What can be done to prevent more dangerous heatwaves in Europe?
Does Europe need to plant more trees in it’s cities?
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change - public transit over cars, recycling, reducing carbon footprint better compared to other parts of the world. Of course all communities can do better at reducing their carbon footprint - Is this America’s fault with their carbon footprint that Europe is suffering? America has their cars, and simply cranks up their Air conditioners when it’s hot.
What else is there to do? I thought China had success improving their renewable energy output, even though they are still polluters, is it the actions of China and the USA causing misery in Europe? How do we help Europeans suffering and prevent this from happening again?
The idea we seem to be going with is that we could kill everyone in Europe who isn’t extremely wealthy. Then there will be no one in that region in danger from climate change, and far less pollution globally.
We’re past the “prevention” phase and have moved on to the “adaption” phase.
We can do both! And call it pre-daptive
You know those reflector screens they put in cars, yeah picture that but enough to cover a continent.
What if the reflective screen is angled towards another planet and signs of life appear?!
I was thinking aiming it back at the sun to give it a taste of its own medicine but your idea works as well.
is this serious ?
120yrs ago, yeah CO2 emissions will be a problem in the decades to come
50 years ago, yeah emissions will be a problem in decades to come, including heatwaves that will damage infrastructure and kill poeple
30 years ago, yeah emissions will be a problem in decades to come, including heatwaves that will damage infrastructure and kill poeple
10 years ago, yeah emissions will be a problem in decades to come, including heatwaves that will damage infrastructure and kill poeple
this year, how about that heat, if only we’d been warned /s
it very likey that if we’re not near emission system by 2030/2035 (not net zero bullshit) then we’ll end civilization in the decades to come as there is no coming black from the increasing tipping points. Strat with bannibg all private jets.
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change
as long as this sort of bullshit is prevalent in the zeitgeist then nothing changes.
As to doing something ? vote green (not to get the Greens into power per se but to move the Overton Windows) , don’t fly, don’t drive.
What we’ll do instead is normalise out stupidity as we go fascist and keep on keeping on, like we do with inequality, hunger, homelessness, war erc
Plot out the sun, obviously.
You can’t prevent them you can only prepare for them mainly with AC. Europe must get on AC or at least have more cooling centers for people.
So we will just run for cover from ac spaces to other ac spaces like americans? No thanks.
AC just displace the issue, you will be good in your ACed appartment but the neighbor who face the exhaust will be blasted with hotter air.
At a building scale it creates “hot air islands”, at a city/datacenter scale it is +2°C at least in a large radius.
AC should be only a part of the solution, as it adds more issues (electricity needs, pfas emissions, dangerous fluids management).
Other forms of AC exist my friend, geothermal is a great one that would work everywhere in Europe I’ve been.
So we will just run for cover from ac spaces to other ac spaces like americans? No thanks.
Well, your other options are enduring the heat or move to somewhere cooler.
At least for the most vulnerable, like the elderly
Sure, and maternities and schools.
This is a part of the solution, like a bandage, but it should not be the whole plan.
I know nothing but according to some scientists the most efficient cooling system is forests and humid zones.
That’s why we are planting trees in cities instead of parking lots and in schools courts. It’s a good start but we need moooore
A time machine
Build infrastructure to make Europe more heat tolerant.
A lot of what Americans do to deal with the heat, like air conditioning and ice water, need to get adopted in Europe. As for the concern of the energy needed to power air conditioners, most demand generally follows peak solar production. Also, if you install heat pumps instead of normal air conditioners, it will help lower carbon requirements for heating.
That’s the thing about climate change.
One place can do everything right…if the other countries in the world doesn’t do the same everyone is fucked regardless.
NO! This is not just false, it’s dangerously false.
If a country takes measures to emit 500M less tons of CO2 per year, the result is… 500M less tons of CO2 in the air per year than otherwise. That helps!
There isn’t a single fucked/not fucked threshold. There are a lot of nuances of fucked and each one we dodge puts us in an incrementally less awful place. Who knows how many more lives saved for each Mton CO2 not produced. Who knows how many species get to live, how many fewer days of heatwave per year, how many more glaciers survive.
I STG, “we’re already fucked anyway” is oil shill talk. Fuck that noise, let’s make oil obsolete, let’s avoid entire shades of fucked, we’ve already made insane progress with renewables and electric cars, let’s just keep going! Let’s pressure our individual politicians because you know the fuckers love it when you give up! You on board?
let’s make oil obsolete
Yeh good luck with that. There is literally no known replacement for oil. It is in the creation of basically everything that you interact with every single day.
I’m not exaggerating btw. There is no known oil substitute for most products that we use oil for.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-we-really-live-without-oil-bruce-l--g7f8f
If a country takes measures to emit 500M less tons of CO2 per year, the result is… 500M less tons of CO2 in the air per year than otherwise. That helps!
Not if that country just offloads industry to another country. This is what the west is doing, offloading dirty industry to China, then pointing fingers at China.
💯
Australia is “reducing” their emissions by having China manufacture everything using the coal that companies dig out of our ground and sell them, then we buy it all back and ship it over here on planes and boats, while claiming we’ve reduced emissions.
It’s all a grift.
“Nobody else is doing anything about it so why should we go slightly without and pay slightly more to do our part?”
- pretty much everyone at the same time, unironically.
Also, what you’re doing now will have an effect a decade or more down the road
End all fossil fuel use asap and make trade blocks that prefer countries that do the same. Tarrifs for those that use dirty fuels beyond the Eurobloc’s schedule.
Remember, even if we stopped today, there is a 20 year lag time so it’s getting way, way worse.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels#tracking
We are still growing fossil fuel use. The repercussions are enormous, and effectively, permanent.
At this point we need to spend all of our effort in advancing ways we can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean, we are fucked unless we find an efficient way to do so.
Yes, but I don’t believe there is any process could ever be efficient enough.
Deep ocean algae farms might do it. Oil companies have brought up and side lined research on it for decades however.
But that would hurt fossil fuel companies, so we can’t do that. (/jk)
nothing, nothing we do now will stop the warming. if we end all fossil fuel burning, concrete production, and livestock production tomorrow, the atmosphere will continue to warm for hundreds of years before peaking. We are cooked. Grab your popcorn.
👆
Also, it would be helpful not to worsen it with some hype, currently AI or to let go of old fossil technology. But there we go.
So lets do nothing uh?
Fuck it I will do my best.
I’m not saying do nothing. I’m saying nothing can be done about the warming.
nothing, nothing we do now will stop the warming.
What if (theoretically speaking, because I don’t think we’re close yet) we rolled out carbon-capture technology and implementation on a massive scale? How much useful impact would that have on mitigating CC versus how much of that is still out of our hands?
This. What part of “well past the tipping point” do people not understand? The time to take drastic action was 20 years ago. It’s “adapt or die” time. The good news is, the elderly are more vulnerable so that should help with the population decline issue.
my brother in christ we will be the pop corn
And yet we must stop climate change instead of making it even worse.
Sorry. But this comment made me think of this:
Anyway? We’re fucked and the game now is to mitigate and adapt.
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change - public transit over cars, recycling, reducing carbon footprint better compared to other parts of the world.
No. It wasn’t enough by far
There have been many right ideas, but what has actually been done was only a tiny little change, not significant.
Interesting. What are a couple things Europe should do to reduce it’s carbon footprint?
Stop burning things (oil, gas, …).
(Stop does not mean reduce by 3%)Stop producing and buying so many animals for food.
Grow new woods (real large, not tiny).
Europe is already better per capita than most regions. not much point in getting Europeans to cut C02 more when Americans are still driving tanks and burning coal.
Do you blame the US or other polluter nations for Europe’s heatwave?
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I have generally found the lack of urban trees in Europe pretty shocking. Even in wide open squares where there’s no reason not to have them it’s often just cobblestones. While Europe is certainly cooler than where I live, even so it seems like it would be very hot and unpleasant if the weather gets even a bit warm.
Some countries like France and the Netherlands are doing some good work on this lately but it needs to be more widespread and unfortunately it will take some time to pay dividends.
And yes we need to decarbonize more aggressively. It may be a bit painful but less so than the pain of inaction.
yeah this totally, demolishing significant chunks of hot, lifeless city and creating dense woodland in cities would help a lot, also with flooding
Methinks this needs policy-level changes. There’s only so much we can do individually at this point
Immediate terms: There’s nothing that can be done to curb the heatwave IMO, but there are ways to prevent danger. Namely, AC, cooling centers, public education on preventing heat-related injuries/deaths… Maybe govts can even temporarily reduce regulations/give subsidies on split-systems to help nudge some folks, but nothing much else can be done. One pet-idea I have is cooling centers, since I know Houston (which has extreme weathers) opens cooling/warming centers when the weather is too extreme; it is a very progressive implementation that benefits those who are underprivileged
Slightly longer term: Trees/green spaces always help. Public transit systems always help. Some fairly sweeping changes in climate-related regulation (ease AC regulations, tighten car regulations, tax on pollution, etc), aimed at both reducing danger and improving the climate… or at least recuperate some “pollution tax” so the govt can use the money to plant more trees and build more trains. Also some European countries can do so much better at discouraging car use (or at least switch to EVs) given how good the train networks are; for countries without good train networks, build some
Even longer term: Massive investments in green energy; if they are investing already, invest more. But be practical… temporary solutions like nuclear are not everyone’s cup of tea but they help with the transition. Do better on international collaboration. Find ways to discourage international trading partners from over-polluting (probably a combination of tariffs and negotiations… not my specialty).
Obligatory not an economist/political scientist, there are probably better ways to implement these than what I suggested
Your last point should be first. Europe (and the UK) are reducing their carbon output but our success is dwarfed by the increase in co2 output by China and India. The US has also made no effort to reduce emissions but because industry there is declining it hasn’t increased for a few years. We need to apply a carbon tax to imports from those countries.
