alt Hacker NewsEurope's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
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I have an ancient forest near where I live in Switzerland. In the core zone of the forest they do no maintenance whatsoever. The trees live, they get gigantic and very old. They die. At some point the top breaks off and then many years later the rest of the tree is so fungus-eaten it tips over too and rots on the ground.
Sunlight never reaches the ground because of the tall giant trees so there's no undergrowth. It's just dead leaves and mushrooms.
Something that was completely 100% noticeable was that during this drought of several months this forest was still incredibly healthy. You walk into the forest and the temperature drops several degrees Celsius and the ground still seems wet. I could tell that the groundwater level sunk maybe 4 feet by looking at some pits that normally have water. But still the ground didn't feel dried out.
I compared this to a forest where they do maintain the forest and harvest giant trees for wood. They don't clear it but just by cutting out these tall trees they let sunlight reach the ground and dry the forest out.
I read this article, all of it. I'm still trying to square the circle of how a report about the tribulations of fish-farming on the Danube align with the broader concept of the "Desertification in Europe". To me, it seems like a bs, but credible, AI article about fish-farming challenges on the Danube which met some sloppy editor who simply stuck a more click-baity headline on it - one that was completely unrelated to the content.
AMOC collapse [0] is Europe's potential big climate challenge. Nasty business. I wonder how to help prevent that from happening.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Just in case somebody else wanted a map to see exactly which areas in europe actually experience drought this summer
https://drought.emergency.copernicus.eu/tumbo/edo/map/?prodC...
The timing of this article is a bit unfortunate. It's been raining here (France) every day for the past week, sometimes heavily.
How do we get Earth back to something resembling the steady state we know can work long term?
1. Electrify almost everything that can reasonably be electrified.
Move quickly to EVs, and replace anything that can practically become electric with an electric version. Self driving & fleet utilization will push transportation cost per mile lower than ever before.
For the power grid, data centers, and other large 24/7 consumers: solar + wind + battery storage. Deep geothermal also looks interesting.
Build lots of desalination capacity.
Maybe even planes can eventually be electrified. Imagine shorter hops with battery swaps at sea (aircraft carrier sorts of things). Too crazy?
2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.
Cargo ships.
Long haul aviation, if the electric plane idea really is impractical.
For those, we can turn energy + CO2 into liquid fuels, creating something closer to a closed carbon cycle.
3. Remove excess CO2.
CO2 persists in the climate system for 200+ years, so getting emissions to zero does not necessarily return atmospheric CO2 to previous levels.
We will need to remove enough to be net negative & over time bring it back down to the CO2 levels we know worked long term.
That takes energy. Fortunately, solar + wind + storage are cheap enough now & getting cheaper.
4. Find places for all that solar.
Deserts are obvious.
Floating solar could potentially contribute.
Agricultural land is interesting too. Agrivoltaics can sometimes provide useful shading while still allowing crops to grow.
5. Deal with the transition period.
Once we are making a serious transition toward decarbonization and carbon removal, it may make sense to investigate temporary solar geoengineering, such as injecting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, to partially counteract warming while atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are being brought down.
The purpose would be to stop the feedback loops such as more forest fires, thawing permafrost, and loss of ice and other reflective surfaces.
Obviously geoengineering has major risks and should not substitute for reducing emissions. But as a temporary bridge, it seems like something that deserves serious research.
We can do all this.
None of it requires magic. We already have, or can plausibly engineer, most of the pieces.
Just came back from a bike tour through rural Bavaria, it's insane how dusty everything is - and that despite a short but intense rain today night. The farmers around here are pretty much screwed this season, and not just the crop farmers but the cattle farmers as well, as they have to buy lots of feed now that they'd only have to buy in winter.
Everything south of Poland is Southern Europe now.
Meanwhile the cheapest way to travel are budget airlines.
This reminds me of the story of Noah in Bible school.
The huge swath of people are incentivized to pretend nothing is wrong, and the vast majority can’t do anything about it so also pretend nothing is wrong.
Just a friendly reminder that Fortune has been owned since 2018 by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a member of the Chearavanont family that controls the CP Group conglomerate. CP Group created Siam Land Flying in 1991 as its in-house flight department for executives. It later added charter (Executive Wings) and air-ambulance services and still operates King Air 350 and Hawker jets.
These owners don't care about any of your feelings on climate change.
I must depend on the country because the trend is that some countries, the UK for instance, are receiving more rain as climate warms, but it is becoming more seasonal. This year winter was extremely wet then indeed summer has been a record dry, so not sure how the year will look like overall (plus it's a strong El Niño year).
Atmospheric injections of Sulphur is going to be the only answer.
paywall
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I notice a distinct lack of Americans explaining that Europeans need to install more AC.
Who is liable for the deaths caused by extreme weather patterns? Is anyone?
This is all solvable with abundance. We could put together nuclear power with solar and desalination and carbon removal.
Let’s start acting more like a kardishev II civilization.
Complete nonsense. Even climate chance won't change the amount of rainfall we get over the course of the year. In fact, it will most likely be wetter due to it.
But it will become more uneven, with droughts followed by torrential rains and floods. We simply need to adapt by creating underground water basins that store torrential rainfall preventing floods and also serve as buffers for when the drought comes.
I do believe places like Spain could see more desertification, though. But they were at the brink for centuries in any case, especially inland.
Europe is caught in a dilemma: tourism, air travel, and city hopping are its economic lifeblood that keeps the continent running, but these also cause the greatest damage to the environment.
Since they can't fix the real problem are trying to go "green" in counterproductive ways that make things worse: blowing up nuclear plants or taxing cow fart.
Droughts are scary and they suck badly. California went through one for 10+ years. However, don’t go off the deep end and think that it’s the “new normal” like Californians did at one point.
All it took was one big rainfall a few years ago, and California has been out of drought ever since then. The reservoirs have been above historic norms and at the end of this summer, it’s only “abnormally dry”. Compare that to a few years ago where the entire state was mostly in an exceptional level of drought.
Droughts and heat waves suck and many people are suffering but nature goes in cycles and it will get better.
No fear of desertification while we pump the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses.
"The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000" https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024GEcoC..4902791C/abstra...
"Earth observation data shows that most European urban areas are becoming greener" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642...
Just took a train ride from Vienna to Budapest for a few days, and couldn’t help but notice how very, very dry everything is .. as an Australian living in Europe for a few decades now, I’ve always been intrigued by just how green everything is, literally something growing in every single crack in the pavement, or endless rolling green fields of prosperity during spring - whereas, where I’m from its year-long spinifex and grass shrubs and wattles with the occasional bush flower bloom, barely hanging on out in the desert, mostly reds and blacks and greys, not much green - so the vibrancy of European fields and the abundant diversity of countryside flora have always been pleasant to my eyes ..
During this trip, I was kind of shocked that things felt a bit more Australian to my eyes .. the grasses are dry and barren, the beautiful city parks of both Budapest and Vienna dustier than usual, the Danube water level definitely noticeably lower than I remember ever seeing.
I’ve long been encouraging my European friends to not take the abundance of growth for granted, and now we see it in the environment, plain and clear: the worlds’ weather is changing.
A week of sweltering heat is predicted for us again in Vienna, and as we get started on September and then October so close, two thoughts are on my mind: use this opportunity to go for more dips in the Danube, and .. I wonder what the floods of late-autumn will bring, because .. inevitably .. this super dry summer means there will be heavier rains in October. Might be we look back in a month or two and wish we had this dry heat back again, who knows ..
Either way, neither city is particularly comfortable in the heat. A hundred or so years ago, the heat retention was a feature. Now it’s a bug.