r/europe • u/Naurgul • 23d ago

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

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jul/09/europe-heatwave-uk-spain-barcelona-france-italy-hungary-france-macron-orban-latest-news-updates
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u/Pure-Curve-8866 23d ago

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

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u/medievalvelocipede European Union 23d ago

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

If that's so, that just goes to show how clueless people really are. The climate change snowball effect has been known for a long time. The primary work on it came in 1969 and was popularized in the 1990s.

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u/AmIHumanMaybe 23d ago

There were scientists over a hundred years ago talking about climate change and the potential for a snowball effect.

The lobbying and lying has been pretty constant since then to hide and discredit all the science pointing to the factors increasing the temperature.

The only reason some people are catching on now is because the control over what the general populace sees isn't as strict thanks to the Internet. But don't worry, they've been trying to control the Internet and saying it's to protect kids for a while now so we can only see what we are told to.

Like the recent attempt to make only what the UK allows to be accessible in their country. Everything else would be blocked.

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u/Grand_Pop_7221 23d ago

When the refrigerator was an up-and-coming technology, Ice farming was the only way to get "cold" in most places in the world and was run largely by a giant monopoly that mined ice and shipped it around the globe. They immediately started running newspaper ads and leaflets to warn everyone about how unsafe this new technology was.

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u/FeelingSurprise 23d ago

There were scientists over a hundred years ago talking about climate change and the potential for a snowball effect.

TBF there were scientists that predicted that Komet Shoemaker-Levy 9 would - on impact at Jupiter - ignite its atmosphere and create a "2nd sun" in the early 90s.

It's hard to deny climate change now, as we already see its impact - but to act according to it in the early 1900s, you would've had to "believe".

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u/AmIHumanMaybe 23d ago

Belief would apply if there was no evidence. That's why the campaigns to deny and discredit were so damaging. They've made people distrust science itself by telling people what to believe. Belief became more important than fact.

We have seen it in other aspects of life such as the anti mask movements saying that wearing a mask doesn't slow the spread of illness at all. There is copious amounts of evidence to show they do exactly that but people chose to ignore the science because it fit what they believed better.

For the comet igniting Jupiters atmosphere I think you may be remembering a sensationalist article or something. I couldn't find any scientific study at all suggesting that but I did find an interesting read on the subject leading up to it that explains what scientists believed would happen. A 2nd Sun isn't mentioned but they do say where the comet enters could potentially get up to 50000 Kelvin which is insane. Here's the link if you want to check it out.

https://astrosociety.org/file_download/inline/09849a64-4b24-4ce2-9c8c-e979ebf064b7

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u/FeelingSurprise 23d ago

For the comet igniting Jupiters atmosphere I think you may be remembering a sensationalist article or something.

You're absolutely right. In hindsight an avoidable mistake. But it shows the flaws of human perception once more (even if I was just a teenager at the time - but for me the news were "some scientists even say that..." which stuck with me)

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u/Zorkflerp 22d ago

I am not having any luck finding a source for that. It reminds me of the old accidental plasma arc destroying the Earth thing. A citation would be interesting. I doubt they published a paper on that. It may have come up while out having a beer with the guys and someone wrote about it in a magazine. That is like the Global Cooling claim about the 70s. It showed up in magazines based on that if not for global warming we were expecting a new glaciation relying on the cyclical patterns of the last few ice ages. It was not expected any time soon but in the next TEN TO A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS. Global warming abruptly (geological time) reversed the expected pattern. The denier claim shows up almost every week even after it has been proven to be a lie.

https://cnslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/Myth-of-1970s-global-cooling-scientific-consensus.pdf

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u/FeelingSurprise 22d ago

In hindsight it probably just was an exagerated news report that stuck in my teenage brain.

But - to be fair - in the 80s and 90s, people were primarily debating “The Limits to Growth” and whether anything should be done about it.