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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

#211

Post by porkpieshoe »

tyrabound wrote: post #99
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…

It’s not really a common perspective, but I have a theory that the primary cause of especially this kind of drought has way more to do with Europe essentially draining itself through all of the river straightening projects of the 19th century. How could it not be. Before all the industrial age river straightening that has gone on until even rather recently with damming and concrete encasement projects in I think even…

Interesting theory and I can see how you get there.

But if drainage changes were the primary cause, we would've seen drought severity increasing across the time period where straightening/etc were happening... instead the drought severity increases begin _after_ that period, better aligned with temperature changes.

Additionally, your analogy to a water leak from a tank doesn't hold, because the water recharges over time...

Further, your complaints about immigrants also doesn't make sense, as water usage has been going down (and residential utilization is quite low, altogether).

As such, my theory is that you're just a right-wing crank who wants to find a reason to deny global warming, and to hate immigrants.

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

#212

Post by bwindels »

api wrote: post #185
bwindels wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe, we're already degrowing since 2008, even more so if you only look at the real, physical economy because we have to import our fossil energy. We won't be able to power the same lifestyle with nuclear and renewables either, the math doesn't add up. Jean-Marc Jancovici is a french engineer explaining this in great detail, see for example https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/84-jean-marc-... if you d…

Yes, I've read tons of stuff like this. It won't work. You can absolutely trim a lot of fat from the modern lifestyle, but then you'll be left with a residual. Meanwhile the developing world will keep developing and we have no right to order them to stop. The idea that it's not possible is bullshit too, and it's still bullshit even if you ignore nuclear power. https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/200…

I wasn't taking about ideology, I was talking about what is already happening. Here's a graph of total freight volume (a proxy for the real physical economy) in the EU 15 countries since 2000, notice the peak around 2008:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/road_go_ta_to...

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

#213

Post by inigyou »

Symbiote wrote: post #124
inigyou wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should I have done about it for the past 30 years?

Voted for the environmental candidate every time.

Already did, we still ended up here, clearly that solution didn't work

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

#214

Post by paganel »

netsharc wrote: post #140
paganel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won’t mind higher prices? Are you rich? Because most of us Europeans certainly aren’t.

I like low prices, but I'm not looking forward to the chaos (political, social, what else) and deaths which I'm guessing will affect me within in the next 10 years.

The chaos is already here for us, the majority who are suffering the higher prices. Why do you think we're voting for the "extremist" parties? It's not because of "Russian propaganda", it's because life for the majority of us, normal Europeans, has become quite dreadful, economically and not only.

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

#215

Post by vitro »

api wrote: post #201
uv-depression wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a gross misunderstanding of what degrowth means. The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled…

> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich. Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find. Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all…

Their money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is many times a source of great suffering. If they had to make that somewhere adhere to rules or abide by law or stop exploiting others - humans or nature - it would cost them a great amount of money.

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

#216

Post by swasheck »

kakacik wrote: post #198
comrade1234 wrote: post #147

I 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…

Well, 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 dus…

i am currently hiking through switzerland (in cossonay this evening) and have been struck by how wet the forest ground is compared to my home (colorado, usa). locals have told me that’s very recent because of the storms that came through a few days ago.

the mittelland seems dry but since i’m walking through farmland, mostly, everything around me looks green, while i walk on dusty paths.

today was very hot.

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

#217

Post by api »

vitro wrote: post #215
api wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich. Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find. Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all…

Their money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is many times a source of great suffering. If they had to make that somewhere adhere to rules or abide by law or stop exploiting others - humans or nature - it would cost them a great amount of money.

If that's true it would mean fixing this injustice would just even out who gets to have what. It would not meaningfully reduce consumption, certainly not enough to make a huge difference in CO2 emissions.

(There might be one exception to that: reducing warfare. War is a gigantic waste twice over: tons of energy to fight, tons of energy to rebuild all the stuff we break. But I doubt eliminating warfare would be enough alone to cut emissions enough to matter.)

There's only two ways to reduce CO2 emissions by a large amount in a durable lasting way:

1. Replace CO2 emitting sources of power with those that don't emit CO2.

2. Destroy the middle class.

Actually I guess there's a third: kill a lot of people.

Anything less is a rounding error that won't make much of a difference.

I'll take option 1. Luckily the laws of physics say we can do it. We just need the political will. There's also precedent. Many developed countries' emissions per capita has been falling while growth has actually continued (in most cases) and standard of living hasn't moved much. We just need to do a lot more of what works.

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

#218

Post by fpoling »

well_ackshually wrote: post #197
daedrdev wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unironically the anti nuclear luddites killed the main chance to be divert climate change that we had over unfounded fearmongering

No. You can shit all you want over the antinuclear boys but: * Building nuclear plants is a 5-10 year plan. More if you haven't built them in a while. * The first economy in the world has quite literally started wars over oil because it wants to keep using it. * The countries that would be the biggest emitters right now are also the ones doing the most in electrification. Building more nuclear wouldn't have changed s…

EV only this year became comparable in prices to gasoline cars thanks to massive efforts by Chinese companies to reduce battery prices and improve drivetrain.

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

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

#219

Post by uv-depression »

api wrote: post #201
uv-depression wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a gross misunderstanding of what degrowth means. The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled…

> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich. Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find. Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all…

Perhaps instead of using one of the hallucination machines that's aggravating the climate crisis, you could have done some research: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-worlds-top-1-of-emitter...

> Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.

The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true. But you are also assuming that reducing emissions must come with a reduction in lifestyle, which is untrue. Think about the way that our computers are designed to be disposable and unrepairable, or how clothing is made worse and worse (because it's more profitable, which is only necessary because of the need for infinite growth). Or, as you pointed out, North Americans use a ton of energy for terrible reasons, and fixing that problem would improve their quality of life: walkability, bikability, and public transit so people can drive less (or even stop owning a car) while also getting improved health; replacing flights with more comfortable high speed trains; removing the need to maintain a lawn for every house (shockingly terrible for the environment); etc. Or how we ship things all around the world to be assembled in different phases in different countries because it's cheaper (and suppresses labour). What so many of the things we need to do to solve this problem have in common isn't a reduction in lifestyle (some will do the opposite!), but rather that they impact profits and therefore threaten infinite growth.

Yes, there are some things that people won't like doing, like significantly reducing the amount of meat they eat (>15% of global emissions are from meat production, and it is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon). But pretending nothing will ever change doesn't solve the problem (and we'll be catastrophically forced to change later if we don't voluntarily do it sooner).

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

#220

Post by api »

uv-depression wrote: post #219
api wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich. Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find. Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all…

Perhaps instead of using one of the hallucination machines that's aggravating the climate crisis, you could have done some research: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-worlds-top-1-of-emitter... > Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%. The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true…

I'm not saying nothing will ever change. That's a misreading. I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.

Environmentalists have been making the "abstinence first" guilt trip argument for decades and it's done absolutely nothing and it will never do anything. That approach is a total failure. I use the abstinence framing because it's like abstinence-based sex ed. Instead of having sex, teenagers have guilty sex.

Let's say Claude's wrong. The argument still stands if it's off by 10X. Soaking the rich won't help by more than a rounding error, and redistribution might actually increase resource use. It's also a one-time thing.

Speaking of AI: turning off all the AI data centers won't help either. They're a few percent of electricity use. A few percent won't matter and it's another one-time thing. It's not an ongoing solution to anything if the economy is still powered by burning stuff.

Then you have the developing world. Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.

There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.

If Africa modernizes on coal like China did, that'll add another China worth of emissions, which would be catastrophic. The only way out is for Africa to industrialize and modernize on sources of power that don't emit CO2.

Luckily that's possible, but telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen. It's how you get them to say "fuck you" and ignore you.

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