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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

#261

Post by jjtheblunt »

downut wrote: post #180
jjtheblunt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that sounds wonderful from the ~1000 square miles of Phoenix, Arizona, where a century of concrete and asphalt retain so much heat that the clouds bounce around the borders of the heat bubble overhead, unable to dump rain regularly enough to evaporate away the stored heat, but with rainfall regularly visible outside the edges of the metropolitan area, in the wide open skies.

My wife and I retired to Tucson last year, and intentionally went through this first summer just to get the full experience. Never again! We've been under flash flood warnings the last several days and have only had a few sprinkles to go with the 108F days. So... I had a look at Eureka CA weather this morning. Looks like Western Norway. Nice. Spending July and August up there might be mandatory for our mental health.…

that's good info : i'll take a look at Eureka, but think further north would be even better, like Oregon coast. I'm from Chicago outer suburbia originally so miss actual greenery and rain without the mega-dramatic desert windstorm bullshit...and at altitude at the foothills north of the phoenix metro area it's been way over 100 for a very long time, though less insane than som eof the 8 years we've been here (for work and outdoorsiness).

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

#262

Post by jaskerr »

pfdietz wrote: post #145
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…

El Nino involves moving moisture around, not just reducing precipitation all over. So the opposite can also be seen in some places. The eastern US and parts of the midwest have had a very good year, an the US harvest of maize is projected to be the 2nd highest ever, slightly above 16 billion bushels. Locally (New York state), things have been so wet we're seeing premature leaf drops from maple trees due to leaf fungu…

What part of NY are you in? Here in northern Central NY we’ve been ‘abnormally dry’ all summer long. The forecasters keep promising rain, but it’s little more than a sprinkle when it arrives. Lawns are brown. Trees are dropping leaves, but that’s to slow evaporation.

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

#263

Post by bjourne »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #113
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar observation this year. In 2015, I was in California, was doing some hiking on the weekends, and I found it very unnatural how all the grasses were dry, trails dusty, on the hills/mountains. I came back to Slovakia, and I was happy to see the green grass. Fast-forward to 2026, and our grasses are equally dry and trails are equally dusty. Water management seems to be more important than ever, because th…

I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse. I believe he may not have even bothered planting the normal cash crops, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. That said, the year before I think it was so wet early in the year that farmers really struggled to get crops in…

> I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse.

The Clarkson who ran a popular car show and for years mocked Greta Thunberg and called her an "idiot" that deserved a "smacked bottom" for raising the alarm on global warming?

Oh, noe, I feel so sorry for him. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

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

#264

Post by hdgvhicv »

api wrote: post #217
vitro wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The actual plan is option 2.

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

#265

Post by jakebol »

silon42 wrote: post #161
ffsm8 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, almost nobody will want to live in most of Europe post AMOC collapse in 20-40 yrs

It might compensate for global warming... I think a lot will depend on whether there is rain or not.

Current research is that it would get a lot drier than it is currently. Also the AMOC collapse process would play out over many decades (~50-100 years) it will not be a sudden event.

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

#266

Post by tsunamifury »

bjourne wrote: post #263
VBprogrammer wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse. I believe he may not have even bothered planting the normal cash crops, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. That said, the year before I think it was so wet early in the year that farmers really struggled to get crops in…

> I'm not sure if Clarkson's farm has much of a following outside of the UK. Last year they had several crops fail due to the drought over summer and honestly this year was far worse. The Clarkson who ran a popular car show and for years mocked Greta Thunberg and called her an "idiot" that deserved a "smacked bottom" for raising the alarm on global warming? Oh, noe, I feel so sorry for him. Couldn't have happened to…

Only a fool gloats about being right about the end of the world.

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

#267

Post by hdgvhicv »

fossilemob wrote: post #238
freehorse wrote: post #157

Just 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/?prodC...

Why spain is not affected?

The plains

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

#268

Post by criddell »

tmountain wrote: post #223
formvoltron wrote: post #105

How 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.

I don’t entirely blame the government. They are only doing what they were elected to do.

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

#269

Post by Tadpole9181 »

jacquesm wrote: post #83
markvdb wrote: post #76

AMOC 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...

Bluntly: 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.

The 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.

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

#270

Post by freehorse »

fossilemob wrote: post #238
freehorse wrote: post #157

Just 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/?prodC...

Why spain is not affected?

I 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.

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