff 1mo agoWe’ve engineered so that rain water goes into rivers and out to sea. Whereas we really need to slow it down so that it permeates the ground
- NooneAtAll3 1mo agopaywall
- hn_submit 1mo agoComplete nonsense. Even climate chance won't change the amount of rainfall we get over the course of the year. In fact, it will most likely be wetter due to it. But it will become more uneven, with droughts followed by torrential rains and floods. We simply need to adapt by creating underground water basins that store torrential rainfall preventing floods and also serve as buffers for when the drought comes. I do believe places like Spain could see more desertification, though. But they were at the brink for centuries in any case, especially inland.
- ElFitz 1mo agoI’ve been to quite a few deserts that get the occasional seasonal torrential rain. They still remain deserts nine to ten months out of twelve. The water saturates the soil, can’t percolate to underground aquifers where it could otherwise be stored, and runs into (ephemeral) rivers, washing away some of whatever is left of the soil with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if two places could have roughly the same yearly amount of precipitation yet look completely different depending on how the rainfalls are distributed over time.
- abroszka33 1mo agoOf course it does, Hungary is turning into a desert. Quite easy to see if you live here. And it's only the beginning.
- mschuster91 1mo agoJust came back from a bike tour through rural Bavaria, it's insane how dusty everything is - and that despite a short but intense rain today night. The farmers around here are pretty much screwed this season, and not just the crop farmers but the cattle farmers as well, as they have to buy lots of feed now that they'd only have to buy in winter.
- pvaldes 1mo agoWho could have imagined that after the biggest wildfires registered in Germany, near Bavaria in 2025, millions of liters of water would quit the area?
- pythux 1mo agoCompared to, e.g. France, this week’s Bavaria looked refreshingly green. Not saying it’s great but it didn’t feel too dry (maybe it depends where specifically?). I didn’t know about the farmers’ struggles, though.
- mschuster91 1mo agoYeah France got truly fucked over from what I've heard this year. We in Germany only caught the trail of the heatwaves and that already was enough for me, France got fried.
- thrance 1mo agoForget the farmers, they are concerning signs of large famines potentially coming in early 2027.
- mschuster91 1mo agoNot in the Western world, we got enough food to last us a good while (recent issues with the FDA and food recalls in the US notwithstanding). China is probably also going to be safe, they learned from Mao Zedong's failures and got stockpiles. Africa is going to get fed as long as the Ukrainian and Russian grain exports keep going. But who is going to get screwed hard is a lot of the rest of Asia, thanks to the Iran War taking out a lot of fertilizer sources...
- nakedrobot2 1mo agoAtmospheric injections of Sulphur is going to be the only answer.
- usern20260720 1mo agooh, yes. Anything but stopping the extraction, trade or combustion of fossil fuels. Even if the workarounds have unforeseen consequences.
- inigyou 1mo agoIt's too late for that. We had to do it 20 years ago. Plus, you and I have no power over fossil fuel extraction, but we do have the individual ability to put sulphur in the upper atmosphere (with effort). Game theory rules everything.
- hiddencost 1mo agoEven if we hit carbon neutral tomorrow it's too late.
- the__alchemist 1mo agoSulfur or similar may be more politically viable due to the tradgedy-of-the-commons. They can be enacted without as much consensus, maybe.
- A_D_E_P_T 1mo agoIn Neal Stephenson's novel Termination Shock it was enacted with zero consensus. I think that there are private bodies working on it right now, too.
- pfdietz 1mo agoI could see countries drastically affected by heat doing it. If they experience mass death, or even in the case of island countries complete elimination, what threat would make them stop?
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- aliasxneo 1mo agoJust a friendly reminder that Fortune has been owned since 2018 by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a member of the Chearavanont family that controls the CP Group conglomerate. CP Group created Siam Land Flying in 1991 as its in-house flight department for executives. It later added charter (Executive Wings) and air-ambulance services and still operates King Air 350 and Hawker jets. These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
- gruez 1mo ago>These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change. Would you rather than they kill stories relating to climate change and pretend everything's fine instead? If not, what's the actual point of bringing that factoid up? Sure, rich people flying in private jets might be bad, but I'm not sure why it deserves extra condemnation just because they happen to own a publication that's reporting on the effects of climate change.
- aliasxneo 1mo agoI simply found it comical that they probably make quite a bit of money rolling these articles out while the owners fly around in their private jet fleet. Most people probably don't know that unless someone told them - which is exactly what I just did. Clearly it touched some nerves.
- manacit 1mo agoI’m sorry but the gotcha here is that.. the owner is in a family that also owns an air charter business with all of four small private jets and an air-ambulance business? Give me a break, what does this have anything to do with the content of the article.
- woodpanel 1mo ago> feelings on climate change That. You can't reach these people with reason, the whole debate, the wholse society and entire law has to abide to their feelings.
- markvdb 1mo agoAMOC collapse [0] is Europe's potential big climate challenge. Nasty business. I wonder how to help prevent that from happening. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation#Modeling_AMOC_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
- calvinmorrison 1mo agoperhaps they can cut a deal with China
- jacquesm 1mo agoBluntly: too late. You'd have to rewind to 2001 or so and go on the strictest measures worldwide. But we are utterly unequipped to deal with global issues, the Ozon layer success notwithstanding.
- Tadpole9181 1mo agoThe problem with people constantly pointing to the Ozone layer is that it was only really addressed because it cost virtually nothing to do so. All we had to do was switch from one bad thing to another good thing, which was already becoming cheaper. Climate change as a whole requires a fundamental shift from the basis of almost all chemical manufacturing and transport logistics. And doing so will cause cataclysmic changes to the socioeconomic standings of entire regions of the world.
- jacquesm 1mo ago> And doing so will cause cataclysmic changes to the socioeconomic standings of entire regions of the world. We're going to have those anyway. Might as well make them count for something.
- sfn42 1mo agoSure but like the guy said we needed to do that 30 years ago. Even now we're basically ignoring the problem. "Look at all these renewables" while we're still building new coal plants. And even still, most people are debating whether it's even a problem, and whether it's anthropogenic.
- pluc 1mo agoBut at least we can talk to search engines now
- epolanski 1mo agoAnd eat beef every day. Who cares if a small burger pollutes more than commuting with a SUV. I mean, it's just hard to care or do something, these things should be properly taxed, but there's no chance this would be popular. But it feels we're powerless beyond minor examples we can set something everyday.
- esikich 1mo agoI think it often gets overlooked that effective carbon taxing would tax you right out of pretty much all modern convenience. Which would be the point, but people would fuckin revolt if it actually happened. Parent is complaining about 0.00000000001% of the damage done over the last 100 years.
- dumberquestions 1mo agoA very gradual carbon tax that could've been introduced a couple of decades ago would've been more tolerable, and would've given the market and consumers more time to adapt.
- andai 1mo agoMake each subsequent generation poorer and less populous. Aren't we already doing that?
- haizhung 1mo agoYou could carbon tax it, and give people immediately back the equivalent of what they would lose (on average). Then they can keep their lifestyle - if they are truly diehard about it - or they can adopt a climate friendlier lifestyle and pocket the change.
- formvoltron 1mo agoMeanwhile the cheapest way to travel are budget airlines.
- __d 1mo agoAnd cars. The real costs are externalized.
- tiagod 1mo agoI live in Portugal, near Lisbon (not in Lisbon, as it has become impossible to afford for locals, even tech workers). Many times it would be cheaper for me to travel by plane to a city like London, than the gas+tolls cost to visit my family that live less than 1h away by car. It takes ~2h30 minimum by public transport. I find it pretty ridiculous how the carbon taxing is extremely heavy on cars, but pretty much non-existing for air travel here. Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy, depletes the housing stock, and removes local businesses and culture, but the tourists are always prioritized by government.
- TacticalCoder 1mo ago> Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy 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.
- tiagod 1mo ago>You can't just say: "We'll just remove 10% of our GDP and we'll be fine". Where did I say that? I know we're heavily dependent on tourism. I believe a big part of the reason is that tourism has been prioritized over more complex industries for a long time. It's a crutch that doesn't let us evolve our economy.
- Arodex 1mo ago[flagged]
- artisinal 1mo agoThe 30,000 preventable yearly deaths already remind us of that.
- youngtaff 1mo agoReality is much of Northern Europe hasn’t needed air conditioning until about 5 years ago Throughput the summer my phone regular tells me the temperature is 15°C above the average for the time of year
- artisinal 1mo agoThe 2003 European heatwave had a death toll of 70,000. That should have been a warning for us to get AC.
- hdgvhicv 1mo agoAnd for the next 20 years been basically unneeded. How much AC does Alaska have?
- freehorse 1mo agoThis is not a good argument. AC is needed every summer for some years now for much of northern europe, the only question is how many days per year. The last heatwave was not in 2003. You do not need AC in every house necessarily. You need ACs in public buildings and in places that matter for the most vulnerable population. You need at least places this population can go during the hottest part of the day. Solutions are known in places where heatwaves are common place, but somehow northern europe takes time to realise that they are actually solvable.
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- formvoltron 1mo agoHow do we get Earth back to something resembling the steady state we know can work long term? 1. Electrify almost everything that can reasonably be electrified. Move quickly to EVs, and replace anything that can practically become electric with an electric version. Self driving & fleet utilization will push transportation cost per mile lower than ever before. For the power grid, data centers, and other large 24/7 consumers: solar + wind + battery storage. Deep geothermal also looks interesting. Build lots of desalination capacity. Maybe even planes can eventually be electrified. Imagine shorter hops with battery swaps at sea (aircraft carrier sorts of things). Too crazy? 2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify. Cargo ships. Long haul aviation, if the electric plane idea really is impractical. For those, we can turn energy + CO2 into liquid fuels, creating something closer to a closed carbon cycle. 3. Remove excess CO2. CO2 persists in the climate system for 200+ years, so getting emissions to zero does not necessarily return atmospheric CO2 to previous levels. We will need to remove enough to be net negative & over time bring it back down to the CO2 levels we know worked long term. That takes energy. Fortunately, solar + wind + storage are cheap enough now & getting cheaper. 4. Find places for all that solar. Deserts are obvious. Floating solar could potentially contribute. Agricultural land is interesting too. Agrivoltaics can sometimes provide useful shading while still allowing crops to grow. 5. Deal with the transition period. Once we are making a serious transition toward decarbonization and carbon removal, it may make sense to investigate temporary solar geoengineering, such as injecting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, to partially counteract warming while atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are being brought down. The purpose would be to stop the feedback loops such as more forest fires, thawing permafrost, and loss of ice and other reflective surfaces. Obviously geoengineering has major risks and should not substitute for reducing emissions. But as a temporary bridge, it seems like something that deserves serious research. We can do all this. None of it requires magic. We already have, or can plausibly engineer, most of the pieces.
- pvaldes 1mo ago6. Jail arsonists and harden the laws to protect natural resources from greed and sabotage.
- normie3000 1mo ago
- mchusma 1mo agoThis is all solvable with abundance. We could put together nuclear power with solar and desalination and carbon removal. Let’s start acting more like a kardishev II civilization.
- znpy 1mo ago[flagged]
- thrance 1mo agoThe Christian-Democrats signed the end of nuclear power in Germany, not the Greens. Please stop this mindless scapegoating. And electricity is only 30% of our global carbon emissions.
- imtringued 1mo agoAnd Angela Merkel held onto the phase-out of nuclear power plants all the way until her final term ending in december 2020.
- znpy 1mo agoI am not talking about Germany. The world does not revolve around Germany (despite Germany’s never-desisted ambitions). And 30% is a huge chunk of the emissions
- thrance 1mo agoI brought up Germany because it is the example that comes to mind. The greens never held any power anywhere. Anti-nuclear laws have all been passed by right-wing (or ""center"") parties, pushed by fossil fuel lobbies. You're very misguided in trying to place the blame of the climate crisis entirely on the only ecologists in politics. Until very recently, all major right-wing parties were insisting that climate change wasn't real and that we should "drill, baby, drill" or burn "clan coal". Do you think they share a part of the blame or is that on the Greens too? And lastly, building nuclear plants is all well and good, but it is meaningless if it's only added capacity. Same with solar. We have to close coal and oil plants, or all of this is useless. You should start advocating for that instead.
- comrade1234 1mo agoI have an ancient forest near where I live in Switzerland. In the core zone of the forest they do no maintenance whatsoever. The trees live, they get gigantic and very old. They die. At some point the top breaks off and then many years later the rest of the tree is so fungus-eaten it tips over too and rots on the ground. Sunlight never reaches the ground because of the tall giant trees so there's no undergrowth. It's just dead leaves and mushrooms. Something that was completely 100% noticeable was that during this drought of several months this forest was still incredibly healthy. You walk into the forest and the temperature drops several degrees Celsius and the ground still seems wet. I could tell that the groundwater level sunk maybe 4 feet by looking at some pits that normally have water. But still the ground didn't feel dried out. I compared this to a forest where they do maintain the forest and harvest giant trees for wood. They don't clear it but just by cutting out these tall trees they let sunlight reach the ground and dry the forest out.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kakacik 1mo agoWell, I also have an oak forest just in front of my balcony here in western Switzerland. Most of it is natural reserve, around half is literal scientific reserve. They don't harvest, let everything where it falls unless it completely blocks one of few pedestrian paths, then they use horses to drag it aside. It has few small streams (with crayfish!!) and one river flowing through That forest was crispy dry, almost dusty in recent weeks. One spark could burn it all down easily. We had... 2 properly rainy days through whole summer? Few thunderstorms but they were very local, and all of them avoided directly our area and that forest like plague. At least those crayfish managed to survive as I've seen 2 last week, they are more susceptible to water pollution and some brutal fungal infection which can be brought from other streams and basically sterilize whole stream (happened in other parts of our canton around Lausanne). Water somehow didn't stop. Back where I come from in eastern Europe their local crayfish weren't often so lucky - streams bone dry.
- swasheck 1mo ago
- dmos62 1mo agoEverything south of Poland is Southern Europe now.
- freehorse 1mo agoJust in case somebody else wanted a map to see exactly which areas in europe actually experience drought this summer https://drought.emergency.copernicus.eu/tumbo/edo/map/?prodCode=cdiad https://drought.emergency.copernicus.eu/tumbo/edo/map/?prodC...
- fossilemob 1mo agoWhy spain is not affected?
- hdgvhicv 1mo agoThe plains
- freehorse 1mo agoI don't know, I am not an expert, but it seems more concentrated in france/uk/central europe and adjacent. Also in southern europe summer is generally a dry season, and rainfall happens mostly in autumn/spring. One does not expect much rainfall to happen in the summer. In contrast, in central/northern europe summer is often the wettest. Having an overall dry summer is a common thing in the south, but not as you go north. Maybe this factors in on computing drought indices. Spain itself has very diverse climate, so not sure what applies where there. But other parts of the south had plenty rain in the spring. It is lack of rain/snowfall in the rest of the year that can create problems there more than lack of rainfall in july. And a lot of what people describe, like brown/yellow grass and vegetation, is normal part of the cycle in august in the south already.
- childofhedgehog 1mo agohttps://archive.is/xXHBw https://archive.is/xXHBw
- irthomasthomas 1mo agoNo fear of desertification while we pump the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses. "The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000" https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024GEcoC..4902791C/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024GEcoC..4902791C/abstra... "Earth observation data shows that most European urban areas are becoming greener" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275126004968 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642...
- nobodyandproud 1mo agoThis reminds me of the story of Noah in Bible school. The huge swath of people are incentivized to pretend nothing is wrong, and the vast majority can’t do anything about it so also pretend nothing is wrong.
- ActorNightly 1mo agoIts a case of technology outpacing our evolution. Everyone is living in this world where we still depend on each other to survive, but connected through technology that makes it seem like we don't. The problems that people face are magically solved behind the scenes. As such, nobody really has a sense of community or belonging, so nobody really thinks past the virtue signaling aspects of how to preserve, protect, and grow that community. And the people that do are forced to inconvenience themselves while they see others that don't care.
- chasil 1mo agohttps://archive.ph/xXHBw https://archive.ph/xXHBw
- kayo_20211030 1mo agoI read this article, all of it. I'm still trying to square the circle of how a report about the tribulations of fish-farming on the Danube align with the broader concept of the "Desertification in Europe". To me, it seems like a bs, but credible, AI article about fish-farming challenges on the Danube which met some sloppy editor who simply stuck a more click-baity headline on it - one that was completely unrelated to the content.
- insane_dreamer 1mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1mo agoOnce again, please don't do this here.
- thi2 1mo agoReading some of these comments is really depressing. Since I can remember we talk about climate change and it's still not in peoples head. When will it be real? When your home burns down due to a forest fire? When there is no water? When there is no food because everything is too dry? When a storm destroyed your home?
- akudha 1mo agoIt is likely, never. When all of this happen, a not-so-insignificant percentage of population would still say "it is god's will" or "it is just nature" or "it is just cyclical" etc, will never acknowledge humans caused a big part of it. There is a well funded, well coordinated effort by media, politicians, pundits, businessmen etc that will make sure of it
- tim333 1mo agoI find most comments differ from scientific reality in both directions - denial one way panic the other. It's no doubt real and I think most people accept that but it may be dealable with.
- testing22321 1mo agoFor Americans, at lest, it will take that kind of personal tragedy. Those who are most loudly opposed to universal healthcare switch their story instantly when they or a loved one gets in a terrible accident or develops nasty cancer. The jump to the socialism of go fund me in a heartbeat. I think it will be the same with climate change. Entire cities or states could be really bad with millions displaced or dying but others will still deny it because they are fine. Once it hits them personally, they’ll be screaming bloody murder blaming everyone and saying they need assistance.
- tuesdaynight 1mo agoHave you tried talking to people in real life? At least most people here have some knowledge about it. In real life, nobody cares. I understood that 5 years ago, and now I act accordingly
- m4rtink 1mo agoHere in the Czech Republic it is also very noticeable - rivers are running noticeably low and I've seen smaller streams dry out completely. Many trees ore getting orange or shedding leaves. Also quite interesting sometimes what plants don't have issue with the dryness - often quite exotic ones originally from the Mediterranean or from Asia.
- andai 1mo agoSome nice (well, awful) before/after aerial photos here: Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312413 And a great photo gallery here: Europe's drought reveals medieval buildings, Nazi warships, mammoth remains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49215432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49215432
- WorseIsBetter 1mo ago[dead]
- nchmy 1mo agowhere i live in central america, there's normally rain almost every day from may to September. We've had rain perhaps twice in the past 2+ months. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country (and a mountain range), they have had lots of flooding. Crops lost in both cases.
- fennecbutt 1mo ago"But it was hotter in 1976" The above is a serious threat though. What do you do, in a democracy, with people who are dangerously uninformed?