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- Hacker News
- no offense with their narrative, but the picture - Shipwreck has become visible due to Danube’s low water levels - actually shows MORE GREEN than year ago if you don't focus on the river, look at alla reas around, everything is greener, such a fail BBC
btw. I don't deny many areas are dryer and more yellow than last year, but when looking at satellite pictures you should also take into consideration WHEN was the harvest, logically if harvest is earlier due to hotter weather the whole country will look very different from space and it doesn't say much about whether country is dry (though this is of course unrelated to some French palace photo which obviously ain't farm field)
by Markoff - good thing is not climate change, that would be really bad...by GoToRO
- So in Western Europe we're fucked by first having heatwaves (and fires everywhere) and, indeed, every field around me is yellow instead of green...
And then, when the AMOC shall start running amok, we'll be forever in extreme cold.
Where should I flee?
- What, like an economic migrant?by netsharc
- Side by side images of exactly the same places one year apart would have been much better than the images in the article - combining left and right part from 2 years. Maybe it's just me, but the satellite images mostly were hard to readby Andr2Andr
- They are the same place, you’re supposed to compare using the slider. What bothers me more is that the left and right images seem to have a different color temperature.by layer8
- There's a slider in the middle you can use to see before/afterby brugidou
- It's very disheartening as someone who enjoys recreational fishing that the river closures -- typically legally closed to fishing, but otherwise ethically closed -- are getting earlier and earlier. That is, if the rivers aren't straight up bone dry peak summer.
I'm pretty young, too, so I have this, if not worse than this, to look forward to for the majority of my life.
Not to mention here in BC we're up to three summers in a row where entire towns have burned down ... not a positive sign of things to come.
by tills13 - Climate change affects geographies unequally. Seems like Europe and the tropics have been the first to suffer, year after year, and with the UK losing that warm current in ~47 years, can't help but wonder what is on European minds.by bethekind
- > with the UK losing that warm current in ~47 years
Guess it will cancel out the increased temperature?
by RobotToaster - Well in my mind is no one else cares and the EU is holier than pope. We are destroying our economy for promile of world polution and are even shamed for using AC.by kvgr
- >with the UK losing that warm current in ~47 years
What's that going to look like?
by andai - > can't help but wonder what is on European minds
that only a big catastrophe, possibly a global war, will make people think again
by dariosalvi78 - I tell anyone I meet to seriously consider what immigration will be like when anthropogenic global warming will get stronger. I'm neither pro/against immigration but I know many people are scared by immigration (as is demonstrated in many EC countries by the progression of far right parties).
I also tell them to remember that food prices and insurances prices will inevitably go up.
And I won't much more that that because everything else fails (even the death of 1000 persons in my country during this years heat waves just make people say "bah, that's life")
by wiz21c - > but wonder what is on European minds
UK here. It really feels like this year has been a massive wake-up call, a follow-up to the one of 2022 (and 2018, 2019, 2021...)
Some fire services have had their busiest months on record this year. In an extraordinary (and controversial) move, they convinced the government to use the phone Emergency Alert system to alert the entire country about the risk of fires.
Prior to summer, in the North of England, it was extremely windy and gloomy from September to May. Very very few blue skies. The other day, we went from a 2-day mini heat wave (35c & 28c) to gloomy cloud in 2 days - it's just so bizarre.
We've just had our 5th or 6th heatwave of the summer
A train derailed yesterday due to a buckled rail. Another derailed, cause of which is suspected to be heat/drought related. Luckily no fatalities.
We've had more wildfires than 2022 and drought is more widespread. I often can't have my window open at night when it's 29c inside because of the fires 10-20 miles away. I have no A/C
I'm wondering if our future is gales and grey for 9 months then heatwaves and drought? I know the North of England is historically gloomy, but it 'feels' different of late.
It feels like we do not have the money to begin to prepare and fix things that need fixing to continue the life we have. We haven't built a reservoir since 1990 despite massive population increase. Our rail network is not prepared for heat waves or long periods of drought or long periods of rain or long periods of ice/snow. London buses mostly have no A/C, ditto rest of the country. Many people don't have money for A/C at home - not even sure our electricity network could handle it. And about 100 other issues...
by gib444 - > can't help but wonder what is on European minds
The main thing I have in mind is that human civilization is completely fucked. What is needed to ensure things aren’t too horrible in the next century is so drastic and requires such a global coordinated effort that will never happen. There is no technology or super authority that will magically save us from a climate catastrophe this century.
Given the vast majority of the world population still see vegetarianism as a joke and not a necessity, and developed countries are ready to sacrifice pretty much everything to the AI compute gods we are truly fucked
by dgellow - I think the cows are very stressed here in Switzerland. I make cheese every now and then - ricotta and paneer. It's simple. I buy the milk from a "milch-Automat" - farms around here (Zurich) have machines where you can buy a liter of raw milk from the farm for cheap. So, the milk I'm using is direct from the cows.
I made paneer a week ago. Normally I can cut it up and brown it and make the edges crispy. But for this batch I got far less cheese than normal and it was wet - I had to let the molded paneer dry out longer than normal. Then when I went to brown it the entire batch just melted into a gloopy mess - that just doesn't happen.
Reminded me of the omen.
by comrade1234 - I had to look this up: In European and Alpine agrarian traditions, sudden, inexplicable failures in dairy processing - such as milk refusing to curdle, butter failing to churn, or cheese spoiling unexpectedly - were historically interpreted as serious bad omens. They were seen as portents of impending drought, blighted pastures, severe livestock distress, or famine.by vismit2000
- I just came back from Hungary and Slovakia and it really caught my attention that the grass everywhere was just yellow. I wasn't sure if it's normal by this time of the year, but truely, both countries look like Greece now.by snicky
- Hello from Slovakia. Yellow grass by the middle of august is not that exceptional here. The current drought is much worse though; the trees are already shedding leaves and we've had wild swine come to our appartment building (in the middle of the capital city) to drink water from lawn irrigation, which has never happened before. Most of the smaller creeks and rivers are completely dry. We didn't have much wildfires luckily but that's just a question of time I'm afraid.by tpm
- Yes, I've been told the U.K. looks like California now.by JKCalhoun
- Southern Slovakia and a large part of Hungary are fucked if it keeps getting warmer, and given their governments there is 0% chance they will even try to adapt their agricultureby toasty228
- Same in Switzerland. Trees have started yellowing a month before autumn.by fakedang
- Same here in NL. A few drops of rain today, for the first time in a long time.by jacquesm
- Same in Ireland. I think the country grass is fields or near woodlands or rivers is still holding on to its green but urban grass in parks is scorched. I've never seen this before.
Ireland is fundamentally a wet country and always has been.
by s_dev - Same in Northwest France: I've never seen the grass so yellow, and now the ground is even becoming bare brown. Some tree species are yellowing/browning. With the prolonged lack of rain and extreme heat for the region, it's a summer like I've never seen before. And it's probably one of the coolest of the rest of my life.by vinc
- I remember in 2010, corporate propagandists were telling us that the effects of climate change won't be felt for a 100 years.by geremiiah
- Famine is going to be a really, really bad way to die.by bamboozled
- by andai
- My only practical contribution to fixing this issue is to upvote this article.. and write a message on HN.
I'm in Spain.
I really hope that after this summer, people of Europe will wake up and make fixing the climate their highest priority - at home, at work, in politics. We have very little time left, maybe a few years.
I can still see news articles everywhere blaming 'climate change' and 'CO2 emissions', pointing the finger at the oil companies and the likes. But those 'bad' guys are not operating in a void - they supply the products which are in high demand from me and you and our families - our entire lifestyle is built around them. So what needs to change is our life styles, philosophy, economic order .. drastic changes.
Consumerism needs to go, tourism needs to go, advertising needs to go, travel and logistics needs to be reinvented, industrial production needs to drop by orders of magnitude, everything replaced with healthy and efficient alternatives.
How can this be done peacefully is beyond me, it probably can't. We've had precedent during covid, when the whole world stopped because everyone was scared that they're going to die. It's not so different now.
by delegate