A heatwave continues to grip large parts of Europe, with authorities in many countries issuing health warnings amid searing temperatures.
Southern Spain is the worst-affected region, with temperatures in the mid-40s Celsius recorded in Seville and neighbouring areas.
A new heat record for June of 46C was set on Saturday in the town of El Granado, according to Spain’s national weather service, which also said this month is on track to be the hottest June on record.
No worries guys this is just a normal summer day climate change isnt real, enjoy the sun
/s in case it isnt clear
There is still snow somewhere on earth, everything is fine!
- a politician somewhere
Lets all fly with our private jets to venice for a wedding!
oh also you cant use plastic straws cause its bad for the environment.
“We had a hot summer in 1976 and it wasn’t called climate change then”.
What someone said to me yesterday. He was deadly serious.
The new talking point is that man made climate change is real but burning oil isn’t causing the world to warm. But that does mean we can geoengineer our climate to be cooler. 🙃
Watch them get to 50C in a few years
Dont be so modest. 60°C
Have they considered spending 5% of their GDP on weapons? That will surely save humanity.
There are steps needed to slow global warming and become carbon neutral. Those don’t matter much if someone shows up and machine guns your town and loots it.
Honestly if they spend that on weapons and then use it lower the population it could help.
Shoot maybe Thanos was right…
It’s an endless loop if you think about it
Maybe because of global warming.
Nah, its because of the gay frogs
Here’s to drinking lots of H2O. At least it’s a dry heat. I lose my shit in high humid heat.
114 in ‘merican
Most places in Europe have hit normal summer temperatures where I am (about 35). This is ridiculous, though. It is hotter in Spain right now than it is in Phoenix.
Let that sink in. It is hotter in Barcelona than it is in Death Valley right now.
If anyone is interested, it’s X Celsius times 9/5 + 32
C * dolly Parton + freezing temp in F
That’s how I remember it!
What is the mneminic for freezing temp in F for non-freedom people trying to help the freedom people by converting?
“Double it and add thirty” is accurate enough for ambient temperatures, and easier to do in your head. If you need scientific accuracy then you wouldn’t be using Fahrenheit anyway.
While it is hard to link individual extreme weather events to climate change, heatwaves are becoming more common and more intense due to climate change.
Not that hard after all.
From a scientific point of view this is correct, the climate system is too complex to say this particular event is due to climate change. Exceptional events happened in the past too. So you can only draw conclusions from larger statistics. What’s solid science is the increasing averages, increasing frequencies of extreme events etc. If it was scientifically informed, that’s what this kind of sentence mean.
“It’s hard to link changes in climate to climate change”
Is the author stupid?
No, individual extreme events are not “changes in climate”. It’s easy to say that the rise in heatwaves is caused by climate change but it’s much harder to prove that this specific individual heatwave would never have happened were it not for climate change.
The average global temperature has been rising steadily with greenhouse gas emissions, for over 50 years, but sure we’ll just ignore that and say it’s impossible to know.
We only have the one planet, sometimes you can’t get multiple data sets. But you can certainly study the things that are happening and make predictions based on that.
No, you’re missing the point. We have conclusively “linked changes in climate to climate change” as your comment eloquently put it. That’s not really up for debate. But weather systems are extremely complex and extreme events have always occurred. So you can’t say that this one specific heatwave is caused only because of this trend.
When it comes to the urgency of doing something about it, that doesn’t matter. It’s absolutely sufficient to say “this type of event will occur increasingly often” to establish that it is an existential crisis. You don’t have to be able to prove anything at all about this one very hot week in order to say that it is probably the single most important issue for us to tackle (along with the politics that prevent us from doing that).
But we don’t have the science and statistics to generally link individual events to a trend in isolation, and we shouldn’t misrepresent the science that way.
heatwave
As this keeps happening I continue to wonder when Europe and the UK will finally realize how badly they need to air conditioning. The units are (or were in the past year or 3)b way more expensive there than here in America. I dunno about current costs. It’s worth it though, even if you only need it for like 1 month out of the year.
In France the government is helping people get Aircon by subsidising heatpumps, also way more carbon efficient than Gaz or fioul based central heating.
It depends on the kind of heatpumps, in a lot of cases the heatpump is installed to replace a boiler, reusing the radiators and hot water circulation already available.
Unfortunately in this case the heatpump cannot be used as AC.
Not as AC, but a reversible heat pump can use the heating system for cold water circulation.
It’s rather limited, because you run into condensation concerns, but it’s still a possibility. A place I used to work at did this. It wasn’t perfect, but took some of the edge off.
On the other hand reversible heatpumps work great with floor heating.
Having a cool floor during a heatwave is amazing, plus no noise,
Does that work for ground source heat pumps too? Like could I literally cool my floor with one? For summer and light winter, my air to air unit is fine and air to water is great too, but when it’s like -25 or -30 out, the air source units start getting pretty inefficient.
Probably, it should be quite efficient as well.
Why would they need more airco when many houses and apartments still don’t even have proper shutters for windows and many people still don’t know you should keep your windows closed during peak heat hours, many roofs still barely insulated and they turned all their yards and driveways into concrete and asphalt hellscapes. A nice adult tree in your yard does more than an airco, fight me.
There’s a huge difference in that between the UK and countries further to the south: for example, pretty much all dwellings in Portugal have outside window shutters whilst in the UK it’s incredibly rare (instead they have inside heavy courtains, so the light goes into the house and the INSIDE gets absorbed by transformed into heat by the courtains) but on the other hand housing insulation is generaly complete total crap in Portugal, but less so in the UK (still not at Scandinavia or Russian levels of efficiency, but way better than Portugal) so in Winter unless one uses massive amounts of electricity/gas for heating, it’s literally colder indoors in Portugal than in Britain.
At the very least both Portugal and Spain are much better adapted to higher temperatures than elsewhere in Europe, and that’s anchored on traditional techniques (such as outside window shutters, houses painted in light colors and the type of roofing used) rather than the brute-force energy-heavy techniques (such as heavy use of Aircon) so common in places like the US.
Well in places like UK, people are installing AC instead of trying many other, passive cooling options first. They don’t plant a single shrub next to their building but do put in highly inefficient portable AC units meanwhile asphalting/concreting there driveways… That’s exactly what got me on my high horse. AC can be needed, but it’s definitely not the first way to go in a northern-ish European place if the building doesn’t have outside shutters, very non green streets around etc. It’s not the miracle solution, AC adds to climate change, other ways of dealing with heat do not.
I installed triple glazing and started shutting windows during the day, but since there’s little ventilation, that means the air gets really bad here eventually. There’s trees on the south side of the house and no windows on that wall. I’m further north than the majority of the UK (think between Inverness and Shetland for my latitude - except I’m at the Baltic sea).
The AC is just necessary in the last few years. A decade ago it got hot, but not unbearably. Now it’s worse. I think the increased insulation is actually making AC-less, windows-closed situation heat worse since there are no shutters. I do wonder if polarizing film would be an effective alternative, as I don’t want it to be dark 24/7 and I’d forget to re-open the shutters when the summer is over lol
Europe and the UK
You can just say Europe.
Nope, UK is not part of Europe anymore ;)
Do you mean no longer part of the EU? Because for as far as I know the island is still geographically in Europe lol.
Debatable. They are an island next to Europe. But apart from that, you just stumbled across the joke.
The EU isn’t Europe.
We’re very aware in the UK but it’s not too easy. We have some the oldest housing stock in the world. We don’t have central air with no real way to retrofit so it would have to be one room at a time. Our windows aren’t designed to house those units I see in NY. We have to rely on very inefficient portable units so I only use it on the really hot days. Energy prices are still high after Russia’s invasion. People are adding proper units when extending but only the rich can really afford that.
For detached houses, you can do split systems with multiple indoor units per one outdoor unit. In a flat, you’re a bit more fucked because you might need permission from other people in the building, etc.
I live in Spain, and since temperatures are now reaching 39°C in my area, I ordered two AC units for the most used rooms in my house (living room and bedroom).
With installation it costed 1300€. A months salary basically. In my area the cheapest unit with installation was 450€, but it didn’t look very reliable.
I ordered it 11 days ago, and I’m scheduled to receive it and installed either this week or the next. AC installers are oversaturated with orders this time of the year. It’s insane.
I live in Estonia, temperatures don’t ever get to 39C but they do get up to 33-34 and for some reason my house gets pretty humid even at high temps, so it’s worse inside than outside, even if it’s hotter outside. I got a heat pump installed about 2 years ago, cost around 2k installed, but then again I went for a beefy Mitsubishi unit (big house and only one unit for now). It’s an absolute game changer in the summer, and in the winter when it gets cold, it saves me effort as well - I have to load the furnace less.
I figure it’s already earned its keep via the heating, but also if I do 2 extra hours of productive work 2 days a week, that’s 10 weeks of summertime heat till it’s paid off in full and while most summers don’t come with 10 weeks of heat, every summer has at least 4-5 hot weeks here.
Such an excellent photo, too
You’re going trigger boomers with that map. I love it.
I have to ask, why is that?
Boomers/conspiracy theorists think that the news organisations are using darker red to scare people into falling for climate change.
Across the Mediterranean to the south and east it is even hotter. Wearing shorts and putting on sunblock isn’t the best way to deal with the heat, you need to shield yourself and make use of the chimney effect.
The Bedouin lesson: A scientific study proves robes are the best garment to wear in the desert heat
A Bedouin outfit might not fit socially, but a loose summer dress might work just as well.
So as a counter to the “pants for women” movement, let’s start a “summer dresses for everyone” movement.
Shame I’m a fat old guy now. A few decades back I looked great in a Laura Ashley summer dress.
You were a pretty young women back then ?
He combined into one fat guy
It was a Regrettable Incident.
This is why most places have a strict one at a time policy on the big water slides. It’s not worth it girls.
Women is plural.
He said he was fat already
Oh yes sorry for the typo
Could we build a huge glas dome around a city, with adjustable mirrored / polarised surfaces to block out the heat using electricity to alter the properties of the glass?
No, we literally cannot safely build a glass dome that big. I do think large blimps with reflective tops could cool a city a little though.
It’s possible to protect against heatwaves on a city level. Increase the albedo value of the city by doing the following: Incentivize lighter colored roofing and walls, grow leafy trees for shade, cover parking lots with solar roofing (and add EV chargers). Basically do whatever possible to reduce the amount of asphalt and darkish materials in general, being hit by sunshine.
No it won’t save your ass when ambient temperature is 50C, but considering that cities are by their very nature hotter than the ambient temperature out side of the city, these things would help reduce that gap.
Trees are good and general greenery too, but then you run into water issues which will be the limiting factor for a lot of stuff going forward as fresh water availability decreases and groundwater runs low.
Yeah, hoping we can avoid that, but it’s not looking too great. It’s a mitigation for today’s world, but not for the future unless we also manage to solve the water issue. And just global warming in general.
That’s 115° in human units. Absolutely bonkers.
Would it kill you to not jokingly deny the humanity of every person outside the United States, Liberia, and the Cayman Islands? Just say Fahrenheit. Jeez, yank.
We have to put up with US-defaultism even in world@lemmy.world
I had to convert from Common to Freedom for this one. Are y’all ok over there? I’m used to that kind of heat here in the desert but goodness I couldn’t imagine 115f near the coast y’all must be dying 😬
The south of spain usually has dry air, it’s at 12% right now.
But even in germany it’s okay because it hasn’t really rained that much this year (yay climate change), so it’s hot but bearable. It’s 31°C with “only” 45% right now.
We will get 37°C the next days, so I might change my stance.
