this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
107 points (100.0% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
6844 readers
526 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The 2003 European heatwave has been estimated to have killed more than 70,000 people.
A lot of heat deaths are not obvious, people might die days later because of circulatory problems or many other symptoms (I remember that heat can cause kidney failure, for example).
These deaths can only later be identified as excess deaths from mortality statistics. Germany had a "small" heat wave in summer 2020, and it killed more people than Corona in this summer (not to be confounded with the following years).
BTW it is a question of time not if, but when the electric grid in an Eastern European or Mediterranean country fails and this can cause far more deaths - I speak of hundreds of thousands - if it hits people depending on air conditioning. A big power failure in Italy or Greece and people would be fried alive.
This is also why we need solar power, it is far better matched to that peak demand. (Plus it kills fossil electricity by undercutting it in cost, which is a nice-to-have since we are at war with fossil power now - either we kill it, or it will kill us).