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

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

#231

Post by IshKebab »

headsman771 wrote: post #200
IshKebab wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in a much steadier state for hundreds of thousands of years before the 20th century. Don't be obtuse.

It goes through periods of slow change and periods of rapid change, with regional variations. That will never change. The climate cannot be controlled precisely by humans. To think otherwise is just a comforting lie people tell themselves. The vast majority of people concerned about climate change think there is some paradise we could have kept if only we hadn't been so "climate-sinful". It's uncomfortable to contemp…

Wow dude. I'll just assume you genuinely don't understand this... So the TL;DR is that except for events like supervolcanoes and dinosaur-killing asteroids, no it does not go through periods of change that are this rapid.

You might be misled because you can find graphs of global average temperate that swing wildly by like 10C-20C. But look at the X axis, it's in hundreds of millions of years. Stretch it out to 100k years and it will look perfectly flat.

And yes there is some climate paradise we could have kept it we hadn't emitted so much CO2. The one where it isn't 50C in Baghdad and Europe isn't a dust bowl. Could we have kept it for 100 million years? Maybe not! But nobody is saying that. We could have kept it for 100k years, instead of like 100.

It's comforting to imagine it isn't a problem - both from an "I'm smarter than everyone else" perspective and "I don't have to worry about it", but you're lying to yourself. I dunno lots of people are happy to lie to themselves (at least 50% of religious people I reckon) but I can't do it.

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

#232

Post by tiagod »

__d wrote: post #187
formvoltron wrote: post #88

Meanwhile the cheapest way to travel are budget airlines.

And cars. The real costs are externalized.

I 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.

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

#233

Post by ActorNightly »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #186

This 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.

Its 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.

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

#234

Post by cromka »

alistairSH wrote: post #202
kakacik wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend that show is legendary. Not on the same watchers level as original Top Gear (who can surpass 300 million), but its extremely good and literally eye-opening to millions about woes and challenges of modern agriculture. I must admit I was utterly clueless before watching that show, what an eye opener. I hope Jeremy will be OK regarding his health, he is a national treasure. He used to mock global warming and i…

He might be a treasure, but's he's also a prick. He has a long history of letting his on-screen persona leak into meatspace (or maybe it's the other way around) and that's not a good thing. Edit - since people seem to not believe me, at minimum, he punched his producer [1]. Which wasn't the first time he turned violent - he punched Piers Morgan [2] for letting Clarkson's extramarital affairs go public. Oh, he also ha…

I don't like you're being down voted, let's not give celebrities extra passes to be the assholes they can be. Elon being another prime example.

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

#235

Post by jorvi »

microtonal wrote: post #43
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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 ..

I think currently one of the biggest risks for The Netherlands is salinization. If there is not enough river water and the groundwater level is too low, sea water will push upward, contaminating the river beds and increasingly much soil around it. This summer they had to close locks to block seawater and to increase the fresh water level. Of course, this has a considerable economic damage, since it blocks inland ship…

Netherlands is also in a much worse position due to being downstream of literally everyone.

It's going to be a huge future fight in the EU because all countries upstream will want to retain 'all' the water and the remaining low flow will still have all those countries their industries dumping toxic waste, meaning the ratio of water-waste will get ridiculous.

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

#236

Post by throwaway5752 »

api wrote: post #227
throwaway5752 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 cho…

It's popular right now because the impacts are visibly getting worse. This weather event in Europe is far from normal, and the trend is accelerating.

If we fail to control it, what will happen is that we'll be reduced in population by an order of magnitude or two. We won't be able to sustain the technology we've created, we'll have mined easily accessible minerals and energy, and there is a real chance we will not return to being an advanced species in the same way we are today.

A simple reduction to greens vs not-greens is not helping anything. We can use more solar and wind. We can be more efficient with energy. We can stop burning hydrocarbons immediately and reserve the for material science and we can replace most car energy sources with electric.

None of this is even difficult, it just hurts some established interests who are fighting it with everything they have. They would rather that the planet get destroyed than to lose their wealth and power.

I'd prefer my kids not live in Bladerunner, also, and right now that's the path we're on.

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

#237

Post by epolanski »

ddorian43 wrote: post #208
epolanski wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 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.

The beef is not the source of this. Ruminant meat is the best food there is for humans. (i eat daily as part of ketovore diet)

As you seem to be unaware:

1. a single cow produces 250 grams of methane per day. Methane is insanely more dangerous to the environment than CO2. A single adult cow pollutes in a day as much as a car driven for 165 miles. And that's only for emissions.

2. As a cow does not pollute just what it emits, you need to add the lifecycle: cows need to be fed. 80% of the food we humans grow goes to feed animals, not humans. Beef gets the lion share. So we consumes insane amounts of money, fertilizers, gas, just to feed cows, that pollute like crazy anyway. The amount of water cattle consume (from drinking to the one needed to grow food) is also extreme.

3. Cows produce a lot of waste, that ends up in rivers. Along fertilizers (mostly used to grow food for cattle anyway), it pollutes so much that waters around souther US are essentially dead.

4. By mass, beef alone, outmatches every single land animal on this planet, combined. You could put on a scale every single tiger, domestic dog, rabbit, squirrel, horse, hyppo, kangaroo, etc, etc, etc on the planet. They would weight less than the cows we grow.

4. Red meat is a category 1 carcinogenic. You should eat it rarely. I don't know where you get your nutritional facts, maybe from Joe Rogan?

In essence, you demonstrate fully my point: we humans don't want to know really what our impact on the planet is, and we're happily distracted into the "just buy an electric SUV" trolling.

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

#239

Post by cindyllm »

porkpieshoe wrote: post #211
tyrabound wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

[dead]

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

#240

Post by epolanski »

qyron wrote: post #153
epolanski wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 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.

> Who cares if a small burger pollutes more than commuting with a SUV. Can you give some references basing that? I would like to educate myself a bit (I'm a vegetarian myself)

I'm not vegetarian, albeit I de facto am 5 days out of 7, I try to stick to the (classical) mediterranean diet.

I wrote a comment here, you can of course fact check all I said and investigate more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49502880

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