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Europe's new climate in seven charts

122 points by saikatsg

by Natfan

7 subcomments

to me, these heatwaves feel like the start of the end of human existence

by yread

1 subcomments

Not that it invalidates the article but the previous record for Czech republic was 40.4 not 39 degrees (see VIII/August below)
https://www.chmi.cz/namerena-data/historicka-data/historicke...

by makapuf

6 subcomments

What strikes me is the relative sharp change. CO2 has been rising since, what 250 years ? However real effects of global warming seems to be felt since, like 10 years old ?

by k__

4 subcomments

"Europe's rapid warming is partly the result of [...] a drop in the number of tiny polluting particles in the air. This means that less of the Sun's energy is reflected back into space, leaving more energy to heat the Earth's surface."
Hmmm...

by Luc

0 subcomment

It's a damn shame that the EU's plan to reduce our already low emissions (<6% globally) to zero by 2050, at great cost to our collective wealth, will result in a reduction in global warming of less than 0.02 C (1). That is if industry doesn't just move to India, China, Indonesia, etc.
(1) Based on the IPCC rule of thumb of 0.45 C increase per 1000 GtCO2 emissions, see e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/climate-change-2021-the...

by graemep

2 subcomments

Why such short term graphs? One of them only goes back 1991, and the longest term only goes back to 1946.

by Havoc

1 subcomments

Yeah London was genuinely rough. Everything is built for cold not heat

by jmyeet

1 subcomments

It's hard to compare a shift in a probability distribution because people will hang on to outliers. We hear this every winter: "all I hear about is Global Warming but look at this record snow". But I do believe the empirical evidence for all this has gone well beyond statistical significance.
The Wire is one of my all-time favorite shows in part because it's a story of institutional failure at every level. The police, the ports, the media, the schools and the city government. That's really what's going on here. Utility companies (in the US at least) prefer fossil fuels because they're more profitable. The wealthy prefer fossil fuels because a mine or an oil well is and always has been a massive wealth concentrator. Build a solar farm and it... just produces electricity. There are far fewer profit opportunities so it doesn't happen. So fossil fuel companies have money to throw at politicians to enshrine their rent-seeking behavior. But most depressing is how many ordinary people buy into this system with some hand-waving about "jobs" even though renewables will be strictly better in basically every way at this point.
Spain could become the energy powerhouse of Europe here. It's one of the most southernmost European countries and has plentiful sunshine. Additionally it has a lot of otherwise degraded land. According to Google, 200,000+ square kilometers. You build endless solar farms and UHVDC transmission lines across the continent and you could massively diminish the dependence on natural gas. All the tech for all of this already exists. It can be added incrementally. There's no 20+ year construction cycle like there is for any nuclear project.
As an added benefit, this would likely help regenerate the soil as China has done.
It's worth adding that the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s was a massive problem. Every utility in Europe should be nationalized. It's easier to subsidize energy shocks when you own the companies that are profiting from them.

by metalman

0 subcomment

Unfortunately, the headline, like ALL of the rest for decades, is woefully conservative and fails to address the real situation, and more probmilmaticaly the failure modes of intense climate change. The current (daily) charts and maps as all in record teritory, with changes so extream as to suggest that there could be unmanageable conditions in our imediate future.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/
edit: The charts shown in the article, show the institutional insanity, by greying out Ireland, speaking of "europe", but showing only data for England.

by thewhitetulip

6 subcomments

Why is it that aggressive climate action is not taken still?

by kubb

0 subcomment

Let's keep going. I almost have enough for _.

by BrandoElFollito

0 subcomment

I don't get the chart with the tropical nights.
It is not as if there was a heat dome that is specifically sitting on the cities. It is more because the cities are so bad in heat control that they get tropical night via inertia.

by nemo44x

0 subcomment

Time to get AC in homes. Especially in the Uk Where homes are generally terraced/attached, small, and decently insulated. The costs to operate wouldn’t be too painful.
Secondly, much of Western Europe (except Norway) needs to figure out how to bring energy costs way down. It’s so expensive compared to the USA and Canada and people take home significantly less money.

by IshKebab

0 subcomment

And yet there are still climate change deniers here. Look at any BBC article about this where they enable comments and about a quarter of the upvotes are for denier comments. Absolutely insane.

by bob001

4 subcomments

And yet many Europeans will still argue that ACs are evil and they shouldn't have them despite an estimated 175k heat related deaths per year. Although maybe this heat wave will change some minds.

by petesergeant

2 subcomments

If you’re wondering who to blame, as little as ten years ago:
“Republican Senate environment chief uses snowball as prop in climate rant”[0]
It’s an interesting plot twist in Termination Shock, where the popularist right shifts overnight from “it’s fake” to “real, but the liberals/globalists/experts betrayed us by doing nothing useful”. A reframe from environmentalism into grievance politics, which is already becoming real in France[1].
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/26/senate-james...
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gyqldl3p5o

by bilsbie

2 subcomments

I’ve been hearing this every summer. It kind of feels like these countries rediscover summer every year.

by comrade1234

0 subcomment

Don't worry. The AMOC is already collapsing. I live in Zurich, about the same latitude as the north tip of Maine. Winters here are pleasant - you have to go to the mountains to get snow. Once the Atlantic current that keeps Europe warm collapses maybe the glaciers can start growing again.