5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe

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• Hacker News
• More data centers for plagiarizing code and solving 10 unimportant Erdos problems per year will fix this!
  by 12as109q
• If only Al Gore warned us about AI as well! /s

  Thinking these are at their current level relevant to climate change, is a level of ignorance that I'd almost put on a tin-foil hat to discuss how the fossil industry is feeding an anti-AI campaign of ignorance.

  by athrowaway3z
• Erasing any datacenter ever built (and planned) would do almost nothing to stop climate change.

  What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.

  Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.

  But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.

  by myrmidon
• Enjoy it while it lasts; it'll never be this cool again.
  by Devasta
• Not if Count Binface wins the elections.

  First the UK, then leadership of Europe via behind-closed-doors politics, then a gentle colonization of both the east and the west using our amazing cheese, bread that is baked rather than synthesized from fossil fuels, and 30 days of paid vacations per year. The path forward is clear.

  by H8crilA
• It will probably be warm but this is from the GFS model that was forecasting 50 degrees during the last heat wave. Apparently, it tends to "overegg temperature projections for Europe in the summer by around 2-2.5c. ... it dries out soil too fast in its models."

  https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/1um7tyn/sometimes_...

  by yread
• The soil is quite dry already.
  by b800h
• This is a two week forecast, one month ago. There is no good two week forecast.

  There is a heat wave right now, again.

  by Arodex
• This is a harbinger for insane weather in the United States this fall and winter.

  I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable.

  My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3].

  [1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-10254005...

  [2] https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2023/07/drying-salton-sea-has-stav...

  [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXqOn0GILtA

  Adding...

  https://subjecttoclimate.org/news/study-las-earthquake-risk-...

  by Noaidi
• Seems likely that within our lifetime multiple countries in europe may turn into deserts, and there is little we can do against it except for maybe attempt to terraform the climate by seeding clouds or changing ecosystem flora to something resilient in the face of 40C weather. Losing a huge amount of food production would be my greatest concern.
  by fl4regun
• The thing is, we could survive with a lot less food production. We just don't want to, since animal flesh is so tasty.
  by karmakurtisaani
• Just in France, cost of this year heat waves has been estimated between 10 and 15 billion euros (figure shared by a ministre today).
  by thibaut_barrere
• That's the value of a single third-tier AI startup.
  by antonvs
• Not to mention the cost of premature deaths of children and the elderly who don't deal with heat as well
  by wing-_-nuts
• As of now, our worst problem in Central Europe seems to be drought. Some of the mightiest rivers of the continent are barely there. You can walk across the Danube, the Rhine or the Wisla in some places, drenching yourself a bit, but never losing contact with the bottom.
  by inglor_cz
• The Po River is drying up as well...

  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/08/10/climate-...

  by Noaidi
• "2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives. Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come."

  https://nitter.catsarch.com/JKSteinberger/status/20874034329...

  by Noaidi
• I've been reading up on the inevitable collapse of the AMOC (the potsdam institute has a number of really good videos covering the subject).

  Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well.

  Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...

  by wing-_-nuts
• Any good books on the subject you'd recommend?
  by Insanity
• I do not think a collapse is inevitable, see:

  https://climatetippingpoints.info/2026/05/06/news-explainer-...

  by user43928
• Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.

  I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.

  It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.

  There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.

  by throwaway_7274
• > Your gender equality is made of petroleum.

  That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?

  by fittingopposite
• All we have to do is plant trees. Millions of trees, and reduce beef farming.
  by adammarples
• You are right, except: "solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us."

  You just can't know this. It might be true. But it might not. That's the thing about the future, it is fundamentally alien.

  by exolymph
• Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but I legitimately don't know: does the thermodynamic argument hold up? (Broadly, I agree that humanity needs a healthier relationship with industrialism before fixing this is possible).

  A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:

  - We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.

  - A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.

  - We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?

  by maxwells-daemon
• While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.

  If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.

  Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.

  by kldavis4
• If we ever manage to halt this accelerating crisis we should seriously consider a modern-day equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands needlessly dead, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766 (from 2024)
  by Y-bar
• This is not an argument for global warming, but do bear in mind that cold kills far more and on balance global warming has saved lives here. The issue is going to cause worse problems than heat deaths though. However, a big wet bulb event could completely reverse that count.
  by adammarples
• I think we should start charging the worst emitters with manslaughter now. We shouldn't wait for the crisis to be halted; the law should be part of how we force firms to recognize part of the harm.
  by abeppu
• On the topic of thousands needlessly dead, look at the UN's suggestions:

  Useless yapping about opening windows at night, protecting the vulnerable, limiting global warming to 1.5C, and not drinking caffeine.

  Is any of this "Call to Action" actually actionable?

  Obviously not; and it is pathetic.

  What should be actioned:

  - remove regulatory hurdles to AC installation

  - mandate such installation in residences that otherwise reach unbearable temperatures

  - make funds available to subsidize the installation or train more workers for AC installation

  That would 'protect the vulnerable'.

  Talking about opening windows at night or climate change does nothing, and is performative only.

  by user43928