Floods in parts of Europe and extreme heat in parts of North America

[imitationleather]

All this talk of bunkers, laughable, just have a think about what it would actually mean to sustain your family in a bunker for many decades at the very least.

I hope they've at least been to Austria to pick Josef Fritzl's brain about it.

[Kankurette]

Wasn't Scotty from Marketing™ absolutely useless when Oz was on fire last year?

[Buelligan]

Just move up the hill, easy.

I live on a steep hill.  Maybe, even, a mountain.  Some twat tourist burnt all our trees - they used to cover the slopes - with a barbecue.  Hectares of the poor fucks, burned alive.  Now we have big, really big, fissures opening amongst the stumps, it's very hot and dry and the roots no longer hold the soil.  When the big rain comes and fuck, does it come, then we'll see if living on a hill is as good it's cracked up to be.  We might even find ourselves moving involuntarily on a tide of mud right off that hill.  But Jess Phillips reminds some pointless fucking actor of a strong working class woman so I'm not worrying too much, they've got our backs.

[BlodwynPig]

Was the tourist jailed for life? What a fucking genocidal cunt.

[Zetetic]

Australia ... I can't imagine the ecological damage that needs to be done before they act on it, probably 95% of the country uninhabitable

This does make me wonder how much of Australia is habitable, by the standards of the Australian government, now. (Less than 0.5% is given over to habitation and the like, I believe.)

(Edit: I think that you'd be looking at something 10x-20x higher in the UK, for context.)

[evilcommiedictator]

Wasn't Scotty from Marketing™ absolutely useless when Oz was on fire last year?

He was on holiday in Hawaii when it happened, begrudgingly came back, said "he doesn't hold a hose" and tried to shake hands with people in affected areas who told him to fuck off

This does make me wonder how much of Australia is habitable, by the standards of the Australian government, now. (Less than 0.5% is given over to habitation and the like, I believe.)

Over half the population is contained in the three biggest east coast cities. Given we think Aboriginal Australians were living in Australia for around 60,000 years, we think they reached a max population of 750,000. There's fuck all water.

[Buelligan]

Was the tourist jailed for life? What a fucking genocidal cunt.

Heh.  Nothing.  Only thing that happened was a man that runs a business somewhere in Spain making lorry pallets got the contract to remove the stumps[nb]the wood in the big trees is still good[/nb] - sold to people with the idea that leaving them would encourage termites, which will then destroy our homes.  Not even kidding.

[BlodwynPig]

Bring termites.  Bring death!

[Darles Chickens]

I've seen huge wildfires in Mallorca over the years - one totally destroyed a beautiful old forest in the mountains, reducing it to an ashen, charred wilderness.

Coincidentally, it's easier to get a license to develop property when the tree cover of an area is lower than a certain threshold. Now I'm not saying that these fires were started deliberately... although isn't it funny that a billionaire British property developer has recently bought up a whole load of former forest land in the island.

[steveh]

A relative of mine used to own a place halfway up a mountain in Languedoc. Every year when hunting season started the local hunters would set fires to drive out the animals so they were easier to shoot. One year we stayed there at this time and the chief fireman who owned the next place down spent the whole night sitting outside with a pair of binoculars trying to spot any fires being set so his crew could get there as soon as possible. The next day we watched a plane doing repeat runs dropping water on one area of the mountain opposite that was smouldering. It just seemed to be an annual thing which everyone accepted always happened.

[Buelligan]

That's pretty weird.  I live in the Languedoc.  I've never heard of chasseurs doing that, fire season doesn't normally coexist with hunting season, two different ends of the year.  Here, certainly where I know, the hunters literally plant fields of wheat or wildflowers specifically to encourage little birds and animals to convenient locations for slaughter[nb]How do I know this?  I know this because they leave special pretty posters alongside, saying stuff like Look at these fucking lovely wildflowers, man, we, the Chasse, planted them to sustain the natural fauna.  Like that deserves a fucking clap, the terrible mad fucking cunts.[/nb].  They fucking drive up into the hills in the dead of winter to leave piles of maize to keep creatures alive so's they can enjoy blasting holes in their bodies.  The one thing I have in common with them is that they want to keep the forests foresty, not burn them down alive.  They want the mountains to stay forested and wild, so's they can dress up and validate themselves as men in it, otherwise they'd have to move to America and learn a whole nother language.  I don't have that in common with them.

The people we get who set fires are tourists (who don't understand the world isn't safe and not to play with fire in a tinderbox because they don't live in a tinderbox), smokers and arsonists (we even had a fireperson one, I believe this is not unheard-of).  Maybe your bastards weren't chasseurs in the normal sense of hobby-psychopaths, maybe they were just decent capitalists exploiting a niche in the off piste meat-market.


_{Hobby-psychopath or decent capitalist, you decide}

[steveh]

This was well over forty years ago, around Olargues. The mountains around were more sparse anyway from what I remember - the area where my relative had his place was just scrub and old chestnut trees left over from before that industry had died and the villages had emptied. My mum continued to get annoyed at the hunters for several years after...

[Buelligan]

Being quite serious, fire here is seen with absolute terror, I cannot believe that anyone would get away with that kind of activity more than once or twice - the combination of winds and drought makes all these hills imperiled, villagers, vignerons, other hunters, just would not tolerate anyone doing this stuff.  You can't control it and, if it were a regular thing, where did all our trees come from, they take a long time to grow.  You can't regularly burn them down and still have trees and animals under them to kill next time.  I'm guessing maybe there was a bit of mistranslation - do you think that is possible?

[steveh]

I'll check with my parents in case I'm misremembering or conflating different things. My mum taught French and speaks it well so it's more likely I didn't understand something as a kid than she misunderstood.

[Greg Torso]

Some insane flooding in Zhengzhou, China. One third of their annual rainfall in one hour. Utter chaos. People trapped in the subway. Like a lake was dumped on the city.
Pictures from wife's wechat (not her pics, fortunately (for us) they are nowhere near)
(There were lots more but I'm phone posting and I hate it and anyway some of them had dead bodies in so fuck that)




Nightmare video of people up to their necks in shitty water on the metro

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0vJH7JpwdZ0

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KhT7_4L7xxI

They're reporting 12 dead but it's very likely to be much more going by the videos I saw

[BlodwynPig]

Now will they listen?!

[Petey Pate]

There's also been severe flooding in Wellington, New Zealand the past few days. So much for it being a safe haven for the apocalypse-fearing super-rich.

https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/national/nz-told-to-brace-for-more-slips-and-floods-as-weather-turns-again-bringing-heavy-rain/ar-AAMnkDn