Why Is Europe Burning?

llittlexsparkee about 5 hours ago 19 commentsRead Article on newyorker.com

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delichon•about 2 hours ago

Overall global fire emissions are on a downward trend.

https://bsky.app/profile/mparrington.bsky.social/post/3md3w3...

zkmon•about 2 hours ago

Two issues with the title. Global warming is not specific to Europe (it is "global"). And the "why" can't be meaningfully answered unless you specify how far you want to go along the cause-and-effect chain (Feynman on magnetism - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8).

Let me look at cause-and-effect chain for the past 100 years. It is the unbridled industrialisation, captial markets, business push, desire to dominate other countries, vote-bank democracies, exploitation of natural resources and so on. It is not something caused by single person or policy over past few years or decades.

noduerme•about 2 hours ago

That sounds like a lot of generic, hand-wavey hot takes about why the world is a mess that are taught in higher ed. Here's a take: The world was a mess when drought led to the collapse of the Mayan empire. It was a mess when foreign invasion (now known as mass migration) caused the end of the Roman empire.

You want to funnel the causes and effects into a political or economic framework that suits your ideology, but humans were great at ruining their polities and destroying their ecosystems long before industrialization or capitalism existed.

What industrialization and capitalism have done is to triple the life expectancy and quarter the infant mortality rate in most countries, as well as provide things like, idk, refrigeration and rapid transportation.

Doomers are getting closer and closer to outright Luddite ideas. But the practical consequences of doing away with modern capitalism or industry, the things which have led us to environmental danger, would be the mass extermination by starvation or violence of most of humanity. If that's cool with you, if that's what it takes to save us from capitalist driven climate change, then you're not really much of a humanist.

We are consigned to this road. We are the residue of many empires. We produce a lot of waste and heat and carbon. We also produce life-saving medications and air conditioning and the highest standard of living of any society in history, even in the poorest places in the world. The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet. And yet so many privileged people think that would be alright if it fixes their pet political issues. Think about how anti-human that actually is.

zkmon•5 minutes ago

> But the practical consequences of doing away with modern capitalism or industry, the things which have led us to environmental danger, would be the mass extermination by starvation or violence of most of humanity

These are just your imaginations and exaggerations, while the effects of climate changes are real and here to be seen. Even then, the effects of climate change are not going to be any lesser evil than the scenario you projected.

For example, globally food is already losing nutritional value upto 50% compared to the 60's and becoming toxic due to use of chemicals and modified rapid yield, thanks to your "progress" ideology. Chicken is grown in 40 days, rice crop yield time is reduced to half. Add climate change to this, you as a humanist are proposing people to eat plastic.

bluefirebrand•about 1 hour ago

> The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet

Maybe we could produce less plastic waste, like action figures and other toy junk?

Children need/benefit from having toys, sure, but do we need mountains of options, many of which are destined for the landfill without ever leaving their packaging?

There's a lot of areas we could cut back on excess without necessarily giving up the life saving medications, air conditioning and high standard of living. Maybe just maybe?

audunw•about 1 hour ago

We don’t need any of those things, but they’re in no way the source of our problems anyway, and eliminating them will do nothing of significance to solve the problems. So it’s pointless to discuss.

We have so many plastic toys because plastic is cheap. Plastic is cheap because the feedstocks fall out, practically for free, from the refining of fuel that we absolutely need for society to function at the scale that provides us a healthy and comfortable standard of living.

So the main problem we need to solve is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The rest will follow. When the economies of scale for oil and gas extraction go away, the balance will massively tip in the favour of renewable solutions.

We will still make lots of useless plastic toys though. But perhaps it’ll be bio plastics and perhaps the scale will diminish a bit as the price increases.

And I think they’ll end up in trash burning facilities with district heating rather than landfills. That’s already the trend in Northern Europe, and they’ve started importing trash to burn. Yeah, recycle first. But eventually everything degrades and should be burned.

wewewedxfgdf•about 2 hours ago

It's not climate change/global warming of course - that's a hoax, a con job and a scam - world leaders tell us so.

Robotbeat•about 2 hours ago

I kinda feel like this is mostly irrelevant. Europe can stop fossil fuel emissions entirely right now and it’d have very little effect. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t decarbonize! But… Europe needs to act. Global Warming is real, it’s happening, and it going to continue happening for decades regardless. So mitigations must be done. Improve fire fighting capabilities. Prepare for changing weather patterns and sea level rise. And yes, even install air conditioning to prevent the elderly and disabled from dying very preventable deaths. Letting the misfortunate die by under-resourcing climate mitigations isn’t going to help reduce climate change by any measurable degree.

herbst•1 minute ago

At least in Switzerland all of that is done and discussed publicly.

jryle70•about 2 hours ago

Any Europe leaders saying so? If not, and Europe agree climate change is the cause of the extreme weather, what have Europe done? Why does fire seem more extreme in Europe? Maybe Europe haven't done enough?

herbst•3 minutes ago

No, Europe in general is very aware of global warming and it's an active discussion how we move on with that.

expedition32•about 1 hour ago

Fire is not more extreme in Europe it's just that when half of Canada burns nobody notices. Europe is a very densely populated continent.

clipsy•about 2 hours ago

That's not fair, there are also a lot of world leaders that pay lip service to concern about global warming while defending corporate interests at all costs!

ls612•about 2 hours ago

In this particular case it was literally arson.

abound•about 2 hours ago

Arson may be the original source, as may campfires, downed power lines, sparks from powered tools, etc, but the fact that these fires grow much larger than in the past is because of climate change.

If it wasn't humans, it'd be lightning strikes and other natural phenomena.

goatlover•about 2 hours ago

World leaders paying back fossil fuel companies who helped them get elected.

gregdaniels421•about 2 hours ago

Indeed buddy, what is the point? the GP noted the corruption, you also have issue with corruption. The current admin(in the US) thinks corruption is legal.So why split hairs?

goatlover•about 2 hours ago

Just pointing out where the root of the denialism comes from. Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change in the 1970s because their scientists told them, and they covered it up, then later began a campaign to discredit climate science as it became obvious the Earth was warming.