This is fine, we just need to switch from plastic bugs and make caps attached to bottles and everything will be alright! Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)
I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It's not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it's fun. They're doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.
No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. "Just make corporations pay" to fix things, whether that's a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean "increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities".
That doesn't necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we've all created, and we're all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn't actually get us any closer to solving things.
Yes and No. Yes, it’s not only corporations and we must act ourselves.
No, it’s the rules that set the game. Corporations play within the rules. Politics is owning and can change the rules. The society and corporations will follow accordingly.
If we really want to change we can. Look what happened during Covid. In retrospect, some insane rules (eg Germany kids not allowed to enter playgrounds. Kids couldn’t play to save the elderly). However, society obeyed to those rules.
It’s not us, it’s the rules that must change. In my view this should be the priority.
At least here in Australia parents were using the kids at the playground to socialise (standing right up in each other's space, holding empty coffee cups to justify no mask), and so there were multiple vectors of infection. That and multigenerational households are more common in some parts of the world, so if the kid brings it home, whole family gets sick, hospital system overloads.
It wasn't specifically kids suffer so oldies don't die, but the continuation is that if the oldies are healthy, if anyone needs the hospital, there'll be staff to look after them.
TL;DR people are taking the piss and making the jobs of HCWs harder... Not like that's anything new 🙄
yeah it was obviously the same on any playground so the above comment saying it was "to safe elderly" is just very short sighted. Additionaly implying that this was the case in whole of Germany is again wrong. Each federal state had it's own health regulations in place but yeah some of those were kind of mediated by the ministry of health. Anyway it was a lot more complex than what this comment suggests
Sure it was more complex. Not going to write a Phd here.
My point is, the society accepts rules even tough rules if it’s for everyone. If it’s fair. So, at Covid times younger people, who are less likely to get serious sickness were accepting being „caged“ for two years (exaggerating a bit. If you are 5 years old. 2 years is half of your life!)
I strongly miss this generational fairness when it comes to climate change. Not seeing any step back in terms of carbon consumption/ consumption at all from the older people.
and guess who lobbies a ridiculous amount to either keep the rules the same or bias it further towards their interests
yep, corporations once again
Indeed. Go out at the street and show you want change. Politics fear many people on streets fighting for their rights. Look at France, Israel. When was last time you fight for your rights?
Blaming the public over corporations is the #1 reason why we are in this mess in the first place. For decades, the narrative has been "it's your fault and you need to change your habits". It is a pointless and useless narrative because nobody is going to actively change anything like that until they are forced to. Even when we make moderate, easy efforts to do stuff like recycling, the recycling companies bitch and moan about how they can't ship this shit off to China to let them do the work, and then throw away most of it, anyway. We PAY recycling companies to recycle this shit and they can't be bothered to figure out how to recycle it. We PAY THEM to take away materials to use in new products, not the other way around.
In every aspect of people's lives, you will find that corporations use up 90% of the resources that the general public use because corporations deal in economies-of-scale far bigger than anything a person or even a country can do. Corporations have been pushing the "blame the public" narrative to shift focus away from the decades of abuse they will continue to inflict on the planet. Corporation shit all over everything, and they will continue to do so in the name of profit. That is exactly what they are designed to do.
It takes governmental effort and regulations against the corporations to stop this sort of thing. They do it for clean water, and CFCs, and automotive design, and architecture, and many many other things. Why? Because a minority group of people who are struggling to make a living is never going to have enough power and clout as a large corporation or a government.
It’s not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it’s fun.
I think we can agree on that corporations are aimed at cheapest way to produce most popular goods at the biggest scale they can achieve for, in the end, produce the biggest possible profit. Thats what corporations are made for: money.
In the end, rich guy gets a yacht, bunker for apocalypse and private residence with AC, private kitchen stuff and anything they want so he will be fine even if its 60C outside. If it will get unbearable, they'll move to something like Norway and will be fine.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people who live in hot countries will die and millions will be climate refugees.
All that, because producing iphone with coal electricity (simplification, albeit I feel like its close to truth) is 10$ cheaper.
Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn’t actually get us any closer to solving things.
Swapping to paper bags will not help either. There are only two options to solve the issue:
Government forces corpo to stop wasting our planet (because we don't have a spare one)
People get torches
1 is impossible because gov will never cut the feeding hand and 2 is just a matter of time until we will get couple hundred millions migrants from Aftica, India, Pakistan etc.
1 is still possible. But, we're at a tipping point between ending up in some Cyberpunk corporate-ran dystopia and one where the general public actually has the upper-hand and can fend off governmental corruption.
Choose wisely. Vote every year, twice a year.
but the thing about voting is that basically every politician is either:
In the pocket of one or more corporations
Literally part of a corporation (or outright owns one)
A politician at who doesn't have as much power as the former two or is in the pocket of one of them
so we could vote for John StopClimateChange, and then find out that every single thing that Mr. StopClimateChange said about his crusade to stopping climate change was not at all true or was so utterly miniscule in the long run as to be meaningless
You mean this is a problem that the boomers and gen x created. THEY are the generations that controlled the corporations whose only concern was profit. THEY are the generations that pushed consumerism with no regard to the natural world. THEY are the generations that elected the politicians that allowed this all to happen. So here come the millennials and zoomers to clean up their mess, just like everything else they fucked up for the rest of us.
Yeah, don’t put the blame on us. In all my 29 years of life climate change has always been a big topic no one has done anything about.
We’re living in this ridiculous gerontocracy where old lizards bought by corporations are making decisions to benefit said corporations for the next couple of months, all the while the coming generations suffer.
At this point it’s too late. It’s time to owe up, apologise for being so greedy that you used up the world, leaving nothing for coming generations.
If you're 29 that means you're borderline millennial/gen z. Definitely not blaming you here. You are correct, this has been an issue for our entire lives and the generations before us have done exactly nothing to curtail the destruction of our planet
What an awkward speech.
Sure people spending all day on TikTok and playing with cryptocurrencies are actually solving problems created by people who worked in the mines and watched TV.
The truth is, across all generations, everyone is doing anything to live the most confortable life possible according to their convictions, and YouTubers today are not better promoting their shitty gamer drinks or VPN services than a 1980s vendor trying to sell as much diesel engines as possible.
It’s even more true when it comes to corporate, or you’ll have to tell me what’s is Zuckerberg doing for the planet that Bill Gates is not.
At any given time there were people willing to change the world, trying to make it more fair. We’re just never enough. And being a millennial I can assure you it’s not changing anytime soon, even tho things are getting shittier and shittier.
They produce like double of what we need, it's not only what we need and buy, capitalism is extremely inefficient in the usage of resources, which brought us into this mess.
Yeah. Anything that isn’t consumed is destroyed. Case in point, dumpster diving at grocery stores is illegal. Fast fashion companies destroy clothes that don’t sell.
The entire system is fucked.
Have you seen how much CEOs get paid?
Corporations can switch to greener alternatives AND pay workers a living wage AND make a profit, without having the consumers pay the price.
All it takes is the willingness of politicians to force them to. Corporations raise prices because they're allowed to, and they'll take any excuse they can get to get more money out of people.
Gas prices have skyrocketed. First it was covid's fault. Then it was the war in Ukraine. All the while gas corporations have been seeing record-breaking profits. It's all just greed.
I think as someone who did "the things", and that's how I live now, it's hard to look around and see basically no perceptible difference. The incentive is slim for the individual. The bulk of the population is never going to make those changes.
Also if you only eat meat in the weekends then the rich peoples private jets will suddenly have no environmental impact
Is there a bracelet I can wear to show my solidarity with the people dying of heat stroke, or perhaps an instagram filter.
These two things have no relation. One is about climate change, the other one about (micro)plastics in the environment and our food chain.
Apparently there are still loads of people who don't understand this simple fact and think everything that is done to make the world a better place is for climate change.
I mean, they both show a callous disregard for the fragility of life on this planet, and a keen disinterest in anything but short term convenience and comfort? Oh and profit, can't forget about MONEY
This argument keeps coming up as an excuse to do nothing.
It's not my fault but theirs!
Why should I change when they won't?
I'm just one person against all these big corps, why try?
Even if I stopped, it wouldn't make a difference.
Pure defeatism neglecting even any bit of responsibility.
Yet people who say this will put another child on the planet, buy yet another product from Apple on release, love fast fashion, buy the cheapest goods possible, toss their meal as soon as they're full, vote egoistically, take the cheapest trip to wherever, drive a car, toss cigarette butts on the ground, and so much more.
It's always easier to blame others. Yes, corporations are shit, but remember, they are made up of people like you and I.
WE work there.
WE buy their crap.
WE vote for the same politicians over and over again (or don't vote at all).
WE put another child on this planet to go through this shit.
WE as humans are the problem.
See, that's your point of view. My point of view is that people who are all doom online are the problem.
Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)
I wish our choices had a 1% impact.... That seems extremely generous.
For example...
Go look at your local Walmart and it's bazillion products. They expect to sell almost everything in that store multiple times within a month. All that generates enormous waste on a scale that's literally impossible for the earth to sustain for another 100 years without total ecological collapse.
We're living in the single most polluting decade in human history, every decade, since all of us were born. Even if the entire Lemmy user base become subsistence farming monks, the factories would just keep churning out poison unphased.
I'm not saying it's bad for people to try and consume more responsibly. I'm just saying it doesn't make a difference over any meaningful time period until there's a radical change in how our global economy functions.
Environmental catastrophe will continue until we literally cannot ignore it, only then will we do anything substantial about it. Unfortunately that's just how our society works.
I don't agree with you. Many individuals changing their behavior is what it takes for an economic shift in our society. By thinking that we don't have an impact we loose motivation to change our behavior. So if you say you are annoyed by big supermarkets filling our planet with waste that's fine, I agree. But this needs to lead to a change in behavior, first of yourself, then for those who notice you haven't died from eating mostly vegan products and buying from local farmers markets and then hopefully for most people in our society.
Companies produce as long as people consume their products. If commnsumers switch to sustainable products (quite different from products advertised as sustainable) companies will have to follow
What has that to do with anything? Reducing single use plastics is environmental protection which is not the same as fighting climate change. No one who fights against plastics does so for climate change. Stop spreading such nonsense. Not even your linked article claims something like that.
we have the 80% solution and it's nuclear power, but whatever y'all keep wailing and gnashing teeth and denying the obvious. I'm just gonna keep on living I guess and hope my house survives the shitty weather.
We have what, 10 years to try stop the planet to get over 1,5ºC? 20 over 2ºC?, that's pretty much the time it takes to build a new nuclear power plant from 0.
At this point, I'm down for the execution of selfish billionaires who actively push for coal and other harmful climate policies. They not only don't care about the world, they are actively harming it to make their short time left feel better from seeing a number go up in their bank.
If you were on reddit: "You have been permanently suspended for threatening to use violence."
I'd always just drop a link. Got the message across, but never got me banned:
I always thought Lemmy (at least this instance) had stricter rules than Reddit. Seeing a comment here that outright wishes for billionaires to be culled is a huge culture shock.
Because we aren't worried about offending advertisers. This is what real people think without being forced to be advertiser friendly.
It would do absolutely nothing at all. For every billionaire that is running some seedy enterprise that you don't like, there are dozens if not hundreds of well paid people that are supporting that enterprise and would keep it going going forever.
Send them all to a for-profit prison I say!
You know what the French nobility did when the people started to, quite rightfully, remove their heads? It sure wasn’t move in to the newly vacant palace…
Yeah, the vast majority of human kind would gladly own a multi billion dollar company even if that company were causing climate change.
If only somebody warned us 50 or 100 years ago. Oh wait, they did.
More like over 200 years ago. There was a french female scientist that discovered the greenhouse effect before John Tyndall but I forgot her name and I'm at work rn, can't search for it.
It was an American named Eunice Foote that detailed the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, but, give or take, it was also around the same time that many scientists came to the same or similar conclusions about this subject. So yes, we've been warned for over 200 years and have done exactly nothing to solve the problem. Why? $.
New normal, folks. So begins the era of climate migration.
A reminder that this is why we should never tolerate selfishness. We're now largely screwed because we, as a species, valued our individual comfort over expert research.
We knew what we needed to do - but no, profits. Such a dumb way to die.
Climate and Healthcare migration. I can't afford to retire here in the states. It's coming.
you will probably not be entirled tobhealthcare in Europe either then.
Usually the idea is that you pay as a worker into the healthcare system. If you never paid in here you will probably have to fo dor private insurance and you'll be faced with similiar rates like in the US because the age of entry is crucial for the rates of private health insurance
Some European countries do provide healthcare if you get permanent residence or citizenship, despite not paying throughout your life.
This has been the mildest summer in my 5 years living in the area, I'm loving it
Tornado watches are becoming more frequent tho
Same here in montreal, my grass has never been this green in the middle of july. Kinda weird that we had all those forest fires when the summer's been pretty damn mild for now
Over here in the west it's never been so dry. Pastures are brown, hay and crops aren't just stunted but are dying before maturity. Trees are yellowing and dropping leaves. Plague of grasshoppers eating everything that was still green. Every day is hot and the air is full of smoke, it feels like the end of the world over here.
That isn't "just" climate change though, it's also urbanisation and the way you guys over there use ground water. It's a combination of a lot of things, climate change is only one puzzle piece in the whole scheme of things.
Also, the drought thing is easily combatable with desalination, which has a few other benefits. The main caveat is, it's expensive. But, it's a lot cheaper than having to deal with various other things due to the droughts.
Guessing you've never been to Western Canada. We only have a couple major cities, and we don't use that much groundwater both as it tends to be saline and because we have plenty of surface water to use due to snowmelt runoff. Also we don't have anything to desalinate, unless we're talking about that low-quality groundwater, which is a very expensive proposition as you say to get any significant volume.
We're not concerned about water for drinking, city usage etc. Most cities are on major rivers that are running near normally. Hydro dams have tons of storage to run until next winter's snow. On my farm I have dugouts that capture runoff, they are full. I have shallow wells on GUDI aquifers where the water is near the top of the casing! I'm irrigating my garden and my orchard like mad out of my yard dugout and that usage isn't even noticeable compared to evaporation losses.
We're concerned that our crops are dying, our livestock are starving (sold mine already) and almost none of our land is irrigated. In BC the trees are dying and burning for lack of rain and there is no way to irrigate them of course. This part of the country has long relied on a steady cycle of June and July thunderstorms for moisture - but the thunderstorms have dried up.
It just won't rain, that's all.
No, I have never been to Western Canada (it's very high on my bucket list, though) and I was broadly talking about North America. Sorry for the generalization.
This year being also an El Nino year may have contributed...while some people will say otherwise, Europe has been uncharacteristically moist. We got a lot of places that already have reached 90% of their yearly average precipitation...
Honestly I will never forgive people who STILL continue to deny climate change is happening and refuse to legilslate on it.
At this point Don't Look Up is a documentary. I honestly cannot imagine what it's like to he a climate scientist who actively studies this, only to have some fox news watching crazy uncle parroting cherry-picked data, thinking they somehow know better than global scientific consensus. I imagine some at this point may be going, "fuck it. Let it burn." And honestly, I can't blame them.
“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” - Jean-Claude Juncker.
Career politicians will never fix anything. They're only interested in not rocking the boat and keeping themselves in office.
And the steps we would need to take to fix it would surely not be popular among the masses, even as they sit dying of heatstroke and starvation. People want magic pills that fix problems, and no such thing exists for this.
Yeah, I didn't even get to fuck around before finding out.
Yes, we. While some are of the impression, that climate change is only because of a select few, it's because every single one of us consumers is to blame as well.
We have the option to buy climate friendly stuff, lots of times it's just more expensive or maybe a little bit inconvenient.
Also, why does one need the next new iPhone after owning the last one for just over a year? Why do we have to eat Avocados in some cases a few times a day, that are shipped around the world and need heaps of water to grow? Same as Bananas or Strawberries in Winter...the list is very long. Same as plastic free vegetables - "the cucumber has a brown spot? Nope, not getting that, I demand it's spotless!" So companies wrap them in plastic.
If there's demand, companies will fulfill that demand, if there's no demand, companies stop doing that shit, because it doesn't make any money. Every single one of us is responsible in some way or another, even if the percentage is very miniscule.
and people say global warming/climate change is not real
It's not simply a climate change. It's a coined term by the fossil fuel industry. Like BP introduced the individual carbon footprint, this one should also be ignored. It's a climate crisis.
Politicians and publications that acknowledge the climate crisis should probably start using that term instead of climate change then.
Oh they are switching from "Its not real" to "its all over, we can't do anything, so invest in fossils even more" (the invest part is an exaggeration).
I want to believe that most of those messages are from paid actors (oil industry, authoritarian regimes).
Personally I think it’s far too late. I’m not having children and my friends and family who do are scared; here in Australia there’s no where to go to escape the heat. We will all die here
The EU needs to wake up and go hard on companies and industries. No mercy, no half-assing, just legislate the absolute shit out of them for once so that maybe our children can survive and live in not so terrible conditions, because not so terrible is the best we can hope for at this point.
The rest of the world too obviously, but the EU seems the most likely to do so.
That's what we are trying to do. But the fossil fuel lobby is still very strong and parties on the right are weaponizing every legal decision to polarise the people. Take the new (still in progress) german heating law for example; It wants to replace the installation of older oil/gas heaters with efficient heating pumps/district heating/hybrid (among other things, but that is the most important thing).
Populist media and right wing parties used this to stir up the people. ("the goverment is outlawing your heater, you need to replace it now or loose your home..." etc.) Simple stuff like that; but it's working - the right is on the rise. And they are, of course, completely against man made climate change.
I been following Tony Seba for years.
He puts good videos out on YouTube.
People naturally are unable to understand exponentials but he goes through the maths and shows that the world is going to change fast.
I have more faith in mathematics and economics than I do in massive societal change.
Let's be honest, this will end up with only the ultra-rich surviving in the last few strips of livable surface of the planet - and them elated to have finally "culled the undeserving" as they have been hoping for for millennia.
Look at previous violent revolutions and see who died and who lived. I wouldn't bet on the ultra-rich, there are simple more of the rest but a new elite will rule, just like the old one.
Then the ultra rich will perish because they don't know how to survive cause they don't have the "plebs" to do any of the underling work.
"What do I do when my motor makes this sound?!"
That's why the concept of artificial intelligence is so appealing to them - having a compilation of all human knowledge, without actually having to deal with humans claiming "nonsense" like human rights and a livable wage.
that's funny, because if they rely on AI to serve them, they will the first ones to be screwed.
the most replaceable human class in the History is not plebs, but tyrants.
they are the least prepared, the least talented, the least creative, the least reliable, the least resourceful, and finally, the least willing to contribute something to any compilation.
so let them have fun while they can.
Then "what to do, when the motor makes this sound" becomes "what to do when the LLM tells me to eat my children and water the plants with gettorade because it got electrolytes"
Nah, the rich will be eaten. Since their power completely relies on society. Taliban in the Mountains of Afghanistan will be fine and will be fighting off a alien occupation in 1000 years.
The fucking irony and probable truth if that is hilarious and frustrating
If you look at the Bronze Age collapse, its the nomadic mountain people that survive.
I'm Italian myself. The issue with this heat is that it's humid too, I live in the riviera and we've had constant 35-37°C weather with high humidity for a week now
Yesterday here in Germany it was 36°C with high humidity. This single day was enough.
What RH% were you reaching? In the UK we have been spared the high heat (for now, it will probably come later) but we had 70%+ and it's not nice that high as everything feels damp.
I just spent a week in Sorrento (South West Italy), we could not handle the outdoor weather of 35-38C + 70-80% humidity for more than an hour tops.
Yeah, the humidity is the worsts. Got to change my shirt after every walk outside.
Yet, social medias are filled with people saying that they saw this every day when they were younger and the millenials are just weak and should stop complaining.
This is Charles Dickens syndrome (a term I just made up) but basically Dickens grew up 1810's which was uncharacteristicly cold for Britain. Specifically, a lot more snowy than it had been for centuries. When he came to put the season into his stories, it was those seminal years that he wrote about. This then imprinted on our culture and the stories that came after it followed the theme. Anyone who lives in Britain can tell you, while we get some years that have a decent amount of snow, we get just as many that are wet and miserable.
People who believe 'It was that hot when they were young' likely remember one pivotal day or feeling warm but I doubt had any real concept of the actual temperature as a kid. What we're seeing now is more regularity in the extremes. Yes, that day they remember may be imprinted on their minds for being extra hot, but then that becomes 'It was this hot when we were young'.
Also, since the 60s life expectancy has got way longer. We're living decades more than someone of that era, we're extending the lifespans of the critically ill, and access to things like affordable housing have tanked making people live in less than ideal situations or a part of a much larger unhoused population than we've had for many years. All of these add up to extreme weather having an oversized impact.
It really annoys me when folks like that make blanket statements without realising we live in a very different world today. (Of course, there are some positives that advancements in technology and material science can bring to mitigate some of this).
Literally my father moment
Genuine old person here I call bullshit on whoever said that. I don’t remember it ever being this bad. Ever.
whatever could we have done to stop this!!!
Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry: "we're just trying to find the guy who did this!"
I dunno what I could have done, everything I try to have an impact on is always a pittance compared to the size of the problem, but I know what I can do going forward.
I'm quitting. I'm having zero children. Good luck, have fun the rest of you.
Meanwhile big polluters like Shell and others help pumping emissions and try to keep carbon based economy for short term profit 🙄
While funding messaging like "if you didn't use your air conditioner when it was 118f it would certainly help"
I was working outside this week (Southern US) and it was an absolutely miserable week. After a half an hour I was drenched in sweat, and it was rolling off my hard hat, getting in my eyes, and I was forced to pace myself and work much slower than I would otherwise be able to do because the heat was that intense.
I was able to drink some of my coconut water reserve because it has the things plants crave.
It's definitely the worst summer heat I've felt since ever.
For the longest time, measures against climate change were decried for potentially impacting "the economy". Well now we're going to see the impact to "the economy" with climate change getting worse. I assume it'll be a bigger impact than if we had invested in more sustainability earlier. Slower work pace outside just being a small taste of the impact.
Wait until next summer!
Why was your hard hat sweating? I wear a hard hat at work and I don't think I've ever had sweat rolling off it. That doesn't seem physically possible.
i imagine it was the humidity from the ambient air and not from his head.
This one has a cloth like padding at the forehead, it collects the sweat but gets saturated and beads up on the front and rolls off.
It's nice to have if it isn't a lot of sweat, but when your entire face is drenched, it does that.
Everything is fine, the earth simply won't be habitable for humans. The Earth will spin on without us when we inevitably allow industry to destroy humanity by making earth uninhabitable by human life.
It's what we deserve for being so stupid as to see this happening and doing nothing about it to stop it or slow it down. There's plenty of climate change advocates which are almost always drowned out by the chorus of companies and climate deniers who believe propaganda over science.
You make it sound like humans are the only ones affected by climate change. Sea turtles, elephants, polar bears, pandas, there's a fuck load of animals we're directly killing off. Everything is most certainly not fine, even if you don't give a single shit about innocent human lives.
We will take a large chunk of the planets life with us. I don't think we can destroy it all however, the planet will get to intelligent life eventually.
I don’t think we can destroy it all
Oh, I'm sure we can engineer something to that end.
Where I stay these temperatures can be quite normal in summer. I'm now just worried that a hot summer's day here will now go from 45 to 55. I've felt 50 before. It's not fun. But besides that, I think of the implications for the agricultural sector.
Good luck my European friends. I'll report back in our summer.
It's the lack of sure conditioning in Europe that makes it especially brutal.
Sure, there are hotter climates but they are usually more prepared with AC. Certainly not always, I know.
AC doesnt help construction or farm workers, doesnt help against wildfires and also not against drought.
The economy and society asba whole arent prepared for these temperatures. We would need a cultural shift even in northern Europe, where siestas need to become normal. Too bad if you would need to commute 2h back and forth for your siesta break.
It also, given our current electricity-creation-machines, only exacerbates the whole "climate change" thing.
where are you? desert country? if mine have that temp, there would be so many dead people.
Humidity level does matter, a 50c in a dry weather is pretty hot, but not as hot as how people accustomed to high humidity level make it sound.
Simple way to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit in your head:
Take the Celsius value and double it
40 * 2 = 80
Subtract 10%
80 - 8 = 72
Add 32
72 + 32 = 104
40 C = 104 F
This is still hot but a far cry from 118F
That was a typo by OP. The temp in Italy is 48C/118F
I guess the op added it to the title, but on the article the conversion is from 48°C to 118F
Thanks for the formula! Never knew how to do this.
yeah, 104 a spring day in bakersfield California. But we have AC and stuff. if they’re not used to those temps they might not be prepared for it
We usually do not have AC here (for example in Germany). Not even in hospitals, schools, elderly care, etc. The solution of our government, after many people already died because of heat, is to make shelter rooms somewhere in the city where you can go when it's getting too hot. That's how "prepared" we are.
Also, the majority of people here do not own a home but instead are dependable on their landlord to do something against the heat. Which is obviously not happening. So instead those people who have the money for it start buying free standing AC units. Which need a pipe to hang out of the window and are highly inefficient.
Yeah, that’s what I figured. I’d heard that a lot of europe lacks warm weather infrastructure and most homes lack the basic air conditioning that is ubiquitous here in the US. I don’t see a lot of fixes for that.
The solution is the for the rich landowners to spend their fucking money and retrofit building with central air.
The solution is as simple as always: the rich must spend money.
I think climate change is happening far sooner than scientists could have predicted. We focus on increased global average temperatures but I think that we are going to have insanely hot summers sooner. We're fucked.
What makes you think that? The science has been pretty damn good for a long time.
Maybe it's more about already being able to see the results of climate change.
Rivers drying out, ice sheets and glaciers melting, oceans heating up, desertification, water shortages, etc.
And with everything it seems like we're "nearly" at a breaking point. Cities running completely out of water, crops failing because of the heat or forests dying or burning, etc.
At least it feels like we're not that far away from a really bad time than anticipated.
You don't need to guess. It was less than 3 months ago where scientists (on nearly every news/publication outlet that wasn't denying climate change) said we are going to blow by the 1.5C estimate we used as a threshold in our models.
Climate change is already happening exponentially now.
Yeah just 20 years ago, much of the world was a bunch of primitive people living in jungles, and the planet could balance the relatively small number of industrialized nations. Today, way more countries have been industrialized. Countries like Vietnam, Thailand, etc are now concrete cities with massive highways and bridges, motorized vehicles everywhere, and factories manufacturing all kinds of stuff and pumping huge clouds of crap into the air. The EU and US try to pass laws and regulations to lower pollution output, but the factories just move to these other countries that have no or less regulations. We aren't at steadily increasing pollution levels, it's exponentially increasing.
I think the problem is when you show them the projections people would say "you're just being alarmist, clearly you have an agenda"
So the messaging has been consistently toned down in the hopes people would listen.
They've been warning about water scarcity for decades, I think most people accept it's going to be a thing. Tell them this is going to happen in their country, this decade? Most won't believe you.
Doesn't matter that it's already at the breaking point, and that we have still growing populations that are already rationing water from sources that aren't just down due to drought. There's aquifers that would take centuries to fill back up to where they were decades ago
Scientists told us "your grandchildren will be screwed", then "think of the world you're leaving your children"... Well this generation, they're not saying "you're screwed", because people aren't ready to hear that
People don’t want to have to worry or deal with reality so they simply choose to believe otherwise.
Why do you think we still have rampant religion infecting the world.
the messaging has been consistently toned down in the hopes people would listen.
My guess is its even more than this: deadlines were extended to not let people fall into inaction. The tipping point always close enough so that its dangerous, but still far away enough so that there is still hope.
It is a ploy analogous to the fascist "the enemy is strong enough to be dangerous and weak enough to be thoroughly defeated."
This scene is far more realistic, I think. But as you can tell, it doesn't play very well with either the audience or the media.
Imagine being that guy, telling people the same thing scientists have been saying for 100+ years and watching all of them put their hands over their mouths like it's an earth shattering discovery. If only someone had told them repeatedly over the course of multiple generations!
No, no - it's just as scientists predicted. In the worst-case "no-mitigation" scenario and with attempts from them to explain that +2 global will likely be +10 in peak temperature increase over land (read US, Europe, Asia). As in, both mean and std will increase, but without ocean's mitigation over land.
Fucked is not the correct word - there is a +50 predicted before the end of decade in Strasbourg, where I am from. There is not a single building built there made to resist that kind of temperatures, nor a single tree or crop that could stand that for a day.
And it's a relatively "safe" area as far as long-term projections go...
Fucked is not the correct word - there is a +50 predicted before the end of decade in Strasbourg, where I am from. There is not a single building built there made to resist that kind of temperatures, nor a single tree or crop that could stand that for a day.
And it’s a relatively “safe” area as far as long-term projections go…
I would love to read the source on this, not because I think it's bullshit but because that is pretty fucking alarming.
In North Carolina, we had a "winter that wasn't" and now we have a summer of "surface of the sun" heat. Triple digit heat index every day last week. Good luck getting the locals to admit that climate change is real though. At this point I think some of them are actually starting to see the truth, but it just pisses them off and they dig in to denial even harder, because if there's one thing they can't do it's admit they were wrong.
When I mentioned the hot weather forecast to my super libertarian crazy father in law, he was went off on a tangent on how the government is controlling the weather and causing all of this on purpose 🤦
I had to stop going to my favorite Saturday morning breakfast restaurant for pretty much the same reason. They were ranting about how all the wildfires up here were lit by the government in order to put out enough smoke to block out the sun so our crops would fail. Then everyone would rely on the government for food and they could purge the people they didn't want around.
Get ready for this headline every year.
We already have it. Every year, we hit a new record in "hottest day of the year".
Eventually they'll start reporting deaths instead of temps
Covid showed that humanity doesn't really gives a shit about deaths either
Who could have predicted this!?!?? Why weren't we warned?
Does Italy have air conditioned cooling centers like California does?
Climate control technology never reached Europe. Every building is a sweltering hellhole, unless youre in the first floor of a concrete building.
I buckled and bought a stand-AC a few years ago when I literally couldn’t sleep for days during an insanely hot summer here in Germany. I really try not to use it much but on those days when it’s unbearable it’s literally a lifesaver.
AC never was popular because it used to be that you never needed it here. You’d have maybe one or two days above 30 a year where I live and that wouldn’t be enough to heat up the concrete walls, so your living space still stayed cool. And at night the temperature would drop and you could simply air out your flat. Now it’s different though and it’s seriously a shame that people still doubt climate change is happening.
Same thing on my part of Canada. Might have to get an AC for the bedroom.
Pair it with solar panels, then it doesn't contribute to climate change and you can run it as much as you want when the sun shines.
Believe me, I would if I could, but my building doesn’t allow us to hang stuff from our balconies. Can’t go about being more energy efficient if it might look too ugly! (/s)
California offers the public to visit certain public buildings and community centers to cool off for free during heatwaves. It saves lives. It would be great if the Italian government could offer something similar. I know they have some very old buildings, but they have some that could facilitate this. Or they should build more pantheons like in Rome if they reject air conditioners.
I read something in the news about inviting people to churches. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself for several hours there, also the seats are pretty uncomfortable. But better than a heatstroke I guess.
“And I know I’ve finally accepted that air conditioning is a privilege, not a right.”
-Ted Lasso
You forget how much further north Europe is. You didn't need ac in many parts.
I don't know what people are smoking, maybe it's too much heat, but air conditioning is very common and normal here in Italy too.
I don't know what a cooling center is, but there is AC everywhere, and when there isn't it's a choice of the owner to avoid installing it.
Also it's not the first time we reach similar temperatures sadly. We get around 40°C basically every year.
The south of Italy is clearly on a very high and uncommon peak, tho.
The situation is different in other countries like Germany, northern France or England.
Until a few years ago they never needed AC at all so most homes don't have it and it's not even that easy and immediate to have it installed
A cooling center is a building with AC open to the public, so people without AC can cool off.
Data supporting this. About 50% of italian private households have AC, with obvious differences between regions and local climates.
I don't know where people in this thread are retrieving data to support their statements but they definitely sound absurd. Source: am Italian
Central aircon is pretty standard for most large buildings but individual aircon systems for private housing is rare, mainly because it is only very hot for a short period of time.
It is becoming more common in northern Europe, which sounds counterintuitive, because heating during winter is a far bigger issue here than cooling during summer.
However, many private houses get 'heat pumps', which gives you more heating pr kW than pure old-fashion electric heating would have given. Basically it is a backwards airconditioner.
These heat pumps can also be run backwards, and then they function as aircondition.
No, air conditioning is rare in Europe. Pretty much only hotels have it, and by far not all hotels. About 5% of private residences have A/C, even in southern regions of France, Spain and Italy.
Source: Wikipedia, and my kid that went to Italy and Greece and Germany for the previous few summers worth of heat waves.
Edit: Formal, government supplied cooling centers are a CA thing. Informal ones like shopping centers are more widespread in the U.S., but don't really exist in Europe.
It doesn't even matter all that much. A couple years ago in the PNW when it hit 43°c/115°f, I had my central air absolutely kicking out the jams and it was still 90°f in my house. I got really annoyed before coming to the realization that it was 25° cooler inside which is honestly a pretty decent effort on behalf of my AC. There's no reason it should be this hot anywhere, but especially Cascadia. Of course my AC couldn't handle it because it wasn't designed to. Even a decade ago you'd think someone was nuts if they installed an AC capable of dealing with this anywhere except say Arizona or Florida
My understanding is that it is more common in offices, though, than in residences.
Yeah its pretty standard to have in offices and shops, but not in apartments or houses. I've seen couple of ceiling fans in Spain, but here in France some people don't even use regular floor fans for some reason lol
To be honest, we only get 2 hot months in a year (usually, though its starting to change and now its more like 3 hot months where 2 are extra hot)
I used to specifically not want A/C in my cars back in the 90s living in Denver. It was never hot enough to need it. In the past years I've spent quite a few days sitting in stopped traffic in my open Jeep with the thermometer reading 104-107F. Once was behind an uncovered manure truck. Good times, good times.
Where I live now (further north from CO) there's a massive junk yard with thousands of snowmobiles. Apparently my current area used to be a mecca for snowmobiling in the 70s and 80s, with 1500 miles of snowmobile trails. It snows maybe 3 times a year now, average of 10 inches total per season. Neighbors all around me have every kind of motor toy imaginable, but I have not seen a single snowmobile. My snowblower hasn't been seen use in over 4 years, and the city routinely forgets how to plow or sand streets.
Weather definitely got hotter year round over 3-4 decades. I'll fight fellow Gen-X and boomers over this.
It really shouldn't even be a fight... we've had accurate thermometers for a long time now, and weather stations all over the world at airports at the very least. Taking an average of the temperatures around the world isn't really some crazy advanced science.
Here in Germany not even offices have them. Well, most of them.
AC is a luxury that no one needed like 5 years ago. 5 years in the future this will have changed, obviously.
I honestly get dizzy by just looking at those numbers...😵💫
We had 40C here in London this time last year. It was not pleasant. It didn't even rain.
We've been 37 or 38 in my area of Tokyo off and on the past couple of weeks. It will only get warmer. The bad part is that it's still rainy season so we also get stupid humidity to go with it. It's 27 in my office, but we have at least one of our aircon units running nearly 24/7 on the "dry" setting to attempt to pull some of the heat and humidity out.
What suprises me the most when watching news on this. You will see people in Rome getting interviewed in the middle of a plaza in the burning sun.
And there are many walking outside.
I would crawl into a cool cellar and only come out at night.
The people walking around are called Australians.
They live in apartments without AC and also have to go to work.
Like when whole countries begin to go green and EVs are being more realistic and tangible, and to top off no seemingly push back from big oil, you know shit needs to change
From my understanding, we see less pushback from big oil because now big oil is properly invested into the alternative energy sector. For example Koch industries has been investing in alternatives since at least the 90s.
They will simply profit off of the solution(s)/alternatives to the problems they created.
Aircon plus solar panels for the win? Other than the initial manufacturing cost, it's a fairly good solution.
For those with a limited budget in a dry heat area, a large portable Swamp box and a single panel may be enough. Needs access to water though...
Aircon plus solar panels for the win? Other than the initial manufacturing cost, it's a fairly good solution.
Can't tell if you're thinking this is anything more than an emergency stopgap for people that can't bear living in their home, but.... All A/C does is spend energy to move the heat back outside, and also produce some more heat on the side. So it isn't a sustainable solution or fix, even if your energy generation is somehow perfect.
And swamp boxes are basically just a fan with extra steps that puts a miniscule amount of heat into the water. They feel a tiny bit better, but they're not really fixing anything either. That warm water still needs to go somewhere etc.
I disagree on the efficacy of evaporative coolers. When I lived in Bourke, they were excellent. Typically roof mounted models such as these. Very low power usage for whole house cooling, but the massive caveat is they don't work well in humid places.
A simple portable one like the Convair Classic will only really help whoever's near it, but at under 80 watts of power it'll run off even the cheapest inverter and car battery in an emergency.
Solar panels make the cost of using a split system practically nothing during daylight hours, with little net additional heat created in the process.
My point is these are just making you feel better at best. Even a perfectly efficient split system running off a perfectly efficient power source which was manufactured out of thin air without having any effect on climate change is still moving heat around. None of these address the core problem with the climate. Even at perfect efficiency they're just building you a small bubble to feel better in.
40-45C happens in our summers on a semi regular basis (thank f*** last summer we only had a handful of days like that). Inner Oz can reach close to 50C in some areas.....
40-45C happens every summer in Sevilla. When I went to roma over a decade ago there were some 40ºC days.
I've done low humidity 45° days/38° nights and it was pretty toasty, but 35° with high humidity kicks my arse. The last couple of weeks here in Catalunya we've had 30-35° with high humidity and I'm just exhausted.
500 years later, Europe finds out their Industrial Revolution has consequences, for everyone. Yay!
200 years later. 500 years ago Europeans were discovering islands and continents.
"Discovering"... this land is your land, this land is my land 🎵
I already knew that we're fucked. But scientist said more around 2050 or something. The way things are progressing right now the next 10 to 20 years are going to be dicey.
I really don't like seeing these temperatures and I also don't like that governments have not educated the public effectively on what to do to limit climate change. It's a tragedy to see people making irrational and ineffective descisions out of fear.
It’s not about education at this point, it’s about regulation. Without mandates and penalties there is zero incentive to change for the large corporate polluters.
While I agree that there is a lack of education around it, the real solution is regulating emissions from industry and providing businesses monetary incentive to improve
This is fine, we just need to switch from plastic bugs and make caps attached to bottles and everything will be alright! Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)
I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It's not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it's fun. They're doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.
No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. "Just make corporations pay" to fix things, whether that's a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean "increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities".
That doesn't necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we've all created, and we're all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn't actually get us any closer to solving things.
Yes and No. Yes, it’s not only corporations and we must act ourselves.
No, it’s the rules that set the game. Corporations play within the rules. Politics is owning and can change the rules. The society and corporations will follow accordingly. If we really want to change we can. Look what happened during Covid. In retrospect, some insane rules (eg Germany kids not allowed to enter playgrounds. Kids couldn’t play to save the elderly). However, society obeyed to those rules.
It’s not us, it’s the rules that must change. In my view this should be the priority.
At least here in Australia parents were using the kids at the playground to socialise (standing right up in each other's space, holding empty coffee cups to justify no mask), and so there were multiple vectors of infection. That and multigenerational households are more common in some parts of the world, so if the kid brings it home, whole family gets sick, hospital system overloads.
It wasn't specifically kids suffer so oldies don't die, but the continuation is that if the oldies are healthy, if anyone needs the hospital, there'll be staff to look after them.
TL;DR people are taking the piss and making the jobs of HCWs harder... Not like that's anything new 🙄
yeah it was obviously the same on any playground so the above comment saying it was "to safe elderly" is just very short sighted. Additionaly implying that this was the case in whole of Germany is again wrong. Each federal state had it's own health regulations in place but yeah some of those were kind of mediated by the ministry of health. Anyway it was a lot more complex than what this comment suggests
Sure it was more complex. Not going to write a Phd here.
My point is, the society accepts rules even tough rules if it’s for everyone. If it’s fair. So, at Covid times younger people, who are less likely to get serious sickness were accepting being „caged“ for two years (exaggerating a bit. If you are 5 years old. 2 years is half of your life!)
I strongly miss this generational fairness when it comes to climate change. Not seeing any step back in terms of carbon consumption/ consumption at all from the older people.
and guess who lobbies a ridiculous amount to either keep the rules the same or bias it further towards their interests
yep, corporations once again
Indeed. Go out at the street and show you want change. Politics fear many people on streets fighting for their rights. Look at France, Israel. When was last time you fight for your rights?
Blaming the public over corporations is the #1 reason why we are in this mess in the first place. For decades, the narrative has been "it's your fault and you need to change your habits". It is a pointless and useless narrative because nobody is going to actively change anything like that until they are forced to. Even when we make moderate, easy efforts to do stuff like recycling, the recycling companies bitch and moan about how they can't ship this shit off to China to let them do the work, and then throw away most of it, anyway. We PAY recycling companies to recycle this shit and they can't be bothered to figure out how to recycle it. We PAY THEM to take away materials to use in new products, not the other way around.
In every aspect of people's lives, you will find that corporations use up 90% of the resources that the general public use because corporations deal in economies-of-scale far bigger than anything a person or even a country can do. Corporations have been pushing the "blame the public" narrative to shift focus away from the decades of abuse they will continue to inflict on the planet. Corporation shit all over everything, and they will continue to do so in the name of profit. That is exactly what they are designed to do.
It takes governmental effort and regulations against the corporations to stop this sort of thing. They do it for clean water, and CFCs, and automotive design, and architecture, and many many other things. Why? Because a minority group of people who are struggling to make a living is never going to have enough power and clout as a large corporation or a government.
I think we can agree on that corporations are aimed at cheapest way to produce most popular goods at the biggest scale they can achieve for, in the end, produce the biggest possible profit. Thats what corporations are made for: money.
In the end, rich guy gets a yacht, bunker for apocalypse and private residence with AC, private kitchen stuff and anything they want so he will be fine even if its 60C outside. If it will get unbearable, they'll move to something like Norway and will be fine.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people who live in hot countries will die and millions will be climate refugees.
All that, because producing iphone with coal electricity (simplification, albeit I feel like its close to truth) is 10$ cheaper.
Swapping to paper bags will not help either. There are only two options to solve the issue:
1 is impossible because gov will never cut the feeding hand and 2 is just a matter of time until we will get couple hundred millions migrants from Aftica, India, Pakistan etc.
1 is still possible. But, we're at a tipping point between ending up in some Cyberpunk corporate-ran dystopia and one where the general public actually has the upper-hand and can fend off governmental corruption.
Choose wisely. Vote every year, twice a year.
but the thing about voting is that basically every politician is either:
In the pocket of one or more corporations
Literally part of a corporation (or outright owns one)
A politician at who doesn't have as much power as the former two or is in the pocket of one of them
so we could vote for John StopClimateChange, and then find out that every single thing that Mr. StopClimateChange said about his crusade to stopping climate change was not at all true or was so utterly miniscule in the long run as to be meaningless
then what?
You mean this is a problem that the boomers and gen x created. THEY are the generations that controlled the corporations whose only concern was profit. THEY are the generations that pushed consumerism with no regard to the natural world. THEY are the generations that elected the politicians that allowed this all to happen. So here come the millennials and zoomers to clean up their mess, just like everything else they fucked up for the rest of us.
Yeah, don’t put the blame on us. In all my 29 years of life climate change has always been a big topic no one has done anything about.
We’re living in this ridiculous gerontocracy where old lizards bought by corporations are making decisions to benefit said corporations for the next couple of months, all the while the coming generations suffer.
At this point it’s too late. It’s time to owe up, apologise for being so greedy that you used up the world, leaving nothing for coming generations.
If you're 29 that means you're borderline millennial/gen z. Definitely not blaming you here. You are correct, this has been an issue for our entire lives and the generations before us have done exactly nothing to curtail the destruction of our planet
What an awkward speech.
Sure people spending all day on TikTok and playing with cryptocurrencies are actually solving problems created by people who worked in the mines and watched TV.
The truth is, across all generations, everyone is doing anything to live the most confortable life possible according to their convictions, and YouTubers today are not better promoting their shitty gamer drinks or VPN services than a 1980s vendor trying to sell as much diesel engines as possible. It’s even more true when it comes to corporate, or you’ll have to tell me what’s is Zuckerberg doing for the planet that Bill Gates is not.
At any given time there were people willing to change the world, trying to make it more fair. We’re just never enough. And being a millennial I can assure you it’s not changing anytime soon, even tho things are getting shittier and shittier.
They produce like double of what we need, it's not only what we need and buy, capitalism is extremely inefficient in the usage of resources, which brought us into this mess.
Yeah. Anything that isn’t consumed is destroyed. Case in point, dumpster diving at grocery stores is illegal. Fast fashion companies destroy clothes that don’t sell.
The entire system is fucked.
Have you seen how much CEOs get paid?
Corporations can switch to greener alternatives AND pay workers a living wage AND make a profit, without having the consumers pay the price.
All it takes is the willingness of politicians to force them to. Corporations raise prices because they're allowed to, and they'll take any excuse they can get to get more money out of people.
Gas prices have skyrocketed. First it was covid's fault. Then it was the war in Ukraine. All the while gas corporations have been seeing record-breaking profits. It's all just greed.
I think as someone who did "the things", and that's how I live now, it's hard to look around and see basically no perceptible difference. The incentive is slim for the individual. The bulk of the population is never going to make those changes.
Also if you only eat meat in the weekends then the rich peoples private jets will suddenly have no environmental impact
Is there a bracelet I can wear to show my solidarity with the people dying of heat stroke, or perhaps an instagram filter.
These two things have no relation. One is about climate change, the other one about (micro)plastics in the environment and our food chain.
Apparently there are still loads of people who don't understand this simple fact and think everything that is done to make the world a better place is for climate change.
I mean, they both show a callous disregard for the fragility of life on this planet, and a keen disinterest in anything but short term convenience and comfort? Oh and profit, can't forget about MONEY
This argument keeps coming up as an excuse to do nothing.
Pure defeatism neglecting even any bit of responsibility.
Yet people who say this will put another child on the planet, buy yet another product from Apple on release, love fast fashion, buy the cheapest goods possible, toss their meal as soon as they're full, vote egoistically, take the cheapest trip to wherever, drive a car, toss cigarette butts on the ground, and so much more.
It's always easier to blame others. Yes, corporations are shit, but remember, they are made up of people like you and I.
WE work there.
WE buy their crap.
WE vote for the same politicians over and over again (or don't vote at all).
WE put another child on this planet to go through this shit.
WE as humans are the problem.
See, that's your point of view. My point of view is that people who are all doom online are the problem.
I wish our choices had a 1% impact.... That seems extremely generous.
For example...
Go look at your local Walmart and it's bazillion products. They expect to sell almost everything in that store multiple times within a month. All that generates enormous waste on a scale that's literally impossible for the earth to sustain for another 100 years without total ecological collapse.
We're living in the single most polluting decade in human history, every decade, since all of us were born. Even if the entire Lemmy user base become subsistence farming monks, the factories would just keep churning out poison unphased.
I'm not saying it's bad for people to try and consume more responsibly. I'm just saying it doesn't make a difference over any meaningful time period until there's a radical change in how our global economy functions.
Environmental catastrophe will continue until we literally cannot ignore it, only then will we do anything substantial about it. Unfortunately that's just how our society works.
I don't agree with you. Many individuals changing their behavior is what it takes for an economic shift in our society. By thinking that we don't have an impact we loose motivation to change our behavior. So if you say you are annoyed by big supermarkets filling our planet with waste that's fine, I agree. But this needs to lead to a change in behavior, first of yourself, then for those who notice you haven't died from eating mostly vegan products and buying from local farmers markets and then hopefully for most people in our society.
Companies produce as long as people consume their products. If commnsumers switch to sustainable products (quite different from products advertised as sustainable) companies will have to follow
What has that to do with anything? Reducing single use plastics is environmental protection which is not the same as fighting climate change. No one who fights against plastics does so for climate change. Stop spreading such nonsense. Not even your linked article claims something like that.
we have the 80% solution and it's nuclear power, but whatever y'all keep wailing and gnashing teeth and denying the obvious. I'm just gonna keep on living I guess and hope my house survives the shitty weather.
We have what, 10 years to try stop the planet to get over 1,5ºC? 20 over 2ºC?, that's pretty much the time it takes to build a new nuclear power plant from 0.
We are too late.
At this point, I'm down for the execution of selfish billionaires who actively push for coal and other harmful climate policies. They not only don't care about the world, they are actively harming it to make their short time left feel better from seeing a number go up in their bank.
If you were on reddit: "You have been permanently suspended for threatening to use violence."
I'd always just drop a link. Got the message across, but never got me banned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
I always thought Lemmy (at least this instance) had stricter rules than Reddit. Seeing a comment here that outright wishes for billionaires to be culled is a huge culture shock.
Because we aren't worried about offending advertisers. This is what real people think without being forced to be advertiser friendly.
Unfortunately, now the comment just says Removed
It would do absolutely nothing at all. For every billionaire that is running some seedy enterprise that you don't like, there are dozens if not hundreds of well paid people that are supporting that enterprise and would keep it going going forever.
Send them all to a for-profit prison I say!
You know what the French nobility did when the people started to, quite rightfully, remove their heads? It sure wasn’t move in to the newly vacant palace…
Yeah, the vast majority of human kind would gladly own a multi billion dollar company even if that company were causing climate change.
Start at the top and keep going down the list until emissions fall far enough.
It's not just the billionaires.
It's the entire first-world culture of consumerism.
If only somebody warned us 50 or 100 years ago. Oh wait, they did.
More like over 200 years ago. There was a french female scientist that discovered the greenhouse effect before John Tyndall but I forgot her name and I'm at work rn, can't search for it.
Are you thinking of Joseph Fourier? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
It was an American named Eunice Foote that detailed the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, but, give or take, it was also around the same time that many scientists came to the same or similar conclusions about this subject. So yes, we've been warned for over 200 years and have done exactly nothing to solve the problem. Why? $.
Eunice Newton Foote
New normal, folks. So begins the era of climate migration.
A reminder that this is why we should never tolerate selfishness. We're now largely screwed because we, as a species, valued our individual comfort over expert research.
We knew what we needed to do - but no, profits. Such a dumb way to die.
Climate and Healthcare migration. I can't afford to retire here in the states. It's coming.
you will probably not be entirled tobhealthcare in Europe either then.
Usually the idea is that you pay as a worker into the healthcare system. If you never paid in here you will probably have to fo dor private insurance and you'll be faced with similiar rates like in the US because the age of entry is crucial for the rates of private health insurance
Some European countries do provide healthcare if you get permanent residence or citizenship, despite not paying throughout your life.
Detroit ftw.
This has been the mildest summer in my 5 years living in the area, I'm loving it
Tornado watches are becoming more frequent tho
Same here in montreal, my grass has never been this green in the middle of july. Kinda weird that we had all those forest fires when the summer's been pretty damn mild for now
Mild in Montreal, maybe, but check out the Canadian Drought Monitor as the rest of Canada is in drought. Like, the entire rest of Canada. https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agricultural-production/weather/canadian-drought-monitor/current-drought-conditions
Over here in the west it's never been so dry. Pastures are brown, hay and crops aren't just stunted but are dying before maturity. Trees are yellowing and dropping leaves. Plague of grasshoppers eating everything that was still green. Every day is hot and the air is full of smoke, it feels like the end of the world over here.
That isn't "just" climate change though, it's also urbanisation and the way you guys over there use ground water. It's a combination of a lot of things, climate change is only one puzzle piece in the whole scheme of things.
Also, the drought thing is easily combatable with desalination, which has a few other benefits. The main caveat is, it's expensive. But, it's a lot cheaper than having to deal with various other things due to the droughts.
Guessing you've never been to Western Canada. We only have a couple major cities, and we don't use that much groundwater both as it tends to be saline and because we have plenty of surface water to use due to snowmelt runoff. Also we don't have anything to desalinate, unless we're talking about that low-quality groundwater, which is a very expensive proposition as you say to get any significant volume.
We're not concerned about water for drinking, city usage etc. Most cities are on major rivers that are running near normally. Hydro dams have tons of storage to run until next winter's snow. On my farm I have dugouts that capture runoff, they are full. I have shallow wells on GUDI aquifers where the water is near the top of the casing! I'm irrigating my garden and my orchard like mad out of my yard dugout and that usage isn't even noticeable compared to evaporation losses.
We're concerned that our crops are dying, our livestock are starving (sold mine already) and almost none of our land is irrigated. In BC the trees are dying and burning for lack of rain and there is no way to irrigate them of course. This part of the country has long relied on a steady cycle of June and July thunderstorms for moisture - but the thunderstorms have dried up.
It just won't rain, that's all.
No, I have never been to Western Canada (it's very high on my bucket list, though) and I was broadly talking about North America. Sorry for the generalization. This year being also an El Nino year may have contributed...while some people will say otherwise, Europe has been uncharacteristically moist. We got a lot of places that already have reached 90% of their yearly average precipitation...
It's not just individual comfort, it's also keeping up with the Jones' and looking good in front of our peers.
If it were sexier to consume less, that's what we'd do.
It's been sexy to consume more, because those who can must have a lot of excess to do so.
It's so much worse than the new normal. It's going to keep changing just as fast, or faster. "Normal" isn't going to exist much longer.
Honestly I will never forgive people who STILL continue to deny climate change is happening and refuse to legilslate on it.
At this point Don't Look Up is a documentary. I honestly cannot imagine what it's like to he a climate scientist who actively studies this, only to have some fox news watching crazy uncle parroting cherry-picked data, thinking they somehow know better than global scientific consensus. I imagine some at this point may be going, "fuck it. Let it burn." And honestly, I can't blame them.
“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” - Jean-Claude Juncker.
Career politicians will never fix anything. They're only interested in not rocking the boat and keeping themselves in office.
And the steps we would need to take to fix it would surely not be popular among the masses, even as they sit dying of heatstroke and starvation. People want magic pills that fix problems, and no such thing exists for this.
We fucked around, now we're going to start finding out.
Captain Planet tried to tell us
So did Al Gore.
He's a hero
If only we took pollution down to zero...
"we"
Yeah, I didn't even get to fuck around before finding out.
Yes, we. While some are of the impression, that climate change is only because of a select few, it's because every single one of us consumers is to blame as well.
We have the option to buy climate friendly stuff, lots of times it's just more expensive or maybe a little bit inconvenient. Also, why does one need the next new iPhone after owning the last one for just over a year? Why do we have to eat Avocados in some cases a few times a day, that are shipped around the world and need heaps of water to grow? Same as Bananas or Strawberries in Winter...the list is very long. Same as plastic free vegetables - "the cucumber has a brown spot? Nope, not getting that, I demand it's spotless!" So companies wrap them in plastic.
If there's demand, companies will fulfill that demand, if there's no demand, companies stop doing that shit, because it doesn't make any money. Every single one of us is responsible in some way or another, even if the percentage is very miniscule.
Don't worry guys, everything is fine. We just need to [redacted] and this will all go back to normal in no time.
Yeah, my dad says fux news did it’s just a cycle. So, no worries bro.
and people say global warming/climate change is not real
It's not simply a climate change. It's a coined term by the fossil fuel industry. Like BP introduced the individual carbon footprint, this one should also be ignored. It's a climate crisis.
Politicians and publications that acknowledge the climate crisis should probably start using that term instead of climate change then.
Oh they are switching from "Its not real" to "its all over, we can't do anything, so invest in fossils even more" (the invest part is an exaggeration). I want to believe that most of those messages are from paid actors (oil industry, authoritarian regimes).
Personally I think it’s far too late. I’m not having children and my friends and family who do are scared; here in Australia there’s no where to go to escape the heat. We will all die here
The EU needs to wake up and go hard on companies and industries. No mercy, no half-assing, just legislate the absolute shit out of them for once so that maybe our children can survive and live in not so terrible conditions, because not so terrible is the best we can hope for at this point.
The rest of the world too obviously, but the EU seems the most likely to do so.
That's what we are trying to do. But the fossil fuel lobby is still very strong and parties on the right are weaponizing every legal decision to polarise the people. Take the new (still in progress) german heating law for example; It wants to replace the installation of older oil/gas heaters with efficient heating pumps/district heating/hybrid (among other things, but that is the most important thing).
Populist media and right wing parties used this to stir up the people. ("the goverment is outlawing your heater, you need to replace it now or loose your home..." etc.) Simple stuff like that; but it's working - the right is on the rise. And they are, of course, completely against man made climate change.
I been following Tony Seba for years.
He puts good videos out on YouTube.
People naturally are unable to understand exponentials but he goes through the maths and shows that the world is going to change fast.
I have more faith in mathematics and economics than I do in massive societal change.
It wasn't normal.
Nowadays it is.
Hurray for new normals!
Let's be honest, this will end up with only the ultra-rich surviving in the last few strips of livable surface of the planet - and them elated to have finally "culled the undeserving" as they have been hoping for for millennia.
Look at previous violent revolutions and see who died and who lived. I wouldn't bet on the ultra-rich, there are simple more of the rest but a new elite will rule, just like the old one.
Then the ultra rich will perish because they don't know how to survive cause they don't have the "plebs" to do any of the underling work.
"What do I do when my motor makes this sound?!"
That's why the concept of artificial intelligence is so appealing to them - having a compilation of all human knowledge, without actually having to deal with humans claiming "nonsense" like human rights and a livable wage.
that's funny, because if they rely on AI to serve them, they will the first ones to be screwed. the most replaceable human class in the History is not plebs, but tyrants. they are the least prepared, the least talented, the least creative, the least reliable, the least resourceful, and finally, the least willing to contribute something to any compilation. so let them have fun while they can.
Then "what to do, when the motor makes this sound" becomes "what to do when the LLM tells me to eat my children and water the plants with gettorade because it got electrolytes"
Nah, the rich will be eaten. Since their power completely relies on society. Taliban in the Mountains of Afghanistan will be fine and will be fighting off a alien occupation in 1000 years.
The fucking irony and probable truth if that is hilarious and frustrating
If you look at the Bronze Age collapse, its the nomadic mountain people that survive.
it's a snake eating its tail, there'll always be someone at the bottom of the list who needs to be 'culled'.
Nah, history is your best teacher here. They will try that, get murdered, and be replaced by a crude junta while the rest of us starve
I'm Italian myself. The issue with this heat is that it's humid too, I live in the riviera and we've had constant 35-37°C weather with high humidity for a week now
Yesterday here in Germany it was 36°C with high humidity. This single day was enough.
What RH% were you reaching? In the UK we have been spared the high heat (for now, it will probably come later) but we had 70%+ and it's not nice that high as everything feels damp.
I just spent a week in Sorrento (South West Italy), we could not handle the outdoor weather of 35-38C + 70-80% humidity for more than an hour tops.
Yeah, the humidity is the worsts. Got to change my shirt after every walk outside.
Yet, social medias are filled with people saying that they saw this every day when they were younger and the millenials are just weak and should stop complaining.
This is Charles Dickens syndrome (a term I just made up) but basically Dickens grew up 1810's which was uncharacteristicly cold for Britain. Specifically, a lot more snowy than it had been for centuries. When he came to put the season into his stories, it was those seminal years that he wrote about. This then imprinted on our culture and the stories that came after it followed the theme. Anyone who lives in Britain can tell you, while we get some years that have a decent amount of snow, we get just as many that are wet and miserable.
People who believe 'It was that hot when they were young' likely remember one pivotal day or feeling warm but I doubt had any real concept of the actual temperature as a kid. What we're seeing now is more regularity in the extremes. Yes, that day they remember may be imprinted on their minds for being extra hot, but then that becomes 'It was this hot when we were young'.
Also, since the 60s life expectancy has got way longer. We're living decades more than someone of that era, we're extending the lifespans of the critically ill, and access to things like affordable housing have tanked making people live in less than ideal situations or a part of a much larger unhoused population than we've had for many years. All of these add up to extreme weather having an oversized impact.
It really annoys me when folks like that make blanket statements without realising we live in a very different world today. (Of course, there are some positives that advancements in technology and material science can bring to mitigate some of this).
Literally my father moment
Genuine old person here I call bullshit on whoever said that. I don’t remember it ever being this bad. Ever.
whatever could we have done to stop this!!!
Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
The planet will be fine. Humans I'm not sure about...
Humans and most other creatures
Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry: "we're just trying to find the guy who did this!"
I dunno what I could have done, everything I try to have an impact on is always a pittance compared to the size of the problem, but I know what I can do going forward.
I'm quitting. I'm having zero children. Good luck, have fun the rest of you.
Meanwhile big polluters like Shell and others help pumping emissions and try to keep carbon based economy for short term profit 🙄
While funding messaging like "if you didn't use your air conditioner when it was 118f it would certainly help"
I was working outside this week (Southern US) and it was an absolutely miserable week. After a half an hour I was drenched in sweat, and it was rolling off my hard hat, getting in my eyes, and I was forced to pace myself and work much slower than I would otherwise be able to do because the heat was that intense.
I was able to drink some of my coconut water reserve because it has the things plants crave.
It's definitely the worst summer heat I've felt since ever.
For the longest time, measures against climate change were decried for potentially impacting "the economy". Well now we're going to see the impact to "the economy" with climate change getting worse. I assume it'll be a bigger impact than if we had invested in more sustainability earlier. Slower work pace outside just being a small taste of the impact.
Wait until next summer!
Why was your hard hat sweating? I wear a hard hat at work and I don't think I've ever had sweat rolling off it. That doesn't seem physically possible.
i imagine it was the humidity from the ambient air and not from his head.
This one has a cloth like padding at the forehead, it collects the sweat but gets saturated and beads up on the front and rolls off.
It's nice to have if it isn't a lot of sweat, but when your entire face is drenched, it does that.
Everything is fine, the earth simply won't be habitable for humans. The Earth will spin on without us when we inevitably allow industry to destroy humanity by making earth uninhabitable by human life.
It's what we deserve for being so stupid as to see this happening and doing nothing about it to stop it or slow it down. There's plenty of climate change advocates which are almost always drowned out by the chorus of companies and climate deniers who believe propaganda over science.
You make it sound like humans are the only ones affected by climate change. Sea turtles, elephants, polar bears, pandas, there's a fuck load of animals we're directly killing off. Everything is most certainly not fine, even if you don't give a single shit about innocent human lives.
We will take a large chunk of the planets life with us. I don't think we can destroy it all however, the planet will get to intelligent life eventually.
Oh, I'm sure we can engineer something to that end.
Where I stay these temperatures can be quite normal in summer. I'm now just worried that a hot summer's day here will now go from 45 to 55. I've felt 50 before. It's not fun. But besides that, I think of the implications for the agricultural sector. Good luck my European friends. I'll report back in our summer.
It's the lack of sure conditioning in Europe that makes it especially brutal.
Sure, there are hotter climates but they are usually more prepared with AC. Certainly not always, I know.
AC doesnt help construction or farm workers, doesnt help against wildfires and also not against drought.
The economy and society asba whole arent prepared for these temperatures. We would need a cultural shift even in northern Europe, where siestas need to become normal. Too bad if you would need to commute 2h back and forth for your siesta break.
It also, given our current electricity-creation-machines, only exacerbates the whole "climate change" thing.
where are you? desert country? if mine have that temp, there would be so many dead people.
Humidity level does matter, a 50c in a dry weather is pretty hot, but not as hot as how people accustomed to high humidity level make it sound.
Simple way to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit in your head:
40 * 2 = 80
80 - 8 = 72
72 + 32 = 104
40 C = 104 F
This is still hot but a far cry from 118F
That was a typo by OP. The temp in Italy is 48C/118F
I guess the op added it to the title, but on the article the conversion is from 48°C to 118F
Thanks for the formula! Never knew how to do this.
yeah, 104 a spring day in bakersfield California. But we have AC and stuff. if they’re not used to those temps they might not be prepared for it
We usually do not have AC here (for example in Germany). Not even in hospitals, schools, elderly care, etc. The solution of our government, after many people already died because of heat, is to make shelter rooms somewhere in the city where you can go when it's getting too hot. That's how "prepared" we are.
Also, the majority of people here do not own a home but instead are dependable on their landlord to do something against the heat. Which is obviously not happening. So instead those people who have the money for it start buying free standing AC units. Which need a pipe to hang out of the window and are highly inefficient.
Yeah, that’s what I figured. I’d heard that a lot of europe lacks warm weather infrastructure and most homes lack the basic air conditioning that is ubiquitous here in the US. I don’t see a lot of fixes for that.
The solution is the for the rich landowners to spend their fucking money and retrofit building with central air.
The solution is as simple as always: the rich must spend money.
Here in Canada we just double it and add 30, because it's close enough generally.
40c is 104f. The article mentions possibly peaking at 48c, which is 118f. In case anyone thought something was a little off
I think climate change is happening far sooner than scientists could have predicted. We focus on increased global average temperatures but I think that we are going to have insanely hot summers sooner. We're fucked.
What makes you think that? The science has been pretty damn good for a long time.
https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming
Maybe it's more about already being able to see the results of climate change.
Rivers drying out, ice sheets and glaciers melting, oceans heating up, desertification, water shortages, etc.
And with everything it seems like we're "nearly" at a breaking point. Cities running completely out of water, crops failing because of the heat or forests dying or burning, etc.
At least it feels like we're not that far away from a really bad time than anticipated.
You don't need to guess. It was less than 3 months ago where scientists (on nearly every news/publication outlet that wasn't denying climate change) said we are going to blow by the 1.5C estimate we used as a threshold in our models.
Climate change is already happening exponentially now.
Yeah just 20 years ago, much of the world was a bunch of primitive people living in jungles, and the planet could balance the relatively small number of industrialized nations. Today, way more countries have been industrialized. Countries like Vietnam, Thailand, etc are now concrete cities with massive highways and bridges, motorized vehicles everywhere, and factories manufacturing all kinds of stuff and pumping huge clouds of crap into the air. The EU and US try to pass laws and regulations to lower pollution output, but the factories just move to these other countries that have no or less regulations. We aren't at steadily increasing pollution levels, it's exponentially increasing.
I think the problem is when you show them the projections people would say "you're just being alarmist, clearly you have an agenda"
So the messaging has been consistently toned down in the hopes people would listen.
They've been warning about water scarcity for decades, I think most people accept it's going to be a thing. Tell them this is going to happen in their country, this decade? Most won't believe you.
Doesn't matter that it's already at the breaking point, and that we have still growing populations that are already rationing water from sources that aren't just down due to drought. There's aquifers that would take centuries to fill back up to where they were decades ago
Scientists told us "your grandchildren will be screwed", then "think of the world you're leaving your children"... Well this generation, they're not saying "you're screwed", because people aren't ready to hear that
People don’t want to have to worry or deal with reality so they simply choose to believe otherwise.
Why do you think we still have rampant religion infecting the world.
My guess is its even more than this: deadlines were extended to not let people fall into inaction. The tipping point always close enough so that its dangerous, but still far away enough so that there is still hope. It is a ploy analogous to the fascist "the enemy is strong enough to be dangerous and weak enough to be thoroughly defeated."
This scene is far more realistic, I think. But as you can tell, it doesn't play very well with either the audience or the media.
Imagine being that guy, telling people the same thing scientists have been saying for 100+ years and watching all of them put their hands over their mouths like it's an earth shattering discovery. If only someone had told them repeatedly over the course of multiple generations!
"Who cares?" I feel ya bud.
No, no - it's just as scientists predicted. In the worst-case "no-mitigation" scenario and with attempts from them to explain that +2 global will likely be +10 in peak temperature increase over land (read US, Europe, Asia). As in, both mean and std will increase, but without ocean's mitigation over land.
Fucked is not the correct word - there is a +50 predicted before the end of decade in Strasbourg, where I am from. There is not a single building built there made to resist that kind of temperatures, nor a single tree or crop that could stand that for a day.
And it's a relatively "safe" area as far as long-term projections go...
I would love to read the source on this, not because I think it's bullshit but because that is pretty fucking alarming.
40C is not 118F
It's 48°C, not 40. The title is incorrect.
In North Carolina, we had a "winter that wasn't" and now we have a summer of "surface of the sun" heat. Triple digit heat index every day last week. Good luck getting the locals to admit that climate change is real though. At this point I think some of them are actually starting to see the truth, but it just pisses them off and they dig in to denial even harder, because if there's one thing they can't do it's admit they were wrong.
When I mentioned the hot weather forecast to my super libertarian crazy father in law, he was went off on a tangent on how the government is controlling the weather and causing all of this on purpose 🤦
I had to stop going to my favorite Saturday morning breakfast restaurant for pretty much the same reason. They were ranting about how all the wildfires up here were lit by the government in order to put out enough smoke to block out the sun so our crops would fail. Then everyone would rely on the government for food and they could purge the people they didn't want around.
Get ready for this headline every year.
We already have it. Every year, we hit a new record in "hottest day of the year".
Eventually they'll start reporting deaths instead of temps
Covid showed that humanity doesn't really gives a shit about deaths either
Already happening:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-people-a-year-with-heat-related-deaths-rising-study-finds
Most people simply aren't or won't pay attention.
Hottest summer - so far
‘It’s not normal’
It is now.
Who could have predicted this!?!?? Why weren't we warned?
Does Italy have air conditioned cooling centers like California does?
Climate control technology never reached Europe. Every building is a sweltering hellhole, unless youre in the first floor of a concrete building.
I buckled and bought a stand-AC a few years ago when I literally couldn’t sleep for days during an insanely hot summer here in Germany. I really try not to use it much but on those days when it’s unbearable it’s literally a lifesaver.
AC never was popular because it used to be that you never needed it here. You’d have maybe one or two days above 30 a year where I live and that wouldn’t be enough to heat up the concrete walls, so your living space still stayed cool. And at night the temperature would drop and you could simply air out your flat. Now it’s different though and it’s seriously a shame that people still doubt climate change is happening.
Same thing on my part of Canada. Might have to get an AC for the bedroom.
Pair it with solar panels, then it doesn't contribute to climate change and you can run it as much as you want when the sun shines.
Believe me, I would if I could, but my building doesn’t allow us to hang stuff from our balconies. Can’t go about being more energy efficient if it might look too ugly! (/s)
California offers the public to visit certain public buildings and community centers to cool off for free during heatwaves. It saves lives. It would be great if the Italian government could offer something similar. I know they have some very old buildings, but they have some that could facilitate this. Or they should build more pantheons like in Rome if they reject air conditioners.
I read something in the news about inviting people to churches. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself for several hours there, also the seats are pretty uncomfortable. But better than a heatstroke I guess.
“And I know I’ve finally accepted that air conditioning is a privilege, not a right.”
-Ted Lasso
You forget how much further north Europe is. You didn't need ac in many parts.
I don't know what people are smoking, maybe it's too much heat, but air conditioning is very common and normal here in Italy too.
I don't know what a cooling center is, but there is AC everywhere, and when there isn't it's a choice of the owner to avoid installing it.
Also it's not the first time we reach similar temperatures sadly. We get around 40°C basically every year. The south of Italy is clearly on a very high and uncommon peak, tho.
The situation is different in other countries like Germany, northern France or England. Until a few years ago they never needed AC at all so most homes don't have it and it's not even that easy and immediate to have it installed
A cooling center is a building with AC open to the public, so people without AC can cool off.
https://www.qualenergia.it/articoli/meta-famiglie-italiane-ha-condizionatore-ecco-come-usa/
Data supporting this. About 50% of italian private households have AC, with obvious differences between regions and local climates.
I don't know where people in this thread are retrieving data to support their statements but they definitely sound absurd. Source: am Italian
Central aircon is pretty standard for most large buildings but individual aircon systems for private housing is rare, mainly because it is only very hot for a short period of time.
It is becoming more common in northern Europe, which sounds counterintuitive, because heating during winter is a far bigger issue here than cooling during summer.
However, many private houses get 'heat pumps', which gives you more heating pr kW than pure old-fashion electric heating would have given. Basically it is a backwards airconditioner.
These heat pumps can also be run backwards, and then they function as aircondition.
No, air conditioning is rare in Europe. Pretty much only hotels have it, and by far not all hotels. About 5% of private residences have A/C, even in southern regions of France, Spain and Italy.
Source: Wikipedia, and my kid that went to Italy and Greece and Germany for the previous few summers worth of heat waves.
Edit: Formal, government supplied cooling centers are a CA thing. Informal ones like shopping centers are more widespread in the U.S., but don't really exist in Europe.
It doesn't even matter all that much. A couple years ago in the PNW when it hit 43°c/115°f, I had my central air absolutely kicking out the jams and it was still 90°f in my house. I got really annoyed before coming to the realization that it was 25° cooler inside which is honestly a pretty decent effort on behalf of my AC. There's no reason it should be this hot anywhere, but especially Cascadia. Of course my AC couldn't handle it because it wasn't designed to. Even a decade ago you'd think someone was nuts if they installed an AC capable of dealing with this anywhere except say Arizona or Florida
5% lol you're way off. If you're that far off for Spain, I have to wonder if your arse was also the source for the figures for the other countries.
https://www.idealista.com/news/inmobiliario/vivienda/2021/07/15/791442-el-36-de-las-casas-en-espana-tiene-aire-acondicionado
My understanding is that it is more common in offices, though, than in residences.
Yeah its pretty standard to have in offices and shops, but not in apartments or houses. I've seen couple of ceiling fans in Spain, but here in France some people don't even use regular floor fans for some reason lol
To be honest, we only get 2 hot months in a year (usually, though its starting to change and now its more like 3 hot months where 2 are extra hot)
I used to specifically not want A/C in my cars back in the 90s living in Denver. It was never hot enough to need it. In the past years I've spent quite a few days sitting in stopped traffic in my open Jeep with the thermometer reading 104-107F. Once was behind an uncovered manure truck. Good times, good times.
Where I live now (further north from CO) there's a massive junk yard with thousands of snowmobiles. Apparently my current area used to be a mecca for snowmobiling in the 70s and 80s, with 1500 miles of snowmobile trails. It snows maybe 3 times a year now, average of 10 inches total per season. Neighbors all around me have every kind of motor toy imaginable, but I have not seen a single snowmobile. My snowblower hasn't been seen use in over 4 years, and the city routinely forgets how to plow or sand streets.
Weather definitely got hotter year round over 3-4 decades. I'll fight fellow Gen-X and boomers over this.
It really shouldn't even be a fight... we've had accurate thermometers for a long time now, and weather stations all over the world at airports at the very least. Taking an average of the temperatures around the world isn't really some crazy advanced science.
Here in Germany not even offices have them. Well, most of them. AC is a luxury that no one needed like 5 years ago. 5 years in the future this will have changed, obviously.
Sadly this is the new normal...
Holy fuck
I honestly get dizzy by just looking at those numbers...😵💫
We had 40C here in London this time last year. It was not pleasant. It didn't even rain.
We've been 37 or 38 in my area of Tokyo off and on the past couple of weeks. It will only get warmer. The bad part is that it's still rainy season so we also get stupid humidity to go with it. It's 27 in my office, but we have at least one of our aircon units running nearly 24/7 on the "dry" setting to attempt to pull some of the heat and humidity out.
What suprises me the most when watching news on this. You will see people in Rome getting interviewed in the middle of a plaza in the burning sun. And there are many walking outside. I would crawl into a cool cellar and only come out at night.
The people walking around are called Australians.
They live in apartments without AC and also have to go to work.
Like when whole countries begin to go green and EVs are being more realistic and tangible, and to top off no seemingly push back from big oil, you know shit needs to change
From my understanding, we see less pushback from big oil because now big oil is properly invested into the alternative energy sector. For example Koch industries has been investing in alternatives since at least the 90s.
They will simply profit off of the solution(s)/alternatives to the problems they created.
Aircon plus solar panels for the win? Other than the initial manufacturing cost, it's a fairly good solution.
For those with a limited budget in a dry heat area, a large portable Swamp box and a single panel may be enough. Needs access to water though...
Can't tell if you're thinking this is anything more than an emergency stopgap for people that can't bear living in their home, but.... All A/C does is spend energy to move the heat back outside, and also produce some more heat on the side. So it isn't a sustainable solution or fix, even if your energy generation is somehow perfect.
And swamp boxes are basically just a fan with extra steps that puts a miniscule amount of heat into the water. They feel a tiny bit better, but they're not really fixing anything either. That warm water still needs to go somewhere etc.
I disagree on the efficacy of evaporative coolers. When I lived in Bourke, they were excellent. Typically roof mounted models such as these. Very low power usage for whole house cooling, but the massive caveat is they don't work well in humid places.
A simple portable one like the Convair Classic will only really help whoever's near it, but at under 80 watts of power it'll run off even the cheapest inverter and car battery in an emergency.
Solar panels make the cost of using a split system practically nothing during daylight hours, with little net additional heat created in the process.
My point is these are just making you feel better at best. Even a perfectly efficient split system running off a perfectly efficient power source which was manufactured out of thin air without having any effect on climate change is still moving heat around. None of these address the core problem with the climate. Even at perfect efficiency they're just building you a small bubble to feel better in.
40-45C happens in our summers on a semi regular basis (thank f*** last summer we only had a handful of days like that). Inner Oz can reach close to 50C in some areas.....
40-45C happens every summer in Sevilla. When I went to roma over a decade ago there were some 40ºC days.
Hows the humidity when it gets that hot?
I've done low humidity 45° days/38° nights and it was pretty toasty, but 35° with high humidity kicks my arse. The last couple of weeks here in Catalunya we've had 30-35° with high humidity and I'm just exhausted.
In Italy too, but 48°C is exceptional
It's normal now.
500 years later, Europe finds out their Industrial Revolution has consequences, for everyone. Yay!
200 years later. 500 years ago Europeans were discovering islands and continents.
"Discovering"... this land is your land, this land is my land 🎵
I already knew that we're fucked. But scientist said more around 2050 or something. The way things are progressing right now the next 10 to 20 years are going to be dicey.
I really don't like seeing these temperatures and I also don't like that governments have not educated the public effectively on what to do to limit climate change. It's a tragedy to see people making irrational and ineffective descisions out of fear.
It’s not about education at this point, it’s about regulation. Without mandates and penalties there is zero incentive to change for the large corporate polluters.
While I agree that there is a lack of education around it, the real solution is regulating emissions from industry and providing businesses monetary incentive to improve
"No one could have prevented this."
We are so fucked....
It's normal in a silly mustache disguise!
Well it's normal NOW...