Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 471 posts

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

#311

Post by NewJazz »

scoofy wrote: post #271
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…

California is naturally a desert. It is only unnaturally green and lush.

Well, parts of it are naturally a desert. But plenty of forest and wetlands too. In fact there were even more wetlands before we channelized many of the rivers.

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

#312

Post by NewJazz »

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…

Perhaps the cutting and removal of the trees also plays a factor? They suck in water over their life, then once they are cut the forest loses that moisture.

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

#313

Post by jjtheblunt »

noduerme wrote: post #299
downut wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Eureka is a weird place. It's got a foggy microclimate that you can actually see as you drive into it. Even for the Northern California / Oregon coast it's especially cool and rainy. As a Portlander I treasure our 3-4 months of sunny weather. I wouldn't be able to handle the year-round gloom.

good info...dad lived in hillsboro so i understand the monotony boredom of overcast skies. interestingly, i personally find phoenix area worse since rain is way more rare than sun up there, and it's mega dramatic insane when it happens, from winds.

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

#314

Post by eastbound »

phillc73 wrote: post #256
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…

Also an Australian living in Austria (there’s a few of us), although not in Vienna. Whenever I return to Australia (also mostly rural locations) the major difference I notice is bird life. There are so many more birds in Australia. Maybe they’re just noisier. We put feeders out in our Austrian garden and do see plenty of small birds, as well as woodpeckers, crows and pigeons. However, in Australia there are lots of s…

That's my memory of Sydney to. In Europe we sold every land parcel, reduced their habitat (forests) to 100m blocks, then 50m, then a public park with scientific studies used to justify that they'll be better off in the park... then they die. Turns out all scientific studies are paid out by promoters and everyone has a price.

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

#315

Post by jazzyjackson »

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 know, in a world where dictators bomb whoever they want, if punching someone is the worst thing you can do. People continue to follow and fangirl the politicians who enact violence, so why should one go on a crusade against a tv star who gets a little hands on?

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

#316

Post by bobthepanda »

zeristor wrote: post #246
bobthepanda wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underground cisterns are generally the way to do it and even the Romans were building them

The UK had a hugely wet start to the year, but that’s part of the pattern. More intense rain fall then dry spells. The high prolonged hot spells, with the wind can really make a lot of the land dry out. So many dead and dying Field Maples around

Don’t really know what that has to do with my comment

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

#317

Post by femto »

strictnein wrote: post #20
GolfPopper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally? Almost certainly no one. Ethically? The corporate executives who deliberately covered up evidence of global warming, starting back in the 70s.[1] 1. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...

And since we've all known about this for 30+ years, is it still their fault, or is it ours?

It's "their" fault, at least according to Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, who is one of "them". His view is that if a specific group, of about 1000 powerful people, chose to address climate change, it would be fixed.

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...

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

#318

Post by jazzyjackson »

epolanski wrote: post #276
ddorian43 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red meat is a category 1 carcinogenic It is not. There are no studies with simply meat. They count burgers and processed stuff. I literally do 90% carnivore so eat nothing processed. I only put salt on the meat. > You could put on a scale every single tiger, domestic dog, rabbit, squirrel, horse, hyppo, kangaroo, etc, etc, etc on the planet. Carnivore animals rarely are eaten. Horse/rabbit are low fat. Beef & lamb…

It feels like speaking with a chatbot. The focus of the discussion is topic is how dangerous is cattle farming to the planet. The answer is very, I gave you numbers, you're free to debunk them. The topic of whether red meat is category 1 or 2 carcinogenic is less of an interest to this thread. If you want to keep your diet, keep it, it doesn't change it has an insane impact on the planet in terms of greenhouse gases…

Beef can be raised carbon negative, it’s just more expensive. Maybe not scalable to 8 billion, I don’t know, but the man buying meat from a butcher buying from small farms raising grass fed cows is not the problem (it’s the corn that makes them fart, can’t digest as well)

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

#319

Post by jazzyjackson »

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…

Why no mention of increasing biomass of earth? It’s the living systems that buffer the chemical and energetic changes of the climate, and whether or not we can take back the carbon we’ve aerosolized, we can repair ecosystems and slow down changes in weather.

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

#320

Post by pfdietz »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #283
uv-depression wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But energy source isn't the only problem. The problem is partially that energy use is high in and of itself. Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child sl…

> Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already). Cobalt isn't used in solar panels.

I wonder where they get that kind of nonsense? Do they not check, or they do they just not care?
Post reply on HN