This is it - climate change is really beginning to bite

[Wowwee1234]

We know the climate is changing and it is us. This particular heat wave feels like the next step up after a winter of devastating storms.

YABU - It's just too hot
YANBU - This is the taste of things to come.

Such a shame that only 63% think you are being reasonable. This is like a train coming down the line and 1:3 of the peeps who voted think that’s fine, it’ll miss us. Well it hasn’t, and it’s only going to get a whole lot worse. People need to wake up and stop saying “it’s summer” cos summer was 20-24C, not 32C. 😞

The planet will still be here for a while, but we are living in a self made climate catastrophe where the rate of warming is far quicker than anything experienced in earth’s past!

There is no time for species to adapt, and the melting of the ice caps causing a huge release of fresh water could disrupt the Gulf Stream, making it much colder in the UK.

Elsewhere increased water scarcity and desertification could drive huge wave of migration to Europe, spark wars and conflict.

The human population has never been so large, so with less land suitable for harvests, famines will be more common!

We are seeing climate breakdown happening and yet there are those who falsely believe they and their children will ride it out!

If I had seen the speed of changing climate and predicted the lack of action I might have not had children. I worry about the legacy of climate change and what will happen to them because of the consequences of it!

Erm ... we have been growing grapes in this country (England) for well over a millennium. There are records of wine (and beer) making in monasteries all over the country since the 11th or 12th C

But for different reasons!

The Earth will eventually sort out the damage we have done to it. The systems work together to regulate it. It's called the Gaia hypothesis.

YABU
I'm guessing you were born after 2000?
Those of us that did the end of the 70s, 80s and 90s this is nothing. We had whole summers like this and it was bliss as a child with a paddling pool out for weeks in the garden.

Didn't we miss it last year, or certainly not for as long?

The climate has always changed over time. And pollution is a worsening problem. Absolutely yes reduce environmental pollution but it's not necessarily true that the climate is changing solely because of pollution.

About 35 years ago the 'tenet of the day' proclaimed that the holes in the ozone layer were caused by people opening their fridges and releasing too many CCFCs into the atmosphere.

That little nugget of 'truth' came from Dupont who were then forefront in producing CFC refridgeration.

The ozone holes over Australia narrowed of their own volition and rather than being burnt to death, people still seem to live there. The ozone layer just opened up some other holes to decant some of the man-made fumes into the cosmos.

Nope. In my 40's and whilst we've had summers and storms before, it seems more intense each year. Wildfires, floods, intense heat over and over again. If not here, somewhere in europe.

The ozone holes / thinning did not narrow of their own voilition ffs. There was an international treaty to ban cfc's and hcfc's which did the trick after about a decade.

Nobody remembers 1976? Surely it is entirely possible that the planet cycles and this is simply that!

Funny how climate change is not weather when its fucking freezing in June, but the minute we have a heat wave, then suddenly weather it’s important after all.

It will play out as it plays out. Nothing we can do now. I did a Biology degree decades ago and my take home was we are fucked and it was too late then. Definitely doesn't keep me awake worrying any more. The beauty of the balance of nature and the laws of science. We like to think we are in control. We're not. All that evolution but you can't control everything.

Like when Prof Brian Cox said the sun will die and everything humans ever achieved will be lost. Yet we think we have control and every answer

That's what I said and a poster called me "moronic"

But, they didn't explain WHY it was sometimes even hotter in the 60's, 70's than now?
No one has on this thread.
Conveniently ignored....

What do you mean? It's possible to have a lovely summer with the paddling pool out everyday with a temperature in the low 20s. Google tells me that the hottest summer (defined by mean temperature over June, July and August) was 1976. The only other years from your time frame that feature in the top 15 are 1995, 1997and 1983.

I'm actually really shocked to see so many people belittling the issue, burying their heads in the sand around it, climate change denying. It's trump-esque and I'm not sure why but I sorted of expected people to be slightly more educated on here.

We are changing how seasons work. Animals are unable to evolve or adapt quickly enough to manage these cycles so swaiths of wildlife will die. Eventually water levels will be so unpredictable/cyclic that a huge amount of land we currently use for agriculture and housing will spend weeks underwater, followed by cold, followed by droughts. We already can't make enough food, we already have issues with housing. We also have issues with water shortages which will only get worse.

The worst part is the planets reaction is upto 100 years behind what we are currently doing.

These will be the same people who think everybody should go in to the office because "it's good for mental health" ... "All WFH are slackers" ..."I bought The Sun, it said so and I can't think for myself". Because they can't see what thousands of commuters are doing to the planet.

It's so incredibly backwards I feel like these people are literally unreasonable and even when presented with facts, they just refuse to accept them. As if them not agreeing makes it so, as if this is an opinion piece.

In 1976 it was 32 degree plus.
I was there and it lasted months...

Correct. How long have most of us been here - 40, 50, 60-odd years? The planet is 4.6 billion years old and climate change has always been happening - without human interference. We need to learn to adapt to climate change as Richard Tice says as opposed to trying to act like King Knut Ed Milliband whose idea to reverse climate change will cost more that the £22bn Black Hole that Labour say they inherited. Better to concentrate on tackling pollution

@Petitchat there's already been a poster saying that 'old' people of 50-60 are fixed in their viewpoints. You're really not helping are you? Incidentally my mum was very much like this and I always said she had a 'read only memory'.

I was alive in 1976 too and I also had a padding pool in the early 80s but it wasn't over 30C.

In fact, I went to the Maldives in 2000 (last time I went abroad) for my honeymoon and it was 30/31 every day which was something I wasn't at all used to. Weirdly it's now only around 32C so not much change on the equator.

It was sometimes hotter in earlier decades - but it wasn't the sustained heat, and humid heat, we get now.

When it's humid, it's much harder to sweat - and if we're older we can't tolerate it. 33 degrees at 80% humidity is really dangerous.

This article from last year is really good on why humid heat is so dangerous and why we can't rely on aircon:

More than 1,300 Hajj pilgrims died this year when humidity and heat pushed past survivable limits. It’s just the start

It's clear from this thread that most people really haven't got their heads around what climate catastrophe is going to look like. It will not be linear. If the ocean currents system collapses and models are predicting it to happen from next year onwards, the world will be unrecognizable. People just don't understand risk and the risk of this happening is now huge. if the same level of risk was found to be present in aviation, all flights would be grounded instantly and the industry would die because the chances of passengers reaching their destination would be almost zero. Let that sink in. The ocean currents are going to collapse. It's just a matter of when.

We're fucked. Absolutely fucked. The time for making changes was back in the 1970s. Instead we took the other path and here we are.

I remember that the advice given was that in England you might just be able to grow grapes for white wine in a good year but not red wine. As for dessert grapes then forget it unless you've got a glasshouse. That's all changed.

On the other hand up to 90% of winegrowing areas in coastal and low-altitude regions of Spain, Italy, and Greece may become unsuitable for producing high-quality wine by the end of the century due to excessive drought and frequent heatwaves.

I do actually think adapting to are planning around climate change is the only option now.

But what dont get with the 'climate has always changed' response is that previous changes were much slower giving more time for species adapt and survive. They say the rapidness of this is 20 times faster than other changes. Is it that people don't believe this aspect if it, like we are underestimating how fast previous changes was or overestimating the speed of these changes?

I do actually think adapting to are planning around climate change is the only option now.

That's two of us then ...

I assumed this was sarcasm.