Heat and Fires in Europe

[dseag2]

I saw today that over 1,000 people, mostly elderly, have perished in the heat. The UK is expecting the hottest day on record. ​

‘Just hell.’ 5 countries suffering in Europe’s heat wave​

‘Unprecedented’ lethal weather starts to engulf European nations.

A helicopter drops water on a wildfire near Bustelo, in the north of Portugal on July 16, 2022 | Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

BY ANTOANETA ROUSSI AND EDDY WAX
July 16, 2022 7:32 pm

As Europe feels the heat, politicians are sweating.
In the U.K., an emergency Cabinet meeting was called Saturday to discuss Britain’s first-ever “Extreme Red” heat warning. In France, one lawmaker described the sweltering weather as “hell.” In Portugal, the prime minister is monitoring dangerous forest fires.
With temperatures in Western Europe set to soar beyond 40 degrees Celsius this week, Southern Europe is already fighting the effects of more blistering summer heat, which scientists say is a result of the world’s changing climate.

Across the Mediterranean, firefighters have struggled to contain blazes, rivers have run dry and thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. So far, more than 230 people have died from heat-related effects in Spain and 238 in Portugal, according to local media reports.
The temperatures — the result of a slow-moving high-pressure area, bringing scorching air up from North Africa — are expected to continue this week and move north and eastward toward France, Germany, Belgium and the U.K.
Here are five countries which are feeling the effects of Europe’s heat wave.

Portugal​

The Portuguese government lowered the alert level a notch Sunday because of an improvement in the weather conditions that had seen hundreds of fires breaking out in recent days.
Nearly 250 new blazes were reported Friday and Saturday, most northeast of Porto, but on Sunday the government said that temperatures may drop by up to 8 degrees in coming days. The lowering of the alert level will allow farmers to harvest summer crops in the early morning and evening.
According to Reuters, the Portuguese health ministry said Saturday night that more than 650 people had died because of the heat in the preceding week, with most deaths occurring among the elderly. One person was dying every forty minutes, between July 7 and 13.

Lousã in the center of Portugal hit a record 46.3 degrees on Wednesday. The government has announced a red alert in 16 of the mainland’s 18 districts with more than a hundred municipalities at maximum risk of rural fires. Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa canceled a planned state visit to Mozambique in order to stay and monitor the fires.
Costa paid tribute to André Serra, a firefighting pilot who died Friday when his plane crashed while he was battling a blaze in Torre de Moncorvo.
“We are facing an almost unprecedented situation in meteorological terms,” Andre Fernandes, the national commander of civil protection, said Saturday.
Italy has sent Portugal two firefighting jets under the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism.

Spain​

A helicopter drops water on a raging wildfire in Spain’s Sierra de Mijas mountain range | Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images
Some 30 separate fires are raging across vast swathes of Spain, and temperatures have rocketed above 40 degrees in some places for several days already.
Around 360 people may have died between July 10 and July 15 due to the extreme heat, the Carlos III public health institute has estimated. The victims include a 60-year-old man who was working as a street cleaner for Madrid City Council, when he collapsed on Friday. His body temperature was 41.6 degrees when he was discovered.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will visit the Extremadura region on western Spain on Monday where people have been evacuated to escape the fires.
Blazes have already destroyed around 14,000 hectares of land across the country from Andalusia and Extremadura in the south and west, through the central regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, and in Murcia and the Valencia region to the east.
Almost half of the wooded area of Sierra de la Culebra, a mountain range in the northwest of Spain, has burned — making it the largest fire recorded in Spanish history, with areas in Figueruela de Arriba still alight.
Near the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, a popular tourist destination, around 2,300 people had to flee a wildfire which has spread in the Sierra de Mijas mountain range.
Added to the heat, a lack of rainfall means Spain’s reservoirs were at 44.4 percent of their total capacity this Wednesday — down from an average of 65.7 percent in this period in the last decade, according to authorities.

Italy​

Italy’s Po River has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall | Marco Sabadin/AFP via Getty Images
The Po River, Italy’s longest, has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall. Stretching from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea, the vital source of water is used for drinking, irrigation and hydroelectric power. In the Piedmont region of northern Italy, more than 170 municipalities have issued, or are planning to issue, ordinances on water consumption, meaning a ban on all use other than for food, domestic use and health care. Anyone caught using water for irrigation of public or private gardens, washing of courtyards or cars, could be fined up to €500.

Italy’s teetering government has declared a state of emergency across much of the north.
On Saturday, bishop Enrico Solmi held a mass on the banks of the river in respect of families personally affected. The procession ended with the blessing of the waters and a prayer for rain, which hasn’t been seen for more than 200 days.

France​

Evacuation centers were set up to help thousands of people forced to flee as wildfires raged in southwestern France | Gaizka Iroz/AFP via Getty Images
In France, more than 14,000 people have been evacuated from areas in the southwest of the country, as forest fires rage in the department of Gironde.
According to local media, three major fires are still active and almost 11,000 hectares of land had burned by Sunday, where a southern wind known as the mistral is fueling the spread. The meteorological department has put 15 departments on heat wave red alert from Brittany down the west coast, and another 51 departments on orange alert, from the northwest of France to the Côte d’Azur. “The situation is still very unfavorable,” the local prefecture of the Gironde said Sunday.
Temperatures were expected to hit 40 degrees in the northwest region of Brittany on Sunday.
Green French lawmaker Melanie Vogel tweeted soil surface temperature was measured at 59 degrees in Spain and 48 degrees in the south of France. “This is not just summer,” she wrote. “It is just hell and will pretty soon become just the end of human life if we continue with our climate inaction.”

U.K.​

Government officials in Britain have warned the country should brace itself for the hottest days in its history on Monday and Tuesday, with temperatures set to hit a record 40 degrees. The Meteorological Office issued the first ever red alert for exceptional heat, meaning healthy people, not just the vulnerable, could be susceptible to illness and death.
An emergency cabinet meeting — the second one on the issue — was held Saturday to discuss the heat wave. Cabinet minister Kit Malthouse said the U.K. was pushing to ensure it had the “right contingencies” in place, including “supporting schools, health and emergency services as well as major events and the UK’s transport networks.”
Met Office spokesman Grahame Madge urged people with vulnerable relatives or neighbours “to make sure they’re putting suitable measures in place … because if the forecast is as we think it will be in the red warning area, then people’s lives are at risk.”
Several actions have been proposed by government, including railway speed restrictions on some parts of the network to limit breakages and the closure of schools in the south of the country.
This article has been updated.

 

[Alligatorob]

Thanks for the post @dseag2 I am just catching up on the news and had not heard much about it. Sounds awful. I don't know much about wildfires in Europe, how unusual is this?

In my youth I worked for the Forest Service for a number of summer, and did some firefighting. So I know a little about the situation in the US West, but not Europe.

 

[dseag2]

Thanks for the post @dseag2 I am just catching up on the news and had not heard much about it. Sounds awful. I don't know much about wildfires in Europe, how unusual is this?

In my youth I worked for the Forest Service for a number of summer, and did some firefighting. So I know a little about the situation in the US West, but not Europe.

I think it is fairly rare, although I do remember fires in Greece a couple of years ago that caused evacuations. Only my limited knowledge, but I do believe the last major fires in Europe took place in 2018.

 

[AnnieA]

Industrial Age, Age of Information. Is Age of Extinction (or wishing you were dead) next?

 

[Paco Dennis]

I have been hearing about this. Thanks for the article. It scares me. The weather patterns are so extreme, and the world is losing it's ability to produce food. What a terrible clash as they combine. It feels like in the not to distant future we could be in for some real rough times....I HOPE not.

 

[Harry Le Hermit]

This is reminiscent of 2003, when 10s of thousands died in this region. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/08/02/heatwave.europe/

 

[AnnieA]

This is reminiscent of 2003, when 10s of thousands died in this region. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/08/02/heatwave.europe/

That was described as the worst weather disaster in Europe in centuries; this year has already broken record highs in some places.

 

[Harry Le Hermit]

That was described as the worst weather disaster in Europe in centuries; this year has already broken record highs in some places.

Hopefully, it will be of shorter duration this time, but a significant warning about the future, imo.

 

[Packerjohn]

I feel sorry for all those folks in Europe but I said it all here before: There are just too many people on this planet. Combine this fact with the fact that the globe is warming up due to our pollution and abuse of the environment, the situation is only going to get worse.

 

[Patricia]

I saw today that over 1,000 people, mostly elderly, have perished in the heat. The UK is expecting the hottest day on record. ​

‘Just hell.’ 5 countries suffering in Europe’s heat wave​

‘Unprecedented’ lethal weather starts to engulf European nations.

A helicopter drops water on a wildfire near Bustelo, in the north of Portugal on July 16, 2022 | Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

BY ANTOANETA ROUSSI AND EDDY WAX
July 16, 2022 7:32 pm

As Europe feels the heat, politicians are sweating.
In the U.K., an emergency Cabinet meeting was called Saturday to discuss Britain’s first-ever “Extreme Red” heat warning. In France, one lawmaker described the sweltering weather as “hell.” In Portugal, the prime minister is monitoring dangerous forest fires.
With temperatures in Western Europe set to soar beyond 40 degrees Celsius this week, Southern Europe is already fighting the effects of more blistering summer heat, which scientists say is a result of the world’s changing climate.

Across the Mediterranean, firefighters have struggled to contain blazes, rivers have run dry and thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. So far, more than 230 people have died from heat-related effects in Spain and 238 in Portugal, according to local media reports.
The temperatures — the result of a slow-moving high-pressure area, bringing scorching air up from North Africa — are expected to continue this week and move north and eastward toward France, Germany, Belgium and the U.K.
Here are five countries which are feeling the effects of Europe’s heat wave.

Portugal​

The Portuguese government lowered the alert level a notch Sunday because of an improvement in the weather conditions that had seen hundreds of fires breaking out in recent days.
Nearly 250 new blazes were reported Friday and Saturday, most northeast of Porto, but on Sunday the government said that temperatures may drop by up to 8 degrees in coming days. The lowering of the alert level will allow farmers to harvest summer crops in the early morning and evening.
According to Reuters, the Portuguese health ministry said Saturday night that more than 650 people had died because of the heat in the preceding week, with most deaths occurring among the elderly. One person was dying every forty minutes, between July 7 and 13.

Lousã in the center of Portugal hit a record 46.3 degrees on Wednesday. The government has announced a red alert in 16 of the mainland’s 18 districts with more than a hundred municipalities at maximum risk of rural fires. Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa canceled a planned state visit to Mozambique in order to stay and monitor the fires.
Costa paid tribute to André Serra, a firefighting pilot who died Friday when his plane crashed while he was battling a blaze in Torre de Moncorvo.
“We are facing an almost unprecedented situation in meteorological terms,” Andre Fernandes, the national commander of civil protection, said Saturday.
Italy has sent Portugal two firefighting jets under the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism.

Spain​

A helicopter drops water on a raging wildfire in Spain’s Sierra de Mijas mountain range | Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images
Some 30 separate fires are raging across vast swathes of Spain, and temperatures have rocketed above 40 degrees in some places for several days already.
Around 360 people may have died between July 10 and July 15 due to the extreme heat, the Carlos III public health institute has estimated. The victims include a 60-year-old man who was working as a street cleaner for Madrid City Council, when he collapsed on Friday. His body temperature was 41.6 degrees when he was discovered.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will visit the Extremadura region on western Spain on Monday where people have been evacuated to escape the fires.
Blazes have already destroyed around 14,000 hectares of land across the country from Andalusia and Extremadura in the south and west, through the central regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, and in Murcia and the Valencia region to the east.
Almost half of the wooded area of Sierra de la Culebra, a mountain range in the northwest of Spain, has burned — making it the largest fire recorded in Spanish history, with areas in Figueruela de Arriba still alight.
Near the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, a popular tourist destination, around 2,300 people had to flee a wildfire which has spread in the Sierra de Mijas mountain range.
Added to the heat, a lack of rainfall means Spain’s reservoirs were at 44.4 percent of their total capacity this Wednesday — down from an average of 65.7 percent in this period in the last decade, according to authorities.

Italy​

Italy’s Po River has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall | Marco Sabadin/AFP via Getty Images
The Po River, Italy’s longest, has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall. Stretching from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea, the vital source of water is used for drinking, irrigation and hydroelectric power. In the Piedmont region of northern Italy, more than 170 municipalities have issued, or are planning to issue, ordinances on water consumption, meaning a ban on all use other than for food, domestic use and health care. Anyone caught using water for irrigation of public or private gardens, washing of courtyards or cars, could be fined up to €500.

Italy’s teetering government has declared a state of emergency across much of the north.
On Saturday, bishop Enrico Solmi held a mass on the banks of the river in respect of families personally affected. The procession ended with the blessing of the waters and a prayer for rain, which hasn’t been seen for more than 200 days.

France​

Evacuation centers were set up to help thousands of people forced to flee as wildfires raged in southwestern France | Gaizka Iroz/AFP via Getty Images
In France, more than 14,000 people have been evacuated from areas in the southwest of the country, as forest fires rage in the department of Gironde.
According to local media, three major fires are still active and almost 11,000 hectares of land had burned by Sunday, where a southern wind known as the mistral is fueling the spread. The meteorological department has put 15 departments on heat wave red alert from Brittany down the west coast, and another 51 departments on orange alert, from the northwest of France to the Côte d’Azur. “The situation is still very unfavorable,” the local prefecture of the Gironde said Sunday.
Temperatures were expected to hit 40 degrees in the northwest region of Brittany on Sunday.
Green French lawmaker Melanie Vogel tweeted soil surface temperature was measured at 59 degrees in Spain and 48 degrees in the south of France. “This is not just summer,” she wrote. “It is just hell and will pretty soon become just the end of human life if we continue with our climate inaction.”

U.K.​

Government officials in Britain have warned the country should brace itself for the hottest days in its history on Monday and Tuesday, with temperatures set to hit a record 40 degrees. The Meteorological Office issued the first ever red alert for exceptional heat, meaning healthy people, not just the vulnerable, could be susceptible to illness and death.
An emergency cabinet meeting — the second one on the issue — was held Saturday to discuss the heat wave. Cabinet minister Kit Malthouse said the U.K. was pushing to ensure it had the “right contingencies” in place, including “supporting schools, health and emergency services as well as major events and the UK’s transport networks.”
Met Office spokesman Grahame Madge urged people with vulnerable relatives or neighbours “to make sure they’re putting suitable measures in place … because if the forecast is as we think it will be in the red warning area, then people’s lives are at risk.”
Several actions have been proposed by government, including railway speed restrictions on some parts of the network to limit breakages and the closure of schools in the south of the country.
This article has been updated.

I saw today that over 1,000 people, mostly elderly, have perished in the heat. The UK is expecting the hottest day on record. ​

‘Just hell.’ 5 countries suffering in Europe’s heat wave​

‘Unprecedented’ lethal weather starts to engulf European nations.

A helicopter drops water on a wildfire near Bustelo, in the north of Portugal on July 16, 2022 | Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

BY ANTOANETA ROUSSI AND EDDY WAX
July 16, 2022 7:32 pm

As Europe feels the heat, politicians are sweating.
In the U.K., an emergency Cabinet meeting was called Saturday to discuss Britain’s first-ever “Extreme Red” heat warning. In France, one lawmaker described the sweltering weather as “hell.” In Portugal, the prime minister is monitoring dangerous forest fires.
With temperatures in Western Europe set to soar beyond 40 degrees Celsius this week, Southern Europe is already fighting the effects of more blistering summer heat, which scientists say is a result of the world’s changing climate.

Across the Mediterranean, firefighters have struggled to contain blazes, rivers have run dry and thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. So far, more than 230 people have died from heat-related effects in Spain and 238 in Portugal, according to local media reports.
The temperatures — the result of a slow-moving high-pressure area, bringing scorching air up from North Africa — are expected to continue this week and move north and eastward toward France, Germany, Belgium and the U.K.
Here are five countries which are feeling the effects of Europe’s heat wave.

Portugal​

The Portuguese government lowered the alert level a notch Sunday because of an improvement in the weather conditions that had seen hundreds of fires breaking out in recent days.
Nearly 250 new blazes were reported Friday and Saturday, most northeast of Porto, but on Sunday the government said that temperatures may drop by up to 8 degrees in coming days. The lowering of the alert level will allow farmers to harvest summer crops in the early morning and evening.
According to Reuters, the Portuguese health ministry said Saturday night that more than 650 people had died because of the heat in the preceding week, with most deaths occurring among the elderly. One person was dying every forty minutes, between July 7 and 13.

Lousã in the center of Portugal hit a record 46.3 degrees on Wednesday. The government has announced a red alert in 16 of the mainland’s 18 districts with more than a hundred municipalities at maximum risk of rural fires. Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa canceled a planned state visit to Mozambique in order to stay and monitor the fires.
Costa paid tribute to André Serra, a firefighting pilot who died Friday when his plane crashed while he was battling a blaze in Torre de Moncorvo.
“We are facing an almost unprecedented situation in meteorological terms,” Andre Fernandes, the national commander of civil protection, said Saturday.
Italy has sent Portugal two firefighting jets under the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism.

Spain​

A helicopter drops water on a raging wildfire in Spain’s Sierra de Mijas mountain range | Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images
Some 30 separate fires are raging across vast swathes of Spain, and temperatures have rocketed above 40 degrees in some places for several days already.
Around 360 people may have died between July 10 and July 15 due to the extreme heat, the Carlos III public health institute has estimated. The victims include a 60-year-old man who was working as a street cleaner for Madrid City Council, when he collapsed on Friday. His body temperature was 41.6 degrees when he was discovered.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will visit the Extremadura region on western Spain on Monday where people have been evacuated to escape the fires.
Blazes have already destroyed around 14,000 hectares of land across the country from Andalusia and Extremadura in the south and west, through the central regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, and in Murcia and the Valencia region to the east.
Almost half of the wooded area of Sierra de la Culebra, a mountain range in the northwest of Spain, has burned — making it the largest fire recorded in Spanish history, with areas in Figueruela de Arriba still alight.
Near the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, a popular tourist destination, around 2,300 people had to flee a wildfire which has spread in the Sierra de Mijas mountain range.
Added to the heat, a lack of rainfall means Spain’s reservoirs were at 44.4 percent of their total capacity this Wednesday — down from an average of 65.7 percent in this period in the last decade, according to authorities.

Italy​

Italy’s Po River has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall | Marco Sabadin/AFP via Getty Images
The Po River, Italy’s longest, has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall. Stretching from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea, the vital source of water is used for drinking, irrigation and hydroelectric power. In the Piedmont region of northern Italy, more than 170 municipalities have issued, or are planning to issue, ordinances on water consumption, meaning a ban on all use other than for food, domestic use and health care. Anyone caught using water for irrigation of public or private gardens, washing of courtyards or cars, could be fined up to €500.

Italy’s teetering government has declared a state of emergency across much of the north.
On Saturday, bishop Enrico Solmi held a mass on the banks of the river in respect of families personally affected. The procession ended with the blessing of the waters and a prayer for rain, which hasn’t been seen for more than 200 days.

France​

Evacuation centers were set up to help thousands of people forced to flee as wildfires raged in southwestern France | Gaizka Iroz/AFP via Getty Images
In France, more than 14,000 people have been evacuated from areas in the southwest of the country, as forest fires rage in the department of Gironde.
According to local media, three major fires are still active and almost 11,000 hectares of land had burned by Sunday, where a southern wind known as the mistral is fueling the spread. The meteorological department has put 15 departments on heat wave red alert from Brittany down the west coast, and another 51 departments on orange alert, from the northwest of France to the Côte d’Azur. “The situation is still very unfavorable,” the local prefecture of the Gironde said Sunday.
Temperatures were expected to hit 40 degrees in the northwest region of Brittany on Sunday.
Green French lawmaker Melanie Vogel tweeted soil surface temperature was measured at 59 degrees in Spain and 48 degrees in the south of France. “This is not just summer,” she wrote. “It is just hell and will pretty soon become just the end of human life if we continue with our climate inaction.”

U.K.​

Government officials in Britain have warned the country should brace itself for the hottest days in its history on Monday and Tuesday, with temperatures set to hit a record 40 degrees. The Meteorological Office issued the first ever red alert for exceptional heat, meaning healthy people, not just the vulnerable, could be susceptible to illness and death.
An emergency cabinet meeting — the second one on the issue — was held Saturday to discuss the heat wave. Cabinet minister Kit Malthouse said the U.K. was pushing to ensure it had the “right contingencies” in place, including “supporting schools, health and emergency services as well as major events and the UK’s transport networks.”
Met Office spokesman Grahame Madge urged people with vulnerable relatives or neighbours “to make sure they’re putting suitable measures in place … because if the forecast is as we think it will be in the red warning area, then people’s lives are at risk.”
Several actions have been proposed by government, including railway speed restrictions on some parts of the network to limit breakages and the closure of schools in the south of the country.
This article has been updated.

Is it that the weather seems okay in Monaco? They seemed to do better than others during Covid. Maybe Monaco is a place to add to the list of places to consider moving. Just remember you said you might consider moving.

 

[Warrigal]

Welcome to the Pyrocene Age, the time of runaway fires.

As Wildfires Rage, the 'Pyrocene' Age Is Upon Us - Bloomberg

Welcome to the ‘Pyrocene,’ an Epoch of Runaway Fire​

Fire scholar Stephen J. Pyne proposes a pyrocentric view of the last 10,000 years — and warns that California’s wildfires herald a very combustible future.

By
Laura Bliss
27 August 2020

It isn’t just California that’s burning. This summer, (2020) smoke from massive wildfires in Siberia choked skies as far as Alaska and set new pollution records, in a second consecutive year of unprecedented blazes in the Arctic Circle. Rising temperatures, a loss of precipitation, and parched vegetation are hallmarks of climate change, scientists say, as are the increasingly extreme wildfires that result, from the arid Western U.S. to some of coldest places on Earth.

Earth is a uniquely fire planet, the only one that we know has had fire ever since it has had terrestrial vegetation. The manipulation of fire is also unique to humans — no other animal does that. It’s our ecological signature. We underwent a major acceleration when we began burning fossil fuels. When you add up all of the changes that we’re producing, it looks like we’re entering an ice age for fire. From sea level rise, to mass extinctions, to huge shifts in biogeography, add it up and it looks like we’re replacing the ice ages of the Pleistocene with a fire age that I’m calling the Pyrocene.

I wonder if coining this term — essentially a new unit of geologic time — risks shifting responsibility for climate change away from humans.

I think the Pyrocene puts it fully on us, because we’re the only creature that uses fire. The quest for fire was always to find things to burn and ways to burn it, and now we’ve got an unbounded amount of combustibles and ways to burn but no place for the effluent to go — it’s overloaded the atmosphere and oceans. So it doesn’t absolve us at all. It lays it right on us, because even climate history is now a subnarrative of a longer fire history, which sees us becoming a geologic force.

In what ways are we becoming a geologic force?

The old interpretation is that the last 10,000 or 12,000 years has been an interglacial period, and that we’re living in a short period of intense warming before heading to a new ice age. When I was in school, climatologists would say that winter was coming. Now I think that because of all the things we’re doing, winter is not coming. We’ve broken the cycle. For me, that’s part of a continuous narrative of humanity dealing with fire, and a couple hundred years ago coming onto a form of fuel and ways to combust it that put afterburners on the whole process.

Since the last glacial recession, we see a fire-wielding creature who meets a fire-receptive environment and the two begin interacting. Think about how much hunting and foraging are tied to fire, and most agriculture outside of flood plains. You had to grow stuff that you could burn to get the ecological effects of fire. That goes on and then we hit on fossil fuels, first in the form of coal. Then we developed machines to burn the coal. This changes the relationship to fire and through fire to everything we do.

Burning fossil fuels also changes our relationship to the landscape, right?

Correct. We have always had what I call “living landscapes,” which are the ones we live in, with growing stuff and dead stuff on the surface. The fires burning in California right now are fires in living landscapes. Then I offer the term “lithic landscape,” which shows a continuity between us burning in one setting and then another. These are the fossil landscapes buried in the past that we’re now burning in the present, with all kinds of strange interactions that we don’t understand.

 

[Beezer]

I think in the not too distant future, Canada will become the destination for Climate Refugees...when their countries are burning up...etc.

We'll have milder winters, and we have the geography to sustain more population.

 

[hollydolly]

I've been posting this on the weather thread all week... we're forecast for 104 today... it's 10.25 am and the temp is 85 deg f...

1000..people have died in Europe.. in France... just across the channel from us...this..

In Spain... this..on my Daughters' mountain land...

 

[Don M.]

And Then....when this brutal heat ends, and Winter arrives, much of Europe may be struggling to keep warm....due to this Ukraine war, and the lack of fuel supplies that would normally be coming from Russia.

 

[Medusa]

I saw today that over 1,000 people, mostly elderly, have perished in the heat. The UK is expecting the hottest day on record. ​

‘Just hell.’ 5 countries suffering in Europe’s heat wave​

‘Unprecedented’ lethal weather starts to engulf European nations.

A helicopter drops water on a wildfire near Bustelo, in the north of Portugal on July 16, 2022 | Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

BY ANTOANETA ROUSSI AND EDDY WAX
July 16, 2022 7:32 pm

As Europe feels the heat, politicians are sweating.
In the U.K., an emergency Cabinet meeting was called Saturday to discuss Britain’s first-ever “Extreme Red” heat warning. In France, one lawmaker described the sweltering weather as “hell.” In Portugal, the prime minister is monitoring dangerous forest fires.
With temperatures in Western Europe set to soar beyond 40 degrees Celsius this week, Southern Europe is already fighting the effects of more blistering summer heat, which scientists say is a result of the world’s changing climate.

Across the Mediterranean, firefighters have struggled to contain blazes, rivers have run dry and thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. So far, more than 230 people have died from heat-related effects in Spain and 238 in Portugal, according to local media reports.
The temperatures — the result of a slow-moving high-pressure area, bringing scorching air up from North Africa — are expected to continue this week and move north and eastward toward France, Germany, Belgium and the U.K.
Here are five countries which are feeling the effects of Europe’s heat wave.

Portugal​

The Portuguese government lowered the alert level a notch Sunday because of an improvement in the weather conditions that had seen hundreds of fires breaking out in recent days.
Nearly 250 new blazes were reported Friday and Saturday, most northeast of Porto, but on Sunday the government said that temperatures may drop by up to 8 degrees in coming days. The lowering of the alert level will allow farmers to harvest summer crops in the early morning and evening.
According to Reuters, the Portuguese health ministry said Saturday night that more than 650 people had died because of the heat in the preceding week, with most deaths occurring among the elderly. One person was dying every forty minutes, between July 7 and 13.

Lousã in the center of Portugal hit a record 46.3 degrees on Wednesday. The government has announced a red alert in 16 of the mainland’s 18 districts with more than a hundred municipalities at maximum risk of rural fires. Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa canceled a planned state visit to Mozambique in order to stay and monitor the fires.
Costa paid tribute to André Serra, a firefighting pilot who died Friday when his plane crashed while he was battling a blaze in Torre de Moncorvo.
“We are facing an almost unprecedented situation in meteorological terms,” Andre Fernandes, the national commander of civil protection, said Saturday.
Italy has sent Portugal two firefighting jets under the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism.

Spain​

A helicopter drops water on a raging wildfire in Spain’s Sierra de Mijas mountain range | Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images
Some 30 separate fires are raging across vast swathes of Spain, and temperatures have rocketed above 40 degrees in some places for several days already.
Around 360 people may have died between July 10 and July 15 due to the extreme heat, the Carlos III public health institute has estimated. The victims include a 60-year-old man who was working as a street cleaner for Madrid City Council, when he collapsed on Friday. His body temperature was 41.6 degrees when he was discovered.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will visit the Extremadura region on western Spain on Monday where people have been evacuated to escape the fires.
Blazes have already destroyed around 14,000 hectares of land across the country from Andalusia and Extremadura in the south and west, through the central regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, and in Murcia and the Valencia region to the east.
Almost half of the wooded area of Sierra de la Culebra, a mountain range in the northwest of Spain, has burned — making it the largest fire recorded in Spanish history, with areas in Figueruela de Arriba still alight.
Near the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, a popular tourist destination, around 2,300 people had to flee a wildfire which has spread in the Sierra de Mijas mountain range.
Added to the heat, a lack of rainfall means Spain’s reservoirs were at 44.4 percent of their total capacity this Wednesday — down from an average of 65.7 percent in this period in the last decade, according to authorities.

Italy​

Italy’s Po River has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall | Marco Sabadin/AFP via Getty Images
The Po River, Italy’s longest, has hit record low water levels after months without heavy rainfall. Stretching from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea, the vital source of water is used for drinking, irrigation and hydroelectric power. In the Piedmont region of northern Italy, more than 170 municipalities have issued, or are planning to issue, ordinances on water consumption, meaning a ban on all use other than for food, domestic use and health care. Anyone caught using water for irrigation of public or private gardens, washing of courtyards or cars, could be fined up to €500.

Italy’s teetering government has declared a state of emergency across much of the north.
On Saturday, bishop Enrico Solmi held a mass on the banks of the river in respect of families personally affected. The procession ended with the blessing of the waters and a prayer for rain, which hasn’t been seen for more than 200 days.

France​

Evacuation centers were set up to help thousands of people forced to flee as wildfires raged in southwestern France | Gaizka Iroz/AFP via Getty Images
In France, more than 14,000 people have been evacuated from areas in the southwest of the country, as forest fires rage in the department of Gironde.
According to local media, three major fires are still active and almost 11,000 hectares of land had burned by Sunday, where a southern wind known as the mistral is fueling the spread. The meteorological department has put 15 departments on heat wave red alert from Brittany down the west coast, and another 51 departments on orange alert, from the northwest of France to the Côte d’Azur. “The situation is still very unfavorable,” the local prefecture of the Gironde said Sunday.
Temperatures were expected to hit 40 degrees in the northwest region of Brittany on Sunday.
Green French lawmaker Melanie Vogel tweeted soil surface temperature was measured at 59 degrees in Spain and 48 degrees in the south of France. “This is not just summer,” she wrote. “It is just hell and will pretty soon become just the end of human life if we continue with our climate inaction.”

U.K.​

Government officials in Britain have warned the country should brace itself for the hottest days in its history on Monday and Tuesday, with temperatures set to hit a record 40 degrees. The Meteorological Office issued the first ever red alert for exceptional heat, meaning healthy people, not just the vulnerable, could be susceptible to illness and death.
An emergency cabinet meeting — the second one on the issue — was held Saturday to discuss the heat wave. Cabinet minister Kit Malthouse said the U.K. was pushing to ensure it had the “right contingencies” in place, including “supporting schools, health and emergency services as well as major events and the UK’s transport networks.”
Met Office spokesman Grahame Madge urged people with vulnerable relatives or neighbours “to make sure they’re putting suitable measures in place … because if the forecast is as we think it will be in the red warning area, then people’s lives are at risk.”
Several actions have been proposed by government, including railway speed restrictions on some parts of the network to limit breakages and the closure of schools in the south of the country.
This article has been updated.

My friend is in England and doing okay, (it's currently 36); sitting with his feet in a bowl of cold water. He's worried though, about his ex-wife in London as it's a bit hotter there (37) and she needs to go out today to visit her very elderly mother.

A lot of the people in England don't have air conditioning in their homes as they don't (haven't) need/ed it since the climate there is usually moderate, even in summer.

Yesterday, we were browsing Amazon together for small swamp coolers for his apartment and his house in London (for his ex-wife), but it's too late to do much for this current situation.

I'm concerned for him, but he's telling me he's fine so far. - It is worrying though, in general, for all the people suffering under it.

 

[Alligatorob]

the Pyrocene Age

I like that! Thanks for the link, the term is new to me.

I know a bit about our wildland fires in the US. Fire here is natural, always been a part of the ecosystem, plants and animals have evolved to live in and even take advantage of fire. Historically our fires were started naturally by lightening. We have a lot of dry lightening, thunderstorms without much if any rain. Frequent fires kept the accumulated fuel low, and the fires were relatively small and not superhot. Plants adapted to the fires either surviving them or reseeding quickly. The landscape was a patchwork of recently burned areas with grasses and smaller plants, with some less recently burned areas with trees.

When man first came on the scene here, the Native Americans, they adapted to the fires, even lighting them to improve hunting, farming and access. When Europeans arrived they considered fire bad and starting fighting them. The result was less fire, but build up of unburned fuel, living and dead vegetation. After 100 years or so of firefighting the fuel in many areas built up to very unnaturally high levels creating conditions for larger, hotter, and more dangerous fires. Also we built a lot of houses and buildings that burned along with the vegetation. The Yellowstone fires in 1988 were a classic and well documented example of the problem.

These new fires have been much more destructive, burning hot enough to kill many plants what would have survived the more natural fires, and of course destroying buildings and threatening human life. The new fires are not only hotter, but burn faster and are harder to control.

Finding a solution is hard, at first we tried let burn policies and starting "controlled" burns. Problem was these fires were not always controllable and the liability for damages then fell to whoever was not fighting them or starting the control burns.

I am not sure how much climate change has to do with this. Many of our worst fires have not been in the hottest driest years, they tend to happen in a dry summer following a wet winter. More fuel to burn. So while our fire situation here is not natural, it is for a variety of reasons.

No idea if the same thing is happening elsewhere in the world, but I suspect some of it is.

 

[Jules]

@hollydolly, looks like your daughter would have lost her home and land in that fire? It‘s fortunate that she moved back to England.

 

[Patricia]

I've been posting this on the weather thread all week... we're forecast for 104 today... it's 10.25 am and the temp is 85 deg f...

1000..people have died in Europe.. in France... just across the channel from us...this..

In Spain... this..on my Daughters' mountain land...

Awful

 

[Alligatorob]

we're forecast for 104 today... it's 10.25 am and the temp is 85 deg f...

Are you talking about the UK?? Never imagined it got that hot there.

Do many people have air conditioning in their homes and cars?

 

[heron]

My friend is in England and doing okay, (it's currently 36); sitting with his feet in a bowl of cold water. He's worried though, about his ex-wife in London as it's a bit hotter there (37) and she needs to go out today to visit her very elderly mother.

A lot of the people in England don't have air conditioning in their homes as they don't (haven't) need/ed it since the climate there is usually moderate, even in summer.

Yesterday, we were browsing Amazon together for small swamp coolers for his apartment and his house in London (for his ex-wife), but it's too late to do much for this current situation.

I'm concerned for him, but he's telling me he's fine so far. - It is worrying though, in general, for all the people suffering under it.

Swamp coolers were the standard here in New Mexico until recently. Word from my neighbors is that they are not all that effective when temps or humidity get very high. Also, if connected outside, they cycle all the air pollution into the house. Go carefully.

 

[Medusa]

Swamp coolers were the standard here in New Mexico until recently. Word from my neighbors is that they are not all that effective when temps or humidity get very high. Also, if connected outside, they cycle all the air pollution into the house. Go carefully.

Yes, we noticed that they are not as powerful as standard, outside-venting units, but his apartment is small and he actually can't have anything that will obstruct the view of the building from outside. I did notice there is a disenfectant solution available for the water wells, which seems a good idea. I agree though, best to shop carefully. It's helpful that he is very good about researching things before he buys them. I'm way impulsive about that sort of thing. :/ LOL
Thanks for the note.

 

[hollydolly]

My friend is in England and doing okay, (it's currently 36); sitting with his feet in a bowl of cold water. He's worried though, about his ex-wife in London as it's a bit hotter there (37) and she needs to go out today to visit her very elderly mother.

A lot of the people in England don't have air conditioning in their homes as they don't (haven't) need/ed it since the climate there is usually moderate, even in summer.

Yesterday, we were browsing Amazon together for small swamp coolers for his apartment and his house in London (for his ex-wife), but it's too late to do much for this current situation.

I'm concerned for him, but he's telling me he's fine so far. - It is worrying though, in general, for all the people suffering under it.

yes everyone is aware on this forum that most of us in England don't have AC..I've said it plenty times, it's extortionately expensive to buy and have installed .. ..currently it's 7.45pm.. and it's 89.2 deg f in my house despite the fans and the window blinds closed and windows open...

I've been out today it was 105 deg F while I was out... I don't mind it, , most people seem to be coping.. I'm going to post pics on the Photo thread.. and the 'What are you doing today'' thread, to show how people who have no gardens are keeping cool..

 

[heron]

Yes, we noticed that they are not as powerful as standard, outside-venting units, but his apartment is small and he actually can't have anything that will obstruct the view of the building from outside. I did notice there is a disenfectant solution available for the water wells, which seems a good idea. I agree though, best to shop carefully. It's helpful that he is very good about researching things before he buys them. I'm way impulsive about that sort of thing. :/ LOL
Thanks for the note.

Here in the States, there are single-room portable air conditioners available. They might be accessible in the U.K. (Shipping from USA is probably exorbitant!)

 

[OneEyedDiva]

I was astonished when I heard that statistic today! Over 1,000 deaths, so terrible! Also so sad that the firefighter lost his life when his plane crashed as he was battling the blaze. The pictures are terrifying and heartbreaking. Thank you for posting @dseag2

 

[J-Kat]

Wow, saw on Sky News on You Tube that there has been a “surge of fires” in London today with the London Fire brigade declaring a “major incident”. The video on You Tube shows mainly fires in residential areas. Hope all are safe.