Insane heatwave grips southern Europe. Land surface temperature in some areas of Extremadura in Spain reached 60° Celsius!!locked
A severe heatwave is ongoing in Europe. Temperature records broken in France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain.
On 11 July 2023, the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in some areas of Extremadura (Spain) exceeded 60°C, as highlighted in this data visualisation derived from measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) instrument. The ongoing heatwave in Spain this week is resulting in a total of 13 autonomous communities, being at extreme risk (red alert), significant risk (orange alert), and risk (yellow alert) due to maximum temperatures that, in some cases, will exceed 40°C and reach a maximum of 43°C.
For reference, "in areas where vegetation is dense, the land surface temperature never rises above 35°C. The hottest land surface temperatures on Earth are in plant-free desert landscapes."
The world is burning but no one gives a shit.. i don't think anyone will until literally their house is on fire.
Not even then sometimes. In Germany, there was a small village buried under a mudslide from a flashflood that was a direct consequence of extreme weather patterns created by climate change. That same village overwhelmingly voted for conservative politicians that don't care about doing anything about climate change the very next year.
For a while now, the question of democracy has been haunting the climate change issue. In the west, at least, it has shown itself ill-suited to the task of handling climate change. Of course, seriously proposing older forms of government would be dangerous and perhaps even insane. But the tension is there, and when we look back on all of this, democracy, or the form we have, is likely not going to look good.
Any form of government with idiots at the helm will fail. With power at the helm and feebleness of the people defining the grandeur of the fail.
I.e. I want to say: the form of government doesnt matter. Just defines the imaginary friction for the government to do things and stuff.
The idiots are winning.
For now.
Please can you tell me where you source your optimism from because I can't seem to get any.
Democracy just means the number of people getting kickbacks is a number above 1. The higher the number the more democratic.
The trick is to make it so that the people who profit from fixing climate change are big enough to be in the group that gets kickbacks.
As evil as Nixon was he wasn't an idiot. You can get environmental rules passed as long as someone is getting their palm's greased.
I've spent last August sitting in the shade listening to the music from the village parties mixed with the sound of the airplane engines flying over a nearby forest fire. It was bizarre. But then, what is one to do really? People who live around here aren't really the ones to blame. Can't really blame them for still wanting to have their village party. While I, who does give a shit, do little more than eating local and avoiding consumerism. Eating the rich might me more efficient, but there's none around here, we just have grapes and potato.
The people with the real power to do anything are the people who will suffer the least. We're going off the rails on a crazy train.
'Crazy train' describes well the feeling I had last summer. Like the 'this is fine' meme. And this summer will be the same. You hide, keep your garden watered, and hope the fires won't get you this year. All while the officials keep advising to plant more Eucalyptus for profit and organic matter is blamed for the problem and burned for biofuel or on people's fields - instead of reincorporated into the landscape as it should be. Here in Portugal, for animal bedding, most buy straw bales from the overheated because desertified Extremadura instead of cutting the Giesta (broom) as people used to do. Why are the Spanish straw bales cheaper? Because fossil fuels and the big scale agriculture attached to them create a fake price for the straw (I'm not an economist and don't know the right terms, but it's like the prices for fossil fuels and their derivates don't contain the environmental damage caused by its use). And the Giestais, unused, grow and spread the wildfires.
In Economic terms, it's Negative Externalities not being reflected in the price.
Negative Externalities are negative effects of an economic activity which are dispersed in their effect and thus affect everbody but just a little each (while the positives are all gains for the people doing that activity). These are things like Polution, destruction of Ecological Systems, emission of Global Warming gases and so on - there are quite a lot of things that are like that.
Mathematically (and in practice) the Free Market will never compensate for those (quite the contrary: it makes them more likely), which is why some kind of legislation which is actually enforced is needed to control such things.
This being Portugal, there is no political will to control most of those things (rivers are only clean nowadays because the EU forced it) so either there is no legislation, there is but it's toothless, there is but the fines are way less than the profits from law-breaking or there is but those supposed to uphold the law are activelly hindered in their work, have no real power to do so or are starved of funds so can't in practice do the job (just notice how the Comission for Transparency of Income of Politicians in Public Office has been for years waiting for approval for the location of their HQ)
The country might as well change its name to Cronyist Crookland.
That's it, negative externalities. Thanks for reminding me of the word. Which group would I support if I wanted to change something in Portugal? I have found a lot of middle class 'feel good activism' (planting trees which then die, talking endlessly about what to do, pass the same old advice to fellow citizens ...), but that doesn't really cut it. The country is a beautiful banana republic and has a few nice valleys to hide in, and I have been living here long enough to want to help protect these places. How can we hold accountable the industries who want to come here to destroy and extract?
Frankly, having even become a member of a supposedly thinking leftwing party in Portugal, I have concluded that the country is screwed as there really isn't any strategical thinking or even merelly political ideas constructed from the bottom up out of principles: it's all tribalism, celebrity culture, slogan parroting and people with a ridiculously narrow life experience improvising politics in the spot.
Looking around, I don't think there is a single political movement in the country with an actual thought through strategy or vision for improving things. Politics in Portugal is a microcosmos of the management culture in the country - which I can tell you from experience is amazingly bad compared to the rest of Europe - only with people that are even worse than that perry lousy average.
I'll probably go back to live abroad.
Northern India saw intense heatwaves just a few weeks back and now is being drowned. Indians are used to heatwaves and floods, but this year the intensity and scale both are frightening.
This was the reason it changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change". More energy is being dumped into the weather system. This makes everything more extreme. The heating is almost incidental to it. The extra energy is the killer.
That’s climate change to a tee, it’s more the usual pattern but taken to the extreme, and it’s only going to get worse each year.
Yyyyep. We've never been prepared for our normal weather here for whatever reason, and I simply can't wait for winters to worsen too, now that it's very visibly tipped over the edge. /s
I'd rather die in heat than cold, which insinuates it's definitely going to be the latter.
Winter is coming.
Relevant username. (Are we doing that on Lemmy?)
If that's the case, then I'm worried for you...
username checks out
If I makes you feel any better, I give a shit.
Your comment signals lighting government official's houses on fire nonstop so they start doing something
you know what?
"You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did" - All Eyes on Me
And even then they will find a way to blame it on anything else and people will be saying houses have always burned.
When the crops are dead and the water dried up. Then people will start to take notice. But by then, it's already too late.
Both of those progressing nicely in Spain, and the result was... a rise of the right, that has doubled down on destroying the aquifers in the south, the most affected region.
So the worse things become, the more people turn a blind eye to the issue.
Humans deserve to burn up
The world is 70% water.
Edit.
Another fact, water is wet.
Water is not going to dry up... What a weird comment, climate change means more rain, not less
almost all of it not directly usable
It is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse
Two inputs, solar and seawater
Do you think 100% of our population and agriculture lives by the coast? Sure we have elaborate and resource intensive solutions to the problem, we could eventually just move the whole population(what's left) into domed cities by the coast, but it be better to just not fuck up our environment constantly and hold those that do accountable.
Not sure what point your trying to make her but it's not a good one.
I work in agtech, there's plenty of solutions, vertical farming, genetic engineering for drought resistance.
Point I'm making is that the water is not going to dry up because it covers 70% of the earth's surface, not sure why that's a contentious issue when it's a basic fact that rain is increasing.
It's a salt issue, and desalination would also enable lithium and other rare earth metal mining without destroying habitats
Those big tech solutions always strike me as a very complicated way of solving a very simple problem. The Iberian peninsula is drying out because people (and their animals) are turning it into a desert. Look at Extremadura and many other places in Spain (and Portugal, to a somewhat lesser extent) - what ever happened to the trees? If we allowed trees and the connected biodiversity to return we could also retain water in the landscape more efficiently. And the best about this is that it doesn't need high-tech anything. It really just requires to think twice before you chop down a tree. Actually, do less. Cut less, plough less, stop transporting stuff around ... just chill, and the planet can chill as well.
That doesn't feed 10 billion people though. CEA industrialises nature, but not in nature. If it's powered by renewables, it's pretty much net zero. Uses no pesticides or herbicides, no runoff and the water is reused for a year by filtering and using reverse osmosis.
I used to talk your talk, because I parroted it from other smart guys in Academia. Then I got into small scale gardening and permaculture, and started studying traditional food production. I have to tell you, big ag has been lying big time about their efficiency. Yes, they can produce more per hectar of one crop, but that takes an enormous input of fossil fuel, heavy machinery, fertilizers. In a permaculture system you might not get a ton of x per hectare, but 100kgs of x, 200kgs of y, 300kgs of z ... with less input of fossil fuel and less environmental destruction. Of course if you just count the tons of grain, industrial ag wins. But you have to count both input and output plus long term sustainability to know which system really works better. Combine animals, plants, mushrooms, microorganisms in the right way and you can create a very resilient, nutrition-dense system with little energy needs. Spain is turning itself into a dust bowl for the profit of the few, and a lot of the monoculture propaganda is made up and spread by landgrabbers who are too happy to buy up smaller farms in the name of 'efficiency' and 'feeding the multitudes' - it just sounds so much better than 'I bought my neighbors land because I have more money than him'.
I suggest you visit a well-run forest agriculture and permaculture place to see how you can achieve results that are even more positive than huge technological solutions like vertical farms or desalination water lines crossing the land.
With renewables only the energy itself is an 'infinite' source (nothing is infinite, but for example solar is quite infinite in our terms, geothermal a little less so). The mechanisms for harvesting said energy and for running vertical farms and desalination plants do need finite resources to be built and maintained, however, while a diverse ecosystem basically runs itself. Big engineering has become so normalized that we believe we need this to make a big impact, but I think we have to think smaller again. Big tech has brought us here, let's be a little more careful with it in the future.
It's not one or the other. Regenerative agriculture is great, but it's still very land intensive. The beauty of vertical farming is it can be placed in urban areas on brownfield sites which reduces food miles and provides jobs.
I would say the only environment where I would want to see such a thing is dense urban environments. But then, maybe we shouldn't have urban environments so dense that we have to build skyscrapers for our salads ...
If everyone spread out, we'd have about an acre each and no natural habitat.
It makes sense to have dense urban environments and to build up instead of out.
Either that or depopulation by moving into space or a cull...
This is the most "I work for a tech bro startup that has existed for 6 months, and has done nothing but beg investors for funding" comment I've ever seen.
8 years and have grown ups with plant science masters degrees and such, and no, funding round is closed. IPO next.
UK equities are cheap right now, lots of money looking at snapping up bargains, good times ahead :)
Of course there are solutions. Everyone knows solutions exist. We could, for example, work to stop global warming.
It's having affordable solutions that don't have massive side effects and that people are willing to do that's the problem.
Lots of organisations are already working to stop climate change
My problem is with the moaners who do nothing but use fossil fuels and plastics to moan about fossil fuels and plastics.
What do you expect? Most people are individually powerless to affect the sort of change that would actually be helpful. By "moaning" they at least make their discontent known to those who could affect change.
I disagree, you don't have to fix the world, just the bit you live in. There's plenty of community projects to install solar and insulation that people could get involved with instead.
"You don't have to fix anything just pretend like you're making a difference" What a crock of shit.
Oh cool, and how much energy does that desalination cost? And how do we generate that power?
Solar and eolic. The cost of which is dropping all the time. As soon as it's economically viable then desalination is a good idea. Especially if sodium ion battery tech pans out
https://www.electrive.com/2023/04/21/catl-and-byd-to-use-sodium-ion-batteries-in-evs-this-year/
Oh, wonderful! So third world, developing nations — who will need the water the most— will definitely all have access to not only large scale, very expensive tech (that doesn't even really exist yet) for desalination, but also the money, technology, and infrastructure to power all of it with renewable energy.
That's definitely how the world works.
A greenhouse and a pump aren't exactly high tech
Oh, so you don't even know how desalination works. If it were that cheap and easy, we would all be fucking doing it already, dumbass.
Maybe go learn something while the adults talk babe
https://www.sgsomaliland.com/story
so what you're saying is, that I'm right?
If it makes you happy, sure. But not really, climate change means warmer air and more rain as a result.
Controlled environment agriculture reduces water use by 95%...and we don't need to use anywhere near all the seawater, obviously
What do you do with the salt?
It's a feedstock for a large number of chemical syntheses
Or sodium ion batteries https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40243-022-00208-1
Or eat it?
Stupidest fucking comment I've ever read in my life. Water doesn't dry up? Have you never seen a dry river bed? Or how about salt flats?
This is why we are doomed to die to climate change. People like you who are completely unwilling to even begin to understand the thing they refuse to accept.
Lol, you obviously don't read much then.
Obviously existing agriculture uses too much water, which is why there are alternatives such as CEA...
I work in a sector that is mitigating climate change, so I'd be interested to know what you're doing about it, other than stealing oxygen.
Lmao, please drink nothing but sea water for a few days then get back to me
Talking about surface temperature is pretty misleading.
Ah, I see you're one of these people that will dismiss such claim because of "surface temperature". Well, as someone that:
I can tell you that surface temperature, even if they make "bigger numbers", are extremely relevant to the degradation of the situation, no matter how misleading you think it is. The ground didn't "suddenly" get hotter with everything else staying the same; and everything getting hotter also have dire consequences. It's just a metric, it might not be the best one, but people should stop dismissing these, because it's by having a hot frying pan that the content gets cooked.
Nope, not at all. You completely misunderstood my point.
I'm not saying the ground suddenly got hotter and everything else stayed the same. In this case, it's just a metric that's quoted because it has a misleading high value especially by people who are just scrolling through.
It's click bait.
Here's an article talking about the types of temperature measurements. If LST is high, odds are air temperature will be high to, and air temp is much more relevant to our life as a human, whether we're going to die, and easy to compare to how hot it is locally.
Yeah, it's confusing and unhelpful. People should standardize on reporting air temperature unless there's a very specific and compelling reason not to.
Yep. Unless you're trying to cook eggs on the ground, then you can start letting people know when it finally gets hot enough to do that.
But bigger number
If it's explicitly and specifically noted like in this post, it's fine. It even names airtemps further down.
It's not fine if it's what's used in the title. It's fine to include it as part of the post, but only including the surface temp in the title is misleading.
You guys are arguing over degrees, ironically. Yes, it's misleading, but it's not AS misleading as saying "Temperature reaches 60C" without stating "surface" as well.
Extremadura is not a plant-free desert landscape. Not yet, anyway.
It's a straw-bale filled cube desert, a monoculture hell. The Spanish are really good at creating these.
Because dogs can't read the news, right?
Measurement probably taken from asphalt road at 3pm lmao
I know this is a world community but I'm just going to throw the conversion out there for anyone who needs it to understand how hot that is, that is 140F.
I feel like my toaster oven doesn’t get much hotter than that when I set it to reheat leftovers.
We are truly fucked…
The hottest I've had to endure is somewhere around 112°F with lots of humidity. I would (figuratively) die in 140°F weather.
I'm on vacation in a place that is regularly 20c on summer, it's 35c right now. Real sad since I wanted to escape the 40c city
Get ready for new eco bans, we will have to stop using plastic milk containers and factories will produce more junk to put the milk in to. Like with the plastic straws and bags, good idea on papper, poor execution irl.
Maybe you're being funny, maybe not, but plastic bag pollution and straws etc are not the driving force behind temperature swings like this. Atmospheric gasses such as CO2, CH4, etc are the issue that causes climate change, and thus the instability accompanying things like greater peak temps, more disasters, etc.
The bags and straws discussion is about environmental care. Eg not letting sea turtles eat plastic bags because they think they are jelly fish.
What iam saying that the average person will get the short stick, and the big polluters like factories will not see any new anti pollution regulations. Like do we need 100s of key chain factories, we lived without useless plastic trinkets before, ban those things because thry have no use.
Distractions to make the govt look like they care and to shift blame onto the average person.
Yeah indeed, the paper bags are more polluting to produce than its plastic equivalent. The many problem with plastics is that it does more damage when it ends up in nature, but it is recyclable though.
We should stop blaming the people/consumers and start blaming the large corporations that dump PFAS in our drink water supply, like they did here in The Netherlands and Belgium. That does lore harm than the plastic straws ever did
Out of curiosity, how are paper bags more polluting than plastic ones?
Also, from what I have been reading, the problem with plastic is that it's actually marketed as widely recyclable, but nobody actually recycles plastic as it is too expensive (water bottles, plastic packaging, etc...). Its actually cheaper to produce more plastic than to recycle.
It takes more energy to produce paper bags and they last less.. a paper bag that gets even slightly wet is useless while a plastic bag can be dried out and reused. I read that plastic bags that are reused 2x are less problematic than paper bags.
But that's a big assumption to work from no? The fact that a plastic bag is going to be used more than once. I mean definitely a paper bag is less practical, but it won't end up in a landfill trying to decompose for god knows how many years...
There are loads of single use plastics in our daily lives that are pretty much heading to a landfill as they won't be recycled.
in germany most plastic bottles are reused several times through a deposit system and after reaching a limit they are almost completely recycled. Always wonder why other countries can't seem to be able to use a similar system
Is this audited in any way by authorities? How do you know what has been recycled and what is "virgin" plastic?
That's definitely the way forward in my opinion. Do people get any incentive to use the deposit system or it's already ingrained in the culture?
yeah searching for it, there seem to be certification institutes and audits. The system is quite nicely explained in this video: https://youtu.be/YQ2GOtpYiqk
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/YQ2GOtpYiqk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
It's only gonna get worse as global warming takes hold.
Soon, Britain, Ireland and the Nordics are going to be prime summer holiday destinations because Southern Europe will be too damn hot to even inhabit.
It's going to be absolute hell because homes in these countries are designed to retain heat, have no air conditioning, and typically are built with large windows to let as much light in as possible.
Heat pumps for everyone until they are underwater from rising oceans. I thought the jet stream was going to make it much colder in the isles so maybe it'll balance out lol.
How much more hold do you want?
Smoke em if you got em.
There's probably a handy wildfire around to light 'em!
If we are starting to get alarmed over surface temps, here's my patio furniture temp right now in Arizona
Air temp is currently 43.8C
I always hate these comments, and this is a whole new level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclimatization
TL;DR: You'd probably freeze to death if the local temperature suddenly became -30C.
I'm not sure if the OP edited it or not, but it sounds like you're assuming they're saying something more than they are. They never said "we're all going to die". They're just pointing out that it's also a very high surface temp in Arizona, which is nearly exactly the surface temp the title states in Spain.
That's devastatingly hot.
Climate change deniers are like
Man, that's intense.