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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

#321

Post by pfdietz »

daedrdev wrote: post #108
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...

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

Since uranium at 3x the current price could supply the current world primary energy demand with burner reactors for only about 5 years, diverting climate change with nuclear would have required mass rollout of breeder reactors. These were stopped by their own inherent cost and technical problems, not by greens.

And now, not even the French are pursuing them, sending the strong signal that nuclear is off the table as anything but a minor contributor to stopping CO2 build up.

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

#322

Post by TacticalCoder »

tiagod wrote: post #232
__d wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-e…

> Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy

Portugal is heavily dependent on tourism: it's 10% of the GDP. In the EU not even France is that high: Spain is higher but Portugal's economy definitely depends on tourism.

When stats says: "10% is tourism, 40% is services", if you remove the 10% linked to tourism, the services economy does crash too. And so does the 20% that is "construction": a part of that is second effects from tourism.

You can't just say: "We'll just remove 10% of our GDP and we'll be fine". Firstly even at "only" 10% you'd be totally screwed and then anyway the actual number would be much higher.

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

#323

Post by m4rtink »

Here in the Czech Republic it is also very noticeable - rivers are running noticeably low and I've seen smaller streams dry out completely. Many trees ore getting orange or shedding leaves.

Also quite interesting sometimes what plants don't have issue with the dryness - often quite exotic ones originally from the Mediterranean or from Asia.

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

#324

Post by SECProto »

freehorse wrote: post #287
SECProto wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a graph of total freight volume (a proxy for the real physical economy) In 2008, people and businesses were still buying new computers every year or two, printing everything on paper, buying physical media. I don't know anyone that does this anymore. I don't think that is a good proxy.

In the US there was a slight drop around that time, but not close to 25% in the eu. If it was due to businesses buying less physical media wouldn't it be sth seen in the US data in some year too? https://www.bts.gov/us-tonne-kilometers-freight (a bit easier in table form as the graph does not aggregate accross all means of transport).

I would note that the population increase 2008-present in the EU (340M to 350M) is much lower than the US (305M to 345M), which could account for a rather significant difference too. I don't think either of these is a "smoking gun" but they both seem pretty significant confounding factors.

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

#325

Post by artisinal »

MrDresden wrote: post #259
artisinal wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drought in The Netherlands is artificial though. Millionaire farmers are pumping up water to water their crops during the day. Due to the heat most of the spray evaporates before it touches the plants. During the winter they artificially lower the ground water level for personal benefit. Also of this so they can gain even more millions by exporting all the food across the border. Time to block some more highways, des…

Not saying that Dutch farmers don't use a lot of water overall, but they have some of the most effective farming practices on the planet when it comes to water usage.

That doesn’t change the fact that the millionaire megafarmers completely screwed over Dutch water management for personal gains. Did you know that farmers are basically completely in control of waterschappen despite only bringing in a couple percent of the GDP.

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

#326

Post by AnimalMuppet »

oytis wrote: post #255
jcynix wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes, geoengineering, because nothing can go wrong … Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.

A lot can go wrong, but a long is going wrong already. I think putting effort in trying to do it as safely as possible is more productive than trying to convince nations to become poorer voluntary. Alternative energy is important too, but so far it rather complements than replaces fossil fuel.

But this is one of the classic blunders! "Things are going wrong, so we have to do something! This is something, so we have to do it!"

Well, no, we have to do something that will help. Doing something that makes things worse isn't the answer, and the worse things are, the less we can afford to do so.

"This might help, but also might really mess things up" is not the answer - not in politics, not in economics, and not in climate change.

But I agree with one part of your post. Persuading nations to become poorer voluntarily is not a viable strategy.

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

#327

Post by akudha »

thi2 wrote: post #309

Reading some of these comments is really depressing. Since I can remember we talk about climate change and it's still not in peoples head. When will it be real? When your home burns down due to a forest fire? When there is no water? When there is no food because everything is too dry? When a storm destroyed your home?

It is likely, never. When all of this happen, a not-so-insignificant percentage of population would still say "it is god's will" or "it is just nature" or "it is just cyclical" etc, will never acknowledge humans caused a big part of it. There is a well funded, well coordinated effort by media, politicians, pundits, businessmen etc that will make sure of it

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

#328

Post by ekr »

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…

Very similar experience with Romania and the Netherlands. I grew up in western Romania (was born in the mid '90s), and moved to the Netherlands over 5 years ago. When I first came here, I was stunned by how green everything was, being mid-summer. But this summer I just realized that many areas have a yellowish hue. Vegetation has dried up in some places, something I don't remember witnessing around here before.

I occasionally watch development of infrastructure projects in Romania, videos such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eETeHvExMxw . This is completely different from what I used to remember. Completely dry fields. Fields used to be green at this time of the year. So much dust everywhere.

I do think I'll return one day, because somehow there's still some part of me that's melancholic about the places I've grown up in. But it now seems that if I wait many more years it will be a completely different landscape than the one I left, and not in a good sense.

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

#329

Post by lotsofpulp »

femto wrote: post #317
strictnein wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That’s laughable. The number 1 cause of climate change is spread out living. The 0.1+ acre lot with a detached single family home that results in enormous distances required for all the mass to travel.

There is no way people would have or will accept living in Honk Kong style dense living to save the future planet. Hell, they don’t even accept driving smaller vehicles much less changing their whole lifestyle.

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

#330

Post by jimbokun »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #315
alistairSH wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can be against more than one thing.
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