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

fortune.com

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

#71

Post by gruez »

aliasxneo wrote: post #68

Just 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 abo…

>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.

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

#72

Post by arlort »

DataDive wrote: post #52
morsch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tourism 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.

Note 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.

Big 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.

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

#73

Post by jamonserrano »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #4

Just 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…

As far as I remember, here in Budapest - apart from a handful of quick showers - it rained exactly once all summer, and altogether about four times since the end of winter. The city is estimated to lose a third of its trees in the next 10-15 years.

The summer heat, the drought, combined with winter cold spells and now usual late spring frosts have all but destroyed the country's agriculture too. The new government has initiated a water retention plan, but it might be too little to late.

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

#74

Post by et-al »

reenorap wrote: post #24

Droughts 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…

Please check aquifer levels and let us know if they're back to historic norms.

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

#75

Post by ElFitz »

hn_submit wrote: post #46

Complete 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 bel…

I’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.

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

#77

Post by ricardobayes »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #4

Just 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…

Balaton's current level is something like... 40-50cm so yeah you're right. This is unprecedented

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

#78

Post by kkylin »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #27

I 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).

I just came back to CA from the UK, and the two places looked surprisingly alike: yellow fields everywhere

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

#80

Post by realusername »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #53
alde wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU currently emits only 5% of the globally emitted greenhouse gases. You can cut all the city hopping you want and it won't make the slightest difference.

The EU is responsible for a lot more than that once you factor in emissions in other countries producing goods bought by people and businesses in EU countries.

Those are already included in most statistics
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