Europe's Scorched Landscapes Seen from Space After Summer Heatwaves
Satellite images analyzed by BBC Verify reveal the devastating impact of Europe's record-breaking summer heatwaves, showing shrunken glaciers, wildfire scars, and dried-up rivers. The Danube has hit 30-year lows, exposing WWII warships and mammoth bones, while Alpine glaciers like the Rhône have retreated dramatically. Wildfires have burned over 90,000 hectares in France alone, and vegetation indices show widespread browning across the continent, raising concerns for agriculture and food production.
And if we continue this trend, then the future looks very dramatic for the Alps.
- delegate
My only practical contribution to fixing this issue is to upvote this article.. and write a message on HN.
I'm in Spain.
I really hope that after this summer, people of Europe will wake up and make fixing the climate their highest priority - at home, at work, in politics. We have very little time left, maybe a few years.
I can still see news articles everywhere blaming 'climate change' and 'CO2 emissions', pointing the finger at the oil companies and the likes.
But those 'bad' guys are not operating in a void - they supply the products which are in high demand from me and you and our families - our entire lifestyle is built around them. So what needs to change is our life styles, philosophy, economic order .. drastic changes.
Consumerism needs to go, tourism needs to go, advertising needs to go, travel and logistics needs to be reinvented, industrial production needs to drop by orders of magnitude, everything replaced with healthy and efficient alternatives.
How can this be done peacefully is beyond me, it probably can't.
We've had precedent during covid, when the whole world stopped because everyone was scared that they're going to die. It's not so different now.
- geremiiah
I remember in 2010, corporate propagandists were telling us that the effects of climate change won't be felt for a 100 years.
- snicky
I just came back from Hungary and Slovakia and it really caught my attention that the grass everywhere was just yellow. I wasn't sure if it's normal by this time of the year, but truely, both countries look like Greece now.
- bethekind
Climate change affects geographies unequally. Seems like Europe and the tropics have been the first to suffer, year after year, and with the UK losing that warm current in ~47 years, can't help but wonder what is on European minds.
- comrade1234
I think the cows are very stressed here in Switzerland. I make cheese every now and then - ricotta and paneer. It's simple. I buy the milk from a "milch-Automat" - farms around here (Zurich) have machines where you can buy a liter of raw milk from the farm for cheap. So, the milk I'm using is direct from the cows.
I made paneer a week ago. Normally I can cut it up and brown it and make the edges crispy. But for this batch I got far less cheese than normal and it was wet - I had to let the molded paneer dry out longer than normal. Then when I went to brown it the entire batch just melted into a gloopy mess - that just doesn't happen.
Reminded me of the omen.
- tills13
It's very disheartening as someone who enjoys recreational fishing that the river closures -- typically legally closed to fishing, but otherwise ethically closed -- are getting earlier and earlier. That is, if the rivers aren't straight up bone dry peak summer.
I'm pretty young, too, so I have this, if not worse than this, to look forward to for the majority of my life.
Not to mention here in BC we're up to three summers in a row where entire towns have burned down ... not a positive sign of things to come.
- Andr2Andr
Side by side images of exactly the same places one year apart would have been much better than the images in the article - combining left and right part from 2 years. Maybe it's just me, but the satellite images mostly were hard to read
- GoToRO
good thing is not climate change, that would be really bad...