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Come on, where they will find a way to express their American exceptionalism these days? Let them have that one.
Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
221–230 of 472 posts
Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#222Atmospheric injections of Sulphur is going to be the only answer.
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Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#223How 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 con…
This all sounds good, but the Government of one of the world's primary super powers (The United States) is currently unwilling to participate in fighting climate change, so any plan seems DOA without a major policy change on that front.
Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#224AMOC 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_overturnin...
Get in a time machine. Go back to 1970. Make sure world starts phasing out all coal power by 2000, replacing with nuclear and what renewables are available then, and make sure modular scalable reactors are available for China so they use that instead of coal to power their rise. Convince everyone that late 20th century unscientific greens are full of shit and nuclear power is better than coal. (Renewables were not fu…
"we are never returning to pre industrial times"
We are, one way or the other. It is just a question of the choices we make on the way and how pre-industrial we end up.
There is no a position of leverage, the climate is behaving as modeled and expected. We know what will happen next.
Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#225[flagged]
The 30,000 preventable yearly deaths already remind us of that.
Yearly - since when?
What's your next beef after that? Should we put cows and sheep under AC? Forests and fields under AC? Iceland should start installing AC? The Magreb countries should live under the surface of the Earth like mole people? Why don't people relocate to the Antarctic, those idiots?
Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#226Just 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…
> How could it not be.
Plenty of ways. That's what we have science for. For one, why choose 19th century projects when we did millenia of terraforming, mostly by doing away with forrests and wetlands, but also planting artifical forrests over dry sand areas (see the Cap Ferret fire) etc. etc.
but also, the heatwaves of this summer mostly consist of hot air from Sahara being driven to Europe and staying there.
> that the EU is doing to drive tens of millions of more people into Europe
what
Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get in a time machine. Go back to 1970. Make sure world starts phasing out all coal power by 2000, replacing with nuclear and what renewables are available then, and make sure modular scalable reactors are available for China so they use that instead of coal to power their rise. Convince everyone that late 20th century unscientific greens are full of shit and nuclear power is better than coal. (Renewables were not fu…
"we are never returning to pre industrial times" We are, one way or the other. It is just a question of the choices we make on the way and how pre-industrial we end up. There is no a position of leverage, the climate is behaving as modeled and expected. We know what will happen next.
Last post in this thread for me...
We won't go back. That's the thing, the false option. I think you underestimate how much being poor sucks. I personally call this the "it's better to reign in hell" principle.
So if we are dumb and don't cut emissions, we will "reign in hell," and it'll look like a dark cyberpunk dystopia. There might also be some pretty nasty wars and genocides in there.
I think that's the real choice we have. If we reduce carbon emissions enough, we can blunt the effects of climate change and adapt without too much pain. If we don't, we get to LARP Bladerunner with billions taking shelter in air conditioned mega-blocks when the deadly heat waves hit.
Nature isn't happy life in harmony. Nature is suffering and death. It's an amoral Darwinian meat grinder.
Let me make it concrete. I have kids. Let's say you give me a choice.
Option 1: I go to the future where we live closer to nature, more primitively, but my daughter died of a childhood disease.
Option 2: I go to the future that looks like Bladerunner or Kowloon Walled City with killer heat waves requiring air conditioning to survive, but my child is alive because of modern medicine.
I'd pick two and so would most people, which is why we'll never go back. The infant and child mortality rates alone in "wild nature" are enough to turn people away. It's better to reign in hell.
But I don't think we have to do that. We could do things like carbon taxes, provided we stop spending the social and political capital on guilt trip tactics and back to the land bullshit that will just be ignored, which is why I'm wasting my time ranting about this.
Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve had it explained to me that it evaporates in the heat and gets deposited in the mountains and the atmosphere above the more northern states, where .. once things cool down, it condenses and moves through tributaries in a big rush or two during the massive temperature changes of October/November. The thunder storms we’ve had in Vienna in the last few years have produced amazing floods - reminiscent of the desert…
I dunno about that. I'm living in the mountains (French Alps) and it's unusually dry here. Trees are dying.
Same here in the Swiss Alps. Doesn't look so bad, but rain is WAY below what it should be. Still is
Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#229The timing of this article is a bit unfortunate. It's been raining here (France) every day for the past week, sometimes heavily.
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Re: Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
#230The timing of this article is a bit unfortunate. It's been raining here (France) every day for the past week, sometimes heavily.
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I said nothing about the drought. My comment was on timing, which affects the optics of those who read it. Imagine going on vacation for 2 months, as they do, then coming back and reading this article while seeing heavy rain outside. With all the fake news you can see how some folks would be skeptical.