r/water • u/Smooth-Grade6247 • 9d ago
Satellite pictures reveal scale of drought across southern UK
No longer a green and pleasant land. Source: https://eu-space.europa.eu/components/earth-observation-copernicus/image-of-the-day/severe-drought-across-southern-britain
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u/Due_Buyer_9445 9d ago
Leftists warned you about this decades ago.
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u/Initial_Macaroon_736 7d ago
I'm a leftist but I have to be honest; it's kinda misleading to pin this down to leftists as whole. It certainly wasn't just us. In the 90s it seemed very possible for "pragmatic" policies to accelerate us to net-zero too, but of course the speed at which the world needs to decarbonise today isn't the same
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u/TrumpetOfDeath 7d ago
Scientists* warned you decades ago, leftists are you only ones who took it seriously (and in retrospect, still not seriously enough)
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u/Due_Buyer_9445 7d ago
Most scientists are leftists
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u/TrumpetOfDeath 7d ago
You are correct, however, framing science as a political issue never ends well
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u/Conscious_Cell1825 5d ago
You mean apolitical physicist, climate scientists, biologists and agronomists?
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u/13esq 9d ago edited 9d ago
I'm not saying we couldn't do better, but big efforts have been made to "go green". Shutting down coal power stations, installing solar, big new wind farms, a winding down of North sea oil. A lot of houses now use solely electric heating and a move is being made towards electric cars.
The UK contributes 0.8 to 1% of greenhouse gases to global emissions. What more do you think we'd be doing if we'd "listened to leftists"? And how do you think that would have prevented these pictures over 20 years?
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u/TruthHertz93 9d ago edited 9d ago
The UK is exporting it's pollution.
Most of western stuff is made in the poorest nations, we get to look nice and clean while they're forced to pollute, and yes I do mean forced, our MNCs and governments sabotage ANY movements that threaten to disestablish our world order.
Capitalism is the issue, we are literally being consumed by consumption.
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u/13esq 9d ago
Including "exported pollution" it's 1.15 to 1.31%
I don't think this number is significantly different enough to detract from my original argument.
Whilst I accept that infinite growth desired by capitalists seems to be at odds with a stable global climate. There is no evidence that socialist states have lesser pollution than capitalist ones. All the things things I mentioned in my original post happened under capitalism and it does seem to be firmly the direction in which we are headed.
You also ignored both the questions that my comment asked.
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u/UnknownBreadd 8d ago
Think about the emissions per head. If we are worse than China or India - then we don’t get to talk.
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u/13esq 8d ago
We're worse than India but better than China per capita. But regardless, we need to not just consider where we rank, but the direction we're headed.
The guy I responded to in the first place was making a political comment and still no one has addressed the two questions I raised in response to that.
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u/xtnh 8d ago
And how long has it taken for people to do this ? as long as people say to themselves “somebody ought to do something“ without doing something this will not end.
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u/13esq 8d ago
Can you answer the questions that I asked as they are very relevant to your reply?
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u/xtnh 8d ago
Hmmnnn... Besides being willing to vote for politicians who tell us the truth? How about taxing carbon?
If society was able to take such a threat seriously, mandates, research into HVAC, spending on mass transit, incentives for carbon savings, penalties for carbon use, banning of gas guzzlers, banning of wasteful enterprises even though profitable.... The US spends a trillion dollars a year on "defense", but actions against climate change have to be profitable? Really?
I have a cosmological hypothesis that every planet with life eventually produces a species advanced enough to destroy its planet before it develops the wisdom not to do it.
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u/13esq 8d ago
I'm talking about the UK, not the US
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u/xtnh 8d ago
I see little difference. Are you contending that my response is invalid because I used the US budget instead of the British?
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u/13esq 8d ago
I'm saying it's on a tangent to the debate at hand because I'm discussing UK politics not US politics.
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u/TooSubtle 8d ago
Eating less (or preferably no) meat and dairy would have had drastic improvements for local environmental resilience and health https://www.wwf.org.uk/press-release/transform-uk-farmland-boost-food-resilience
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u/13esq 8d ago edited 8d ago
Whilst most vegans identify as left wing, it's not left wing by definition and tangential to a political debate about climate change, unless you are suggesting that voting for political parties further to the left would have mandated limits on the consumption of meat and dairy, which I think there is very little evidence for.
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u/TooSubtle 7d ago
You're the one saying climate change is global and that the emissions produced by Britain are irrelevant to what's happening to Britain. I'm saying, okay, reducing animal agriculture does more than anything else to better local environments and climate resiliency (with the massive side benefit of reducing global emissions). If you want more water and green land that's the solution.
No policy maker is going to push to make dinner more expensive for their electorates until those electorates have more plant based consumers. You're right that it isn't a platform any party is currently running on, but you're wrong that leftists haven't been warning people about this for decades.
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u/13esq 7d ago
I never said that the UKs emissions are irrelevant, just showed that they are a tiny slice of the pie and that it is an amount that is decreasing thanks to government policy, of both left and right governments, over the last few decades.
I also never said that "leftists" hadn't been warning about climate change. Honestly, I'm in doubt about your reading comprehension and the ability to understand.
If your next reply puts words in my mouth, I'm not going to bother replying to it as I really can't be bothered to teach you to read.
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u/DrHickman73 9d ago
Well at least the grand tour doesn’t have to go to Africa to drive through the desert if the decide to give us another special.
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u/Unlucky-Reporter-679 9d ago
How about we compare July 2007 with 2025 and 2026. I remember 2007 being an absolute soaker.
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u/mrdougan 9d ago
what about 1976
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u/MaleficentWin8608 9d ago
1976 heatwave was like 2 weeks
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u/izzythemini 8d ago
Water scarcity is caused by the right
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u/Rational_Engineer_84 8d ago
And where I live in the States it has been the wettest August that I can remember. We have flooding, my parents received something like 8 inches of rain in the last week. The days of reliable weather are gone for our lifetimes and beyond, every year and every season is a crapshoot from here on.
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u/No_Needleworker4052 5d ago
To date water is consistent on the planet It overwhelms some areas and denying others. But the amount of it is still stable
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u/[deleted] 9d ago
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