Europe Heatwave Drives Drowning Deaths and Disruption

They’re not used to that sort of thing in Europe, they should come to Thailand for a month in April.

The sky is falling!!!!

How pathetic. A bit of sun and the doomsday cult are claiming the world's going to end (again).

Glad to see they're getting some sun for once. Get out, enjoy it, stop whining.

...Meanwhile It's Been Snowing In Parts Of North America...

...A 30+ Year Charade Narrative Still Being Pushed Onto Some... (?)

...Apparently We Are Close To A Mini Ice Age According To Other Experts... (?)

Back in the 1980s I lived and worked in Oldenburg Germany. I lived in the top half of a house whose slate roof did get hot in the summer. Couldn't open the windows at night because there were no screens on them and the way they opened outwards, you couldn't put screens on them. And I wasn't going to leave them open at night for mosquitoes. Likewise, I couldn't find a place that sold fans. Simple little floor fans. Fortunately, almost every night cooled off enough so that only the days were warm. And I could live with a little daytime warmth easily enough. The article above says 21.6 C nights. For me that's downright cold. And an average temp of 29.8? Does that even happen in Thailand? So the French stuff shouldn't be so alarmist. The 40 in Spain is different. Those folks and their tourists will cook. They really ought to think about some small window aircons.

6 hours ago, SOTIRIOS said:

...Meanwhile It's Been Snowing In Parts Of North America...

...A 30+ Year Charade Narrative Still Being Pushed Onto Some... (?)

...Apparently We Are Close To A Mini Ice Age According To Other Experts... (?)

5 hours ago, John Drake said:

Back in the 1980s I lived and worked in Oldenburg Germany. I lived in the top half of a house whose slate roof did get hot in the summer. Couldn't open the windows at night because there were no screens on them and the way they opened outwards, you couldn't put screens on them. And I wasn't going to leave them open at night for mosquitoes. Likewise, I couldn't find a place that sold fans. Simple little floor fans. Fortunately, almost every night cooled off enough so that only the days were warm. And I could live with a little daytime warmth easily enough. The article above says 21.6 C nights. For me that's downright cold. And an average temp of 29.8? Does that even happen in Thailand? So the French stuff shouldn't be so alarmist. The 40 in Spain is different. Those folks and their tourists will cook. They really ought to think about some small window aircons.

That was 40 years ago. Now it's 150c according to the panic merchants.

Back in the 1980ies, if was forecast that if the CO2 emissions are not massively reduced, we would have ever rising temperatures, especially in the Arctic and in Europe. The forecasts were correct: It is happening. Heat "domes" lasting for weeks followed by heavy rains also lasting for weeks. Both diminishing agricultural production massively.

- More window Air Conditioners in Europe? Needs more electric power. A good part coming from Atomic Power Plants. Unfortunately, at some point they will have to be shut down, because rivers (needed for cooling purposes) will become too warm. What if 50% of Atomic Reactors in France (for example) will have to be shut down for this very reason?

We had it coming, we have seen it coming.

But I am quite sure, if temperatures reach 50 degrees in London by 2035, the last "climate sceptic" will realise that there is something true about the "climate hocus pocus".

I am not responsible, I have not contributed to these problems, if they exist at all, and nothing that I do could possibly have an effect on some place as large as the earth or it's vast oceans.

So stop picking on me and stop asking me to take responsibility, because I won't. Plastic is not harmful and I won't make any attempt to cut down on my use of it. Gas vehicles are not harmful and therefore I will make no attempt to drive one that consumes less gas, or to use a bicycle, or even a motorbike. I like gas guzzlers, so again I ask please leave me alone.

I set my AC to 22 °C during the summer.

49 minutes ago, spidermike007 said:

I am not responsible, I have not contributed to these problems, if they exist at all, and nothing that I do could possibly have an effect on some place as large as the earth or it's vast oceans.

So stop picking on me and stop asking me to take responsibility, because I won't. Plastic is not harmful and I won't make any attempt to cut down on my use of it. Gas vehicles are not harmful and therefore I will make no attempt to drive one that consumes less gas, or to use a bicycle, or even a motorbike. I like gas guzzlers, so again I ask please leave me alone.

I for one have not been "picking on you" personally. Most contributors here are rather "mature". It may no more be of concern as we are "old". But most of us have children.

All parents love their children. So is the gospel. Knowing what awaits our children is depressing.

They will wonder why we diden't do the things to keep this little blue planed pleasurably habitable. Our only home we will ever have. They will stand in front of our graves depositing flowers but murmering "why diden'd they do something about it whyle there was still time to do something about it"?

Do we love our children? Not really.

6 minutes ago, swissie said:

I for one have not been "picking on you" personally. Most contributors here are rather "mature". It may no more be of concern as we are "old". But most of us have children.

All parents love their children. So is the gospel. Knowing what awaits our children is depressing.

They will wonder why we diden't do the things to keep this little blue planed pleasurably habitable. Our only home we will ever have. They will stand in front of our graves depositing flowers but murmering "why diden'd they do something about it whyle there was still time to do something about it"?

Do we love our children? Not really.

Load of nonsense. The earth is 100 times safer than a century ago.

12 minutes ago, Rockyroad said:

Load of nonsense. The earth is 100 times safer than a century ago.

A comment worthy of no further comment.

8 minutes ago, swissie said:

A comment worthy of no further comment.

Deaths from natural disasters have fallen by 90 to 99%. Educate yourself.

32 minutes ago, Rockyroad said:

Deaths from natural disasters have fallen by 90 to 99%. Educate yourself.

When, where, why...educate us on this amazing post of your's.

1 hour ago, couchpotato said:

When, where, why...educate us on this amazing post of your's.

https://humanprogress.org/trends/a-safer-world/

2 hours ago, swissie said:

A comment worthy of no further comment.

Have the people of Europe discovered the benefits of air conditioning? It could cool them during those hot summers.

3 hours ago, Effective altruism said:

https://humanprogress.org/trends/a-safer-world/

Excellent graph. Crime per capita be down as well. Roads are the most dangerous thing now.

4 hours ago, Effective altruism said:

https://humanprogress.org/trends/a-safer-world/

That article does not demonstrate the world is 100 times safer than 100 years ago. For a start, it only considers natural disasters.

You argument succeeds in showing that people today are far less likely to die in floods, earthquakes or famines than they were a century ago. But that is not the same as proving that the world is "safer".

The article narrows the definition of safety until only one type of risk remains. Yes, modern societies are better at predicting storms, treating disease and rebuilding after disasters. But safety is about more than avoiding death from natural hazards. It also means asking whether we live under the shadow of nuclear weapons, cyberwarfare, terrorism, authoritarianism, economic shocks and other threats that barely existed, or existed on a far smaller scale, in 1926.

To point to falling disaster deaths and declare the world safer overall is rather like noting that a ship has better lifeboats while ignoring that it is now carrying explosives in the hold.

The argument also assumes that progress simply removes dangers, when in reality it often replaces old dangers with new ones. Wealthier societies can withstand many natural disasters better than ever before, but they are also more dependent on fragile global supply chains, digital infrastructure and complex technologies whose failure can have worldwide consequences. Events since 2020 demonstrate that; we ran out of face masks, then we ran out of computer chips, then we ran out of silicates, all of which had various effects on our safety. 100 years ago, we weren't dependent on urea and helium from Qatar to fertilise our crops and to enable our life saving MRI scanners.

Global averages further obscure the fact that many poorer countries remain highly vulnerable to conflict, displacement and environmental shocks. The real question is not whether humanity has become better at managing traditional hazards—it plainly has—but whether we should congratulate ourselves for becoming experts at surviving yesterday's threats while creating entirely new risks that previous generations never had to contemplate. You will find that is harder claim to prove, and you need more than a rather superficial analysis from a couple of Cato Fellows.

Its interesting to pick the year of 1924 as the starting point for when the world got "safer". In 1922, Alexander Fleming presented his research on lysozymes; he said that people at the time didn't recognise the importance of his discovery, the first anti-microbial proteins. That interest in anti-microbials lead him to recognising penicillin for what it was.

In 1924, you could say the world had entered the period of scientific anti-microbials. Those antibiotics improved our survival from previous killer infections. They made it possible for us to survive surgeries that, biologically, we have no right in surviving. Imagine returning to a world where you can longer survive heart surgery, a colorectal sectioning. Forget about transplant surgery. And that knee replacement you were looking forward to? Tough, get used to a walking stick like your grandad.

And that research into anti-microbials also kickstarted research into biological warfare. Ken Alibek was a scientist-colonel in the Soviet programme. He says he was tricked, as a medical doctor, into signing up, as he was told it was all about developing new cures for the plague. When actually it was about developing antibiotic weaponised strains of Yersinia pestis.

Antibiotics have also enabled livestock yields to increase, and allows us to raise chickens on a mixture of faeces and dead chickens. Does that KFC taste as good in 2026 as your remember it from 1976?

The age of antibiotics is under threat. There isn't really a pipeline for replacements, so we might be facing a cliff face.

There is a strong case that, despite remarkable improvements in health and disaster preparedness, the world is in some respects less safe than it was a century ago because modern civilisation has created entirely new categories of risk that are global, instantaneous and potentially catastrophic.

The clearest example is the advent of nuclear weapons. In 1924, no state possessed the ability to destroy entire cities in minutes, let alone threaten human civilisation itself. Today, thousands of nuclear warheads remain in existence, deployed on high-alert systems capable of being launched within minutes. We've come perilously close to disaster on several occasions, such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 incident in which Petrov correctly identified an apparent missile attack as a false alarm, arguably averting a potential nuclear exchange. A century ago, no comparable risk existed. Arguably, we are now in a post-MAD era, where world leaders are now more petulant; nuclear weapons are no longer something that keeps the bottle marked war closed, they are an enabler of violence (no one will touch me as I attack my neighbour etc, because I have nukes)/

I see that modern societies are also uniquely vulnerable because they depend upon highly complex and interconnected systems. I alluded to supply chain strains that have surfaced in the last 6 years. In 1926, a local power outage, banking failure or communications disruption was largely just that—local. Today, if you have a fault in a major undersea cable, disruption to satellite navigation systems, or a cyberattack on critical infrastructure can have cascading effects across multiple countries and sectors simultaneously. The 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal by the container ship Ever Given demonstrated how a single incident could disrupt global supply chains, delay billions of dollars of trade and affect industries worldwide. Such tightly coupled systems increase efficiency, but they also create vulnerabilities that previous generations simply did not face.

It took 2 years for the flu strain that caused the 1918 Pandemic to get to Europe. It took Sars-Cov-2 24 hours to establish a foothold, enabled by the same technology that you think makes us safer. A hundred years ago, humanity lacked the scientific capability to manipulate pathogens at the genetic level. Today, advances in molecular biology and gene-editing techniques offer enormous benefits for medicine, but they also raise the possibility of accidental releases from laboratories or the deliberate creation of more dangerous organisms. Literally you have bozos, locked in their California basements, biohacking themselves and biothreat agents. The experience of the COVID-19 illustrated how quickly a pathogen can overwhelm healthcare systems, disrupt economies and alter daily life worldwide.

There is a broader point about the nature of risk itself. Our great grandparents faced many dangers but these threats were generally localised and familiar. Today's world has reduced many traditional risks, yet it has introduced hazards that are transnational, technologically complex and capable of affecting hundreds of millions of people simultaneously.

We may be much less likely to die from a flood than our great-grandparents were, but we are also living in a civilisation where a computer error, a laboratory accident, a satellite failure or a misinterpreted military warning could have consequences on a scale that no one in 1926 had reason even to imagine. In that sense, humanity may have become safer from yesterday's dangers while becoming more exposed to risks of its own making.

I'll give you an example where being rich made you less safe' Polio. The 40 year US polio epidemic was a disease of the middle classes. Previously, polio was endemic, the entire population was exposed because we drank and bathed in water containing sh*t. If you made it out of early childhood, chances are you had developed innate immunity. In the 1910s-20s, middle class households in the US started getting clean running water. Fantastic, don't have to bathe in <deleted> anymore. An outbreak in the 1920s became an epidemic, and left thousands of mostly middle class kids and young people, like Roosevelt, cripples.

Then the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami; thousands of well off Westerners, killed in an instant, because they were wealthy enough to spend their Christmas holidays in a faraway tropical paradise. They could have stayed in northern Europe, which is fairly safe tectonically, doesn't really get extreme "big" weather, is quite benign. 100 years ago, there would have been no Swedes, Dutch, Brits, Australians, sunning themselves on a beach, only to be found as bloated, rotting corpses a few hours later.

9 hours ago, swissie said:

I for one have not been "picking on you" personally. Most contributors here are rather "mature". It may no more be of concern as we are "old". But most of us have children.

All parents love their children. So is the gospel. Knowing what awaits our children is depressing.

They will wonder why we diden't do the things to keep this little blue planed pleasurably habitable. Our only home we will ever have. They will stand in front of our graves depositing flowers but murmering "why diden'd they do something about it whyle there was still time to do something about it"?

Do we love our children? Not really.

I cannot possibly agree with you more, and sometimes it seems like many of our fellow earthlings are behaving as if we have seven alternate planets that we can simply shift to, if we degrade this one to the point where it's barely inhabitable.

This kind of behavior is especially apparent within the Republican Party these days, where it seems that even admitting that there are environmental issues is genuinely anti-Trump and showhow considered disloyal.

I love ripping off the bottle tops that they now attempt to attach to my water bottle. I do it just to spite them.

I just bought a 2.8 litre diesel pickup. No EV for me, foo.

The more they try to brainwash me with this doomsday garbage the more I will rebel. Sue me, tree huggers.

Well , we become 8 billions. All eager to have their share of comfort . That is what wasn't existing 30 years ago . 1.5 million Cinese and 1.5 millions Indians woke up asking for their share . Food , Energy et et . It will cost on Earth resources. Pollution from 8 billion people all burned in the air or discharged in the sea . What are we expecting ? Like nothing happened ? We 8 billion are to many and we are fu@ing it up ! ( Probably Covid wasn't enough strong to kill enough of us . Maybe some evolved transmitteable Ebola will do the job to get us down to 4-5 billions . Build yr self a comfortable Bunker 😉 ).

14 hours ago, JonnyF said:

I love ripping off the bottle tops that they now attempt to attach to my water bottle. I do it just to spite them.

I just bought a 2.8 litre diesel pickup. No EV for me, foo.

The more they try to brainwash me with this doomsday garbage the more I will rebel. Sue me, tree huggers.

Thailand is one of the few countries that is still able to get rid of these diesel vehicles as people all around the world with common sense are rejecting them.

17 hours ago, JonnyF said:

I love ripping off the bottle tops that they now attempt to attach to my water bottle. I do it just to spite them.

I just bought a 2.8 litre diesel pickup. No EV for me, foo.

The more they try to brainwash me with this doomsday garbage the more I will rebel. Sue me, tree huggers.

And yet you brought a Hilux like millions of other suckers. So you do just follow the herd.

How come you aren't driving around in a V8 Disco 2 on coilovers, lift kit, flying the flag etc. Its pure BNP-voting Solihull. Instead buying something designed by the sons of the Butchers of Nanking.

Oh, wait, fuel economy....

41? And no AC?

Should Le French break down and crack open their wealthy wallets used to pay for $$$$ Michelin French cuisine and install AC*?

Or continue to suffer and complain in French as only the French can do well.

Hmmmm.

I know which side I am on. 🤣

*Or paint their roofs white, install reflective barriers in the ceiling and cupolas in the roof to create an updraft and giant fans indoors like the Thais use when you sit down outside at a restaurant. You know. Change. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. What am I talking about. The French people change their traditional French style?!? No no no. 😅

6 hours ago, Roadsternut said:

And yet you brought a Hilux like millions of other suckers. So you do just follow the herd.

How come you aren't driving around in a V8 Disco 2 on coilovers, lift kit, flying the flag etc. Its pure BNP-voting Solihull. Instead buying something designed by the sons of the Butchers of Nanking.

Oh, wait, fuel economy....

Why?

Import tax.

Plus i can't get my motocross bikes in a Land Rover.

9 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

Thailand is one of the few countries that is still able to get rid of these diesel vehicles as people all around the world with common sense are rejecting them.

Rejecting them for EV's?

My farm in Issan is far better suited to a 4wd Diesel than some Chinese tuna can that sounds like a vacuum cleaner for 12 months before burning your house down.

Each to their own though.

5 hours ago, SiSePuede419 said:

41? And no AC?

Should Le French break down and crack open their wealthy wallets used to pay for $$$$ Michelin French cuisine and install AC*?

Or continue to suffer and complain in French as only the French can do well.

Hmmmm.

I know which side I am on. 🤣

*Or paint their roofs white, install reflective barriers in the ceiling and cupolas in the roof to create an updraft and giant fans indoors like the Thais use when you sit down outside at a restaurant. You know. Change. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. What am I talking about. The French people change their traditional French style?!? No no no. 😅

They seem to think they'll die from thermal shock if they use air conditioning, that a 15 degree F/ 7 degree C change from outside heat to airconditioned cooling will kill them. Funny? It doesn't seem to affect them when they leave their warm and toasty snowbound chalets and step outside into freezing temperature in the winter. How many of you guys here in Thailand think the aircon will cause you to die? "The prospect of American-style air conditioning makes some Europeans shudder. In France, the media often warn that cooling a room 7 degrees below the outside temperature can cause a phenomenon called 'heat shock', resulting in nausea, loss of consciousness, and even respiratory arrest. This would be news to Americans who expect indoor temperatures to drop to around 24 degrees Celsius, even when it is close to 38 degrees Celsius outside." https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/politics-and-global-warming-europe-air-conditioning-turns-out-right-AHWHvvrB

Instead of ranting, you should have a look at this map.

Most record-breaking temperature events occured in Northern Europe. The Southern part of Europe is used to high temperatures so modern buildings are more often equipped with aircon, and traditional housing has been designed to protect from heat for centuries.

It's completely different in more Northern parts of Europe. Housing has not been designed to protect from heat and most people have considered it was not worth investing in aircon to use it only a few weeks a year (usually when they are on holiday in Southern Europe).

Growing up we all used to jump off the railway bridge into the river when the sun came out.

Great times.

Of course the lib doomsday cult wants to ban these things and if anyone gets hurt it's because of global warming.

What a bunch of starmers.

17 hours ago, JonnyF said:

Why?

Import tax.

Plus i can't get my motocross bikes in a Land Rover.

Import tax isn't an option on Disco 2s. They stopped making them 22 years ago.

And even without import tax, a current Disco is a bit out of the price league of a cheapo Toyota. A new Disco Sport is 4.2 million. A tricked out Nippon pickup is 1.4 million at most. The price difference isn't due to import tax. Admit, you're too poor. But not too poor

Nothing to stop you buying Best of British Used. As a Brit, you know how to wield a set of spanners.

Plus plent of options to transport Motocross scooters with a Land Rover. Sounds like you are looking for an excuse not to support the British worker*, and instead fund Tokyo.

*British workers produce spare parts for these veritable beasts.

1.9 million for a mint classic Range Rover, with the 3.9 V8. These have rock solid mechanicals, growth in value is immense. Patriotic. Takes a man to drive them properly. Not spitting on the graves of British soldiers by buying Japanese.