A Dyke A Broad #92 Weather Edition
In which climate change reduces Europe to cinders with a little help from Putin.
Hello from Paris!
Saturday I grabbed a Velib, and biked to the Bois de Vincennes, then walked around for a while through the wooded trails enjoying the exercise and a few cool moments among the chestnuts and pines before the next heatwave set in. Sunday it hit 92. Today and Tuesday are forecast at 103 F and 104 F (40 C. or so).
That’s nothing. In the South of France, wildfires have been burning out of control for days. Even if it’s due to finally dip under 100F, the region still faces two unbroken weeks of days over 90F.
In France, like in Italy, Portugal, Spain, our evening news is full of farmers staring at withered plants and dry creek beds, weary fire-fighters trying to put out the latest conflagration. In Spain and Portugal, hundreds of people have already died from the heat alone. Madrid just had its hottest day on record.
In a must-read thread, climate scientist @KarlMathiesen reports even Scotland (!) is running out of water.
I read a piece he co-authored last year about the political effects of climate change on the European Union. They predicted global warming will exacerbate gaps between countries, but also inside them between the rural and urban, those who can afford air-conditioning and those who can’t, who will live and who will die if they’re old or vulnerable. Or just go nuts.
The heat is literally maddening. Italian researchers found a strong link between psychiatric emergencies and daily temperature. Suicides doubled in Moscow during a heat wave in 2010. In Madrid, incidents of domestic violence and women being murdered by their partners jump when the temperature goes over 34 degrees [93F]. Hot nights bring climate insomnia.”
What was most troubling was that the dire predictions about fuel prices, hunger, inequality, and thirst were from before Russia’s attack on Ukraine which has already gone a long way towards sending energy prices skyrocketing and putting cooling out of reach for many, as well as creating food shortages. These are not just due to weather, but the theft and destruction of Ukrainian crops by Russia, an expert in artificial famines. In the genocide known as the Holodomor, Stalin killed between four and seven million in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
Putin wouldn’t shrink from a similar feat, or even an attempt to surpass it. Analyst Simon Tisdall writes in The Guardian that NATO nations (like France) who think they can somehow restrict the war’s damage primarily to Ukraine and its closest neighbors are completely delusional.
Enraged by Kyiv’s stubborn resistance and hell-bent on punishing his punishers, Putin’s aim is the immiseration of Europe.
By weaponising energy, food, refugees and information, Russia’s leader spreads the economic and political pain, creating wartime conditions for all. A long, cold, calamity-filled European winter of power shortages and turmoil looms. And like a coin-fed gas meter, the price of western leaders’ timidity and shortsightedness ticks upwards by the hour.
The environment is one of the war’s victim. One challenge for Western Europeans who have pledged to quit buying Russian fuel entirely, is not just to find replacement sources, but to do it without making global warming worse. In a July 14 interview, French President Emmanuel Macron was begging people to conserve energy. “Russia uses energy as a weapon of war…we have to return to a collective logic of restraint.” "La Russie utilise l'énergie comme une arme de guerre…on doit rentrer collectivement dans une logique de sobriété.”
That might help France, which only got 17 percent of their gas from Russia, much of the rest coming from Norway and Holland. France also relies heavily on nuclear power, and had already been rapidly expanding renewable energy resources like solar and wind as ways to transition away from fossil fuels.
But completely addicted to Russian fuel, Germany faces a much bigger shortfall.
At the same time, they are trying to phase out their nuclear reactors. Germany’s remaining three plants in operation, responsible for 10% or so of energy production, were scheduled to be closed later this year, and it’s not clear if the process can be reversed, even if there’s a political will for it.
Which means that the supposedly pro-environment Green Party, who had rejected nuclear power and its waste as too dangerous, finds itself advocating for the re-opening of coal plants. They are even reportedly re-considering fracking which pollutes groundwater in addition to creating yet more greenhouse gasses, something Germans shouldn’t sneer at as temperatures top 100F in Berlin.
Not that an American like me should talk. Efforts to rein in global warming in the U.S. have been totally derailed by Democratic West Virginia senator and fossil-fuel millionaire, Joe Manchin, who has refused to support any spending to curb the climate crisis, essentially killing Biden’s environmental policy.
The loss of Manchin’s swing vote in an evenly divided US senate means it’s now probable America will remain without legislation to cut planet-heating emissions for several more years, imperiling national and international climate goals and further escalating deadly wildfires, droughts, floods and heatwaves around the world.
“Given the US’s role as the leading all-time carbon polluter, it is difficult to see global action on climate without US leadership,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, who called Manchin “a modern-day villain, who drives a Maserati, lives on a yacht, courtesy of the coal industry, and is willing to see the world burn as long as it benefits his near-term investment portfolio”.
What can I say but yikes?
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,