2y ago

Insane heatwave grips southern Europe. Land surface temperature in some areas of Extremadura in Spain reached 60° Celsius!!

www.copernicus.eu

Scorching heatwave hits Spain | Copernicus

A severe heatwave is ongoing in Europe. Temperature records broken in France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain.

On 11 July 2023, the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in some areas of Extremadura (Spain) exceeded 60°C, as highlighted in this data visualisation derived from measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) instrument. The ongoing heatwave in Spain this week is resulting in a total of 13 autonomous communities, being at extreme risk (red alert), significant risk (orange alert), and risk (yellow alert) due to maximum temperatures that, in some cases, will exceed 40°C and reach a maximum of 43°C.

For reference, "in areas where vegetation is dense, the land surface temperature never rises above 35°C. The hottest land surface temperatures on Earth are in plant-free desert landscapes."

173 comments

The world is burning but no one gives a shit.. i don't think anyone will until literally their house is on fire.
- Not even then sometimes. In Germany, there was a small village buried under a mudslide from a flashflood that was a direct consequence of extreme weather patterns created by climate change. That same village overwhelmingly voted for conservative politicians that don't care about doing anything about climate change the very next year.
  
  For a while now, the question of democracy has been haunting the climate change issue. In the west, at least, it has shown itself ill-suited to the task of handling climate change. Of course, seriously proposing older forms of government would be dangerous and perhaps even insane. But the tension is there, and when we look back on all of this, democracy, or the form we have, is likely not going to look good.
- I've spent last August sitting in the shade listening to the music from the village parties mixed with the sound of the airplane engines flying over a nearby forest fire. It was bizarre. But then, what is one to do really? People who live around here aren't really the ones to blame. Can't really blame them for still wanting to have their village party. While I, who does give a shit, do little more than eating local and avoiding consumerism. Eating the rich might me more efficient, but there's none around here, we just have grapes and potato.
  
  The people with the real power to do anything are the people who will suffer the least. We're going off the rails on a crazy train.
- Northern India saw intense heatwaves just a few weeks back and now is being drowned. Indians are used to heatwaves and floods, but this year the intensity and scale both are frightening.
  
  This was the reason it changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change". More energy is being dumped into the weather system. This makes everything more extreme. The heating is almost incidental to it. The extra energy is the killer.
  
  That’s climate change to a tee, it’s more the usual pattern but taken to the extreme, and it’s only going to get worse each year.
- If I makes you feel any better, I give a shit.
- Your comment signals lighting government official's houses on fire nonstop so they start doing something
  
  you know what?
- "You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did" - All Eyes on Me
- And even then they will find a way to blame it on anything else and people will be saying houses have always burned.
When the crops are dead and the water dried up. Then people will start to take notice. But by then, it's already too late.
- Both of those progressing nicely in Spain, and the result was... a rise of the right, that has doubled down on destroying the aquifers in the south, the most affected region.
  So the worse things become, the more people turn a blind eye to the issue.
  
  Humans deserve to burn up
- The world is 70% water.
  Edit.
  Another fact, water is wet.
  Water is not going to dry up... What a weird comment, climate change means more rain, not less
  
  almost all of it not directly usable
  
  Stupidest fucking comment I've ever read in my life. Water doesn't dry up? Have you never seen a dry river bed? Or how about salt flats?
  This is why we are doomed to die to climate change. People like you who are completely unwilling to even begin to understand the thing they refuse to accept.
  
  Lmao, please drink nothing but sea water for a few days then get back to me
Talking about surface temperature is pretty misleading.
- Ah, I see you're one of these people that will dismiss such claim because of "surface temperature". Well, as someone that:
  currently lives in an area with a long-lasting heatwave
  can't levitate above the ground
  need to breath air
  I can tell you that surface temperature, even if they make "bigger numbers", are extremely relevant to the degradation of the situation, no matter how misleading you think it is. The ground didn't "suddenly" get hotter with everything else staying the same; and everything getting hotter also have dire consequences. It's just a metric, it might not be the best one, but people should stop dismissing these, because it's by having a hot frying pan that the content gets cooked.
  
  Nope, not at all. You completely misunderstood my point.
  I'm not saying the ground suddenly got hotter and everything else stayed the same. In this case, it's just a metric that's quoted because it has a misleading high value especially by people who are just scrolling through.
  It's click bait.
  
  But we don't live directly on top of the ground; we live 5 or 6 feet above the ground, and thus air temperature is much more important to understanding heat impacts to human health and well-being.
  Here's an article talking about the types of temperature measurements. If LST is high, odds are air temperature will be high to, and air temp is much more relevant to our life as a human, whether we're going to die, and easy to compare to how hot it is locally.
- Yeah, it's confusing and unhelpful. People should standardize on reporting air temperature unless there's a very specific and compelling reason not to.
  
  Yep. Unless you're trying to cook eggs on the ground, then you can start letting people know when it finally gets hot enough to do that.
- Extremadura is not a plant-free desert landscape. Not yet, anyway.
  
  It's a straw-bale filled cube desert, a monoculture hell. The Spanish are really good at creating these.
- If it's explicitly and specifically noted like in this post, it's fine. It even names airtemps further down.
  
  It's not fine if it's what's used in the title. It's fine to include it as part of the post, but only including the surface temp in the title is misleading.
- Because dogs can't read the news, right?
- Measurement probably taken from asphalt road at 3pm lmao
I know this is a world community but I'm just going to throw the conversion out there for anyone who needs it to understand how hot that is, that is 140F.
- I feel like my toaster oven doesn’t get much hotter than that when I set it to reheat leftovers.
  We are truly fucked…
- The hottest I've had to endure is somewhere around 112°F with lots of humidity. I would (figuratively) die in 140°F weather.
I'm on vacation in a place that is regularly 20c on summer, it's 35c right now. Real sad since I wanted to escape the 40c city
Get ready for new eco bans, we will have to stop using plastic milk containers and factories will produce more junk to put the milk in to. Like with the plastic straws and bags, good idea on papper, poor execution irl.
- Maybe you're being funny, maybe not, but plastic bag pollution and straws etc are not the driving force behind temperature swings like this. Atmospheric gasses such as CO2, CH4, etc are the issue that causes climate change, and thus the instability accompanying things like greater peak temps, more disasters, etc.
  The bags and straws discussion is about environmental care. Eg not letting sea turtles eat plastic bags because they think they are jelly fish.
  
  What iam saying that the average person will get the short stick, and the big polluters like factories will not see any new anti pollution regulations. Like do we need 100s of key chain factories, we lived without useless plastic trinkets before, ban those things because thry have no use.
- Yeah indeed, the paper bags are more polluting to produce than its plastic equivalent. The many problem with plastics is that it does more damage when it ends up in nature, but it is recyclable though.
  We should stop blaming the people/consumers and start blaming the large corporations that dump PFAS in our drink water supply, like they did here in The Netherlands and Belgium. That does lore harm than the plastic straws ever did
It's only gonna get worse as global warming takes hold.
Soon, Britain, Ireland and the Nordics are going to be prime summer holiday destinations because Southern Europe will be too damn hot to even inhabit.
- It's going to be absolute hell because homes in these countries are designed to retain heat, have no air conditioning, and typically are built with large windows to let as much light in as possible.
  
  Heat pumps for everyone until they are underwater from rising oceans. I thought the jet stream was going to make it much colder in the isles so maybe it'll balance out lol.
- How much more hold do you want?
Smoke em if you got em.
- There's probably a handy wildfire around to light 'em!
If we are starting to get alarmed over surface temps, here's my patio furniture temp right now in Arizona
Air temp is currently 43.8C
- I always hate these comments, and this is a whole new level.
  Acclimatization or acclimatisation (also called acclimation or acclimatation) is the process in which an individual organism adjusts to a change in its environment (such as a change in altitude, temperature, humidity, photoperiod, or pH), allowing it to maintain fitness across a range of environmental conditions.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclimatization
  TL;DR: You'd probably freeze to death if the local temperature suddenly became -30C.
  
  I'm not sure if the OP edited it or not, but it sounds like you're assuming they're saying something more than they are. They never said "we're all going to die". They're just pointing out that it's also a very high surface temp in Arizona, which is nearly exactly the surface temp the title states in Spain.
That's devastatingly hot.
Climate change deniers are like
Man, that's intense.

173 comments