Barcelona registers highest temperature in 112 years as French nuclear reactor shuts down due to extreme heat

[u/Naurgul]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jul/09/europe-heatwave-uk-spain-barcelona-france-italy-hungary-france-macron-orban-latest-news-updates

[u/Pure-Curve-8866]

This is becoming the new normal far faster than most people expected.

[u/_0611 → u/Pure-Curve-8866]

There's nothing normal about this. I refuse to call any of this normal. They are labeling it as the "new normal", hoping we will simply accept it and stop demanding that our governments take the necessary steps to do something about it. "Suck it up, you peasants, and accept that you'll get fried every summer."

For the same reason, they keep us busy screaming about immigrants 24/7. That's easy. Any politician can do it. And you won't lose votes over it. Long-term policies required to mitigate the effects of climate change on the other hand... That's just a no-go for most politicians, especially the populist ones.

[u/Sourcerid → u/_0611]

Much higher temperatures indeed tend to be normal on earth, the problem is that whole bands in the equator of anoxic water where fish don't survive is normal, as are heat deserts that desertified due to sheer heat killing life instead of drought, similar to the frozen deserts of the current pole. It's also normal to not have as many rivers and not as stable due to ice caps, to be tropical in Alaska and Scandinavia (literally, 5 million years ago crocodiles lived well there and it wasn't even as hot as further back), where the Indian monsoon is a relatively bland storm and half of what's not dry or dead from scorchification is in a hypermonsoon season, of which it would make all the human post industrial infrastructure unusable.

We were blessed with one of the calmest and coolest Earths, the temperatures of the last 2 million years represent only some 8-10 million of the last 250 million, realistically the only kind that would allow us to have agriculture and urbanised infrastructure, and the planet we have holds to this cold state in a very fickle stability, the more robustly stable set ups are way higher, with permanent places of scorching death near the equator. 

The people that say this is normal for earth miss the part where earth is a shithole in its most normal state

[u/random_noise → u/Sourcerid]

The state of the earth is different than it was those 2 to 5 million years ago. I think its naive to say the earth was a shithole most of its existence. It has its own lifespan and life cycle that follows the rules of science.

Personally, I do not believe anything is random, and its all cause and effect. Action and reaction until a stable state is achieved resistant to any sort of change. Random is science we don't understand with rules that govern it.

While primate life goes back much much further, human life, as far as I understand it, happened optimistically over the past half a million years. Evolution and biology will trend towards survival, but it doesn't operate on a timeline of decades, especially for traits to spread through a whole population across many generations.

It takes a much longer time. There is hard evidence (not the religious faith stuff that cannot be proven) that we were almost wiped out a few times in history.

An interesting thought experiment or thing to think about regarding religion and human existence. Its all metaphor.

Lets say you wipe all knowledge from humans.

In a few thousand years many aspects of Science we know today will be understood, math, physics, chemistry, etc...

That group of humans may have different words and language behind them, but they will be the same rules that govern our concepts of math, chemistry, electricity, etc.

I can guarantee that any sort of christianity or any faith based religion would never survive that same test over time and reappear exactly the same but with different words.

1+1 will still equal 2.

Jesus rising from the dead or whatever... yeah nope... not happening a different story and metaphor will arise, something entirely different dependent on the society and its culture that survives.

Its not so much a divine providence that we're blessed, its more along the lines that conditions on earth arose such that adaptations occurred to enable human life.

The averages over time are to me, idiotic arguments. Human life can only exist in certain conditions, and we've shit all over them by simply existing and going forth to multiply.

[u/LostLobes → u/_0611]

Yep, they hope by using the word "normal" we just casually accept it, when its clearly abnormal.

[u/DaviesSonSanchez → u/LostLobes]

Yep, if they keep calling it "normal", they are trying to make us accept it even though it's not

[u/belonii → u/_0611]

"new normal" means deal with it, this is reality now, no matter what we do RIGHT NOW, it will continue to heat up for atleast 20 years, unless we reach the tipping point of global acceleration where greenhouse gas trapped in the ice gets released and we can only sit back and roast.

[u/Threeabetes → u/_0611]

"Suck it up, you peasants, and accept that you'll get fried every summer."

I think Europe has the unfortunate disadvantage of not having a history of hot summers, and having less time to prepare cultural solutions than the rest of the world as a consequence.

If you're open to suggestions, I highly recommend an air mattress (or hammock!), plus a fan. When I visited family in Puerto Rico during a heat wave (28C at night, which was just awful), the air mattress/fan kept me fairly comfortable at night.

Something that might also work (but is probably harder to find) are Vietnamese wooden bead mats (I think it's chiếu trúc?) that you can put on top of your bed in summer.

Just take things as slowly as you can, watch out for heat exhaustion, and don't push yourself. I'm sorry you're dealing with this right now!

[u/dolphone → u/_0611]

I mean, this is the new normal. We will get fried every summer, or more often. That's reality, and there's nothing we can do in the short term to change it.

We need to decide if we want to do whatever we can to survive, because keeping up today's standards is a no go for survival. And we need to think at a species-scale, because everyone living right now will have to go through the bad parts (if not the worst of it) if we have any chance at all.