The European Heatwave Is Making Scientists Scream Into a Pillow
And rightly so! They've only been warning us for centuries
Much of Europe is collapsing under a record-breaking heatwave that is killing people from Spain to the Czech Republic.
People are dying in the UK. They’re dying in France, in Spain, and in Germany. Ireland is seeing temperatures they so rarely experienced in the past that 25 degrees for five days is their idea of a heatwave.
That’s cute. Ours in Canada smash 35 and last for weeks.
Just taking the piss, Ireland. I hope things cool down soon!
Where I live, only on thunderstorm days do we see lower than 25 during the summer these days. Right now, looking at my forecast, I have a week of 30+ days and 20 degree nights ahead of me.
That’s now my normal. It never used to be when I was young, but that’s climate change for you.
But going back to Europe, they’re boiling. Even Germany is recording temperatures above 40 degrees right now. For you Americans, that’s about 104. If you want to check the other temperatures I’ve mentioned, here’s a link to a conversion chart.
To call this an emergency is a dire understatement. The World Health Organization has listed 1,300 global deaths linked directly to the heat so far.
This is climate change in action, something a staggering number of uneducated, incurious twerps in the U.S. still somehow believe is a hoax.
I’ve met some of these people. One of them told me that, quote, “The government controls the weather anyway!”
My brain stopped processing English for a few seconds to try and save me from that conversation.
The worst part is, a lot of those ignorant twits are currently running the United States government right now. They’re stripping regulations and environmental protections meant to help curb climate change and slow its escalation.
But thanks to the Republicans, the brakes are being stripped from the train. The U.S. is not the only contributer to climate change, of course, but as one of the world’s largest economies, it’s a huge one.
The day Trump was elected for the second time, I said to my mother that we were fucked. I knew he didn’t give a shit about the climate in terms of saving lives or ecosystems.
He’ll lie and strip protections and convince his cult to burn, baby, burn! Drill, baby, drill! All in the name of short term profits.
The worst part is, no matter what he says, he knows it’s not a hoax. During his first term, he went out of his way to try and protect his seaside golf courses from sea level rise, citing ‘global climate change’ as the reasoning behind it.
He fucking knows. He doesn’t care. Hell, why should he? He won’t be alive to experience the worst of it. That’s a problem for his children and grandchildren, not for him.
A man like Trump doesn’t care about the world after he’s no longer in it. Hell, for all we know he thinks the world stops existing completely after he dies. I wouldn’t put it past him.
Most of his policies seem to maximize human suffering in the name of making money. This is no different.
It’s going to make extreme weather, like we’re seeing in Europe, more common and much, much worse.
Solidarity wins.
Don't worry, it makes the smart Americans scream into a pillow too. I watched a YouTube documentary that was really neat about different cities experimenting with "green cities". The idea is to plant a lot of trees in big cities so it shades and makes the city cooler. It was a pretty neat concept that I would love to see more of if done right. Obviously, this is just a bandaid on a symptom instead of addressing the root of the problem but it's still a cool idea.