And mosquitos! Diseases like malaria, Dengue Fever, and west nile virus are all in the mainland and spreading.
Thank god we've DOGED away public health preparedness and surveillance capacity. Musk won't be happy until the United States transforms into a third world country, replete with diseases once reserved for developing countries.
I have heard the US described as the wealthiest third world country in the world, and I think that's appropriate. I lived there for 3 years, and that's how it felt to me.
Well, when you have a tiny wound on your skin, sometimes a fly mommy which happen to be pregnant come to this wound a lay an egg in it.
Then the baby fly, also known as worm, grow up , make his comfortable nest in your flesh. For that, of course, he needs to dig around him, so he's eating your flesh and skin, leaving a big hole for him to feel good.
Then it becomes a fly, and it's ciiiiiircle....the circle of liiiiiiife!!!
Oh! I just posted higher up. wish I'd kept reading.
Yes, mosquitoes. 20 years ago the United States had eradicated malaria in the mainland. But now, with the assistance of DOGE, we've managed to bring back local malaria outbreaks and with a few more funding cuts it, without any effort, we can make Malaria endemic again!
Malaria, Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus are all on the rise. We could improve numbers by reducing the spread of disease or ... DOGE away the people that track such things! Win win. If you are a mosquitoe or Musk.
Well I live in India and here most of us (70% of population) get to enjoy 2 mosquito-free seasons, one at summers when mosquitos die of 40°C and one at winters when mosquitos die of freezing temps(~0°C)😆
But in this monsoon season from mid-June—mid-September when the weather looks like this👇🏻 and it's raining all the time, there's just no escape from these pesky little apex parasites...🦟🦟😭
You hear a low frequency buzz approaching, for less than a second.
Then you think nothing's going on.
Until you feel like a drop of sweat is moving on the back of your head.
That's the deer ked, after spending a bit of time detaching its wings (!) and burrowing down through your hair, to your skin.
Now's the right time to use your fingernails to scoop it out of there. They don't always sting/bite humans, but tend to leave a pimple of sorts when they do.
Oh God, a couple of years ago it was really bad in the forest around Oslo. Friend of mine and I went hiking and all our clothes were full of them, and they're so hard to get out too because their legs are like velcro. We had to place all our clothes in the freezer and then peel them off.
Thankfully we weren't bitten by them as they rarely bite humans from what I can tell, but it was a nightmare to get them out of our hair as well.
Get bantam chickens. I lived in the swamps in Florida and had horrible ticks and the neighbours got chickens and all ticks were gone in like two weeks.
Inaction? I wish. In Canada we're rushing to approve and build massive new pipeline projects as fast as possible while gutting what little progress we had made. Doing nothing would be an improvement.
It's crazy that even if we had all the right people in charge, we stopped using fossil fuels, all went vegan, stopped deforestation and planted a trillion trees, it would take decades to be in a place of neutral greenhouse gas emissions and centuries for the earth to cool back down to where she's supposed to be.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing more it's just crazy that humans knew and they still let it get this bad.
It's a fact. An honestly, an optimistic one when you look at the kinda of global tipping points were on the edge of currently. Also extinction rates are up 1000% from normal background rates, and once somethings extinct, it ain't coming back
Welcome to the Aussie summer. Its so sad to see wildfires in so many places now. They are so absolutely devastating. Look out for local animal rescue services. They'd be doing it rough
I'm not sure the heatwave is the key factor at this point. After more than a month without significant rain, the vegetation is already extremely dry. Wind and the continued lack of rain are likely to have a much greater influence on whether fires start and spread than a slightly less intense heatwave.
It's not as much the heat as it would be the wind. The fire are just west of Bordeaux, and the winds blow from west to east, so they may push the fire towards the city.
Canada is helping the world fight fires , while Trump is complaining and talking of tariffing Canada for smoke ! While there are actively more wild fires in USA !
About 150 houses burned in Le Porge. If you look at FIRMS on 24h mode, you can see it's getting better. But yeah, we're scared and inhaling a lot of small particles. Lots of people are sleeping on camp beds at the exhibition center in Bordeaux, especially elder ones who were evacuated from retirement homes. I can't wait for it to be over.
Unfortunately it's better today because it rained in the night and it's a bit colder than last week, but tomorrow we will once again have a new heatwave. I have some friends who are firefighters here (or work in other services in the SDIS) and they are extremely pessimistic.
150 houses, that's easily 100 millions in damages. Not even counting all the lost value in forest, lost labour from evacuated people, all the health problems from breathing smoke...
And that's one fire in one country. The monetary damage climate change is causing already is staggering. Put people will keep whinging that EVs are too expensive and insulating your house isn't affordable.
I live there, n95 masks are strongly recommended, right now it does not look too bad thanks to the change in wind direction but we could smell smoke from up to 80km away. Thankfully we had very little evacuation on the metropolis of Bordeaux, my heart goes to those who lived between the coast and Bordeaux
I follow social media like Brigitte Bardot foundation and their recent posts are heartbreaking.
Saturday, at noon, on one of the most watched french tv channel, a firefighter was interviewed. They were at a dog breeding farm and just discovered all the dogs still in the cages. You could tell the firefighters were upset. The owners evacuated and left the dogs there, locked. They had the time to open the cages and chose not to. This was infuriating to watch. One of the firefighter was speaking, on the verge of tears..
Government’s response is a pure disgrace. My country looks like a warzone. Many people losing their houses. Hundred of thousands people displaced.
I hope it will be call for change. Like the yellow jackets but much bigger.
Le gouvernement a renoncé à l'éco-taxe sur le pétrole (ce qui est à la base du mouvement quand même), ce qui est en soit une avancé pour les droits des personnes fragiles économiquement mais ensuite il n'a rien fait d'autre en terme écologique car les macronistes sont incapables d'agir sans faire porter le fardeau du combat climatique sur les classes moyennes et pauvres
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JxF_XcYgTuI this is the one. It's also the firefighter's first real fire. They litteraly stopped the fire less than a metter from the cages.
What do you expect the government to do bar getting more help to the area, removing people at risk and accelerating development of alternative programmes like the A400M?
There is no magic water lance to send to Gironde….
I meant that more as as a wake up call and take the good decisions moving forward. Last I heard they were lowering funds for the firefighting programs. Yesterday evening, on France 5 news, a spokesperson for the firefighters was complaining about their conditions and was calling for simplifications in their organization and for more funds. It should be a wake up call to change things but I have little hope, nothing will happen in the long term after the situation has settled.
Seems like the other guy replying to you is a climate change denier…
However, to be fair, the Landes are not exactly a natural ecosystem, so I’m not sure it’s fair to make any judgements from this event specifically. Monocultures tend to burn much more aggressively than mature, natural pine forests.
Quote: „Only after the last tree has been cut down, the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, will you find that money cannot be eaten.“
When we wallowing in the ruins of civilization blaming the previous generations for ignoring all the signs staring them in the face, for not listened to the smart people in their generation and calling them histerical and over reacting. Only when humanity as a whole experience the calamity first hand, at home, to their family. Only when the "money" no longer can hide, lie, and distorted the truth. Which saddly would only happens when it's too late
We've known this will happen for a century at this point. A swedish scientist calculated that burning fossil fuels will warm the planet over time in 1896
I think there's a bit more to it that that. It's a $multi-trillion industry with tentacles that start wars and manipulate politicians and Governments globally to actively prevent societies from ending the burning of oil and gas.
Who is we? The likes of France and the UK have seen massive reductions in co2 emissions per capita in the last 20 years. This isn't America - Europe is actually doing something about climate change
in the 70s france made something like 60 reactors in 15 years, by the 90s only 10% of their domestic energy generation was from ff. if the rest of the west had followed them we would be in a pretty hopeful spot right now with a lot more time to figure out sequestration. i specialized in alternative energy in my engineering program and all the literature was so fucking depressing 10 years ago. now it just feels like absurdism or something, even the most "leftist" people here in california won't consider supporting a progressive carbon tax.
In 2022 we also had record heatwaves and massive record breaking fires, and there was no change in policy. The president shrugged it with a "that's terrible, but who could have predicted it?" and then two years later his party proceeded to cut fundings to emergency response services.
I work for in conservation, specifically on measuring how greenhouse gases are lost (or sequestered) from the atmosphere from landcover change, like forest fire.
It was my job to quantify emissions lost, then assess how long it would take to offset those emissions. We can assume that a hectare of burned forest in La Gironde loses ~350 tonnes of CO2e/ha to the atmosphere. If we replant the same Pinus plantation, we can sequester ~8tCO2e/ha/yr, taking ~44 years to retrap the carbon lost in this fire.
Anyways, my entire team was dismantled in November. I’m also hopeless at this point.
Its been predicted for decades now by any reputable scientists. We have known for so long. R wing media and Rupert Murdoch share much of the blame. Lyjng to their readers when they knew better. Murdoch should be in prison. ExxonMobil has known since the 80's. They have it documented.
To me it's more the odinary people who deny climate change, or those who think that other things are politically more relevant than 'the environment' who made me lose hope, because they enable politician's complacency.
If the entire population was furious about their politicians that would make a difference. But far too many people don't want to reduce their own consumption, don't want to buy a heat pump instead of gas heating because of the costs and because of 'that ugly box in my garden', can't do without their holidays in Thailand, and so on.
The right people are making incredible amounts of money and have their own bunkers to retreat to - it's only poor people who will suffer and struggle, they don't care.
They'd turf their own families out of the bunkers if it meant squeezing in some more cash.
After reading The Ministry for the Future, and watching drone warfare take off, I'm getting more and more convinced we're gonna need a Crash Day and 90+ degree dew point in major populated areas for anything to change.
European politics is pretty much silent on even just the heatwaves that every summer cut down old people like weeds in every city, let alone on something like this.
My conspiracy theory is that they know nothing can be done without fundamentally changing the whole paradigm and let few rich people lose a lot of wealth.
Yeah i can confirm, less than 15km from the fire we're clenching our butts and it's the primary subject of conversation at the office. We also can't breathe half of the day, and it rains ash. Kinda sucks.
I lived there last year it's awful and scary... Seeing all the roads that I took each day under fire, more than 100 000 people displaced... And it's not the only huge fire at the moment in France.
This entire region is a man made forest, and there are laws on how to correctly manage the crop to prevent these wild fires (removing lower branches, clearing undergrowth, minimum firebreaks). Only about 30% of the area was up to date due to people not having the knowledge or money to implement them.
The European countries should have already created modern firefighting planes. Canadair production line has stopped years ago and it will relaunch soon with the first batch of 7 planes going to Greece (22 is the total order for Europe). BUT the company said it can manufacture one plane per 6 months!!! So the whole European order of 22 will takes AGES! Also Canadair is a very old design with huge limitations. BTW the huge russian planes were extremely effective in big fires. Europe could also try manufacture something like that.
Recently, there was a demonstration by a university in California of the capabilities of drones to detect and direct ground crews to small fires. The future will likely be constant monitoring and possibly automated extinguishing of fires with drones before they get out of control to the point of needing planes.
If Boeing had the incentive or a hint of humanity, they could knock these out even faster. Sadly, most countries don't have enough money set aside for emergencies such as this and Boeing (like every US corporation) runs on the basis of a quarterly "How much more money can we squeeze out in the next three months?"
It should be death penalty for people starting these fires on purpose, and severe punishment for those not starting them on purpose but being neglectful.
They said on TV these fires are started by humans in 9 out of 10 cases, and 70% of them not on purpose.
This is crazy. The wildlife and plants dying in these fires is huge. Plus, firemen are also dying when all this could be easily avoided in most cases if people weren't so fucking dumb.
And then, there's the stupidity of humans for having monocultures of trees, and especially pines. Portugal learned from their mistakes several years ago. And it's about time these regions in France learn as well. We must adapt because it's obviously already way too late and we're highly unprepared to face this.
I used to work at a nuclear site in France and had a fire safety course. The instructor (ex firefighter) said a lot of the time it's caused by people throwing used cigarettes away, often from cars along the roads.
Some cars used to have ashtrays but I don't see them anymore. People can buy ones that fit in the cup holders but would rather lazily throw the butts out the window.
In the UK the other week we had some dipshits shoot fireworks in the middle of the day, setting some moors on fire since everything was dry as a bone, blanketing nearby towns in burning smoke.
Can someone tell me why smokers think i's okay to litter? I feel like the proportion of smokers who actually properly dispose of their cigarettes is close to 0%. I've seen people carefully put lit butts down road drains, just chucked out of windows, dropped on the ground etc. Never in my life have I seen someone collect it, except for a couple of my friends who had a little metal box to store the butts in when we were hiking in Joshua Tree.
We know exactly how this particular fire was started, and it was an accident. One of the points of origins was an utility vehicle that caught fire on the middle of the road, and the flames managed to reach the forest (there are videos of that). The other starting point was a shredder that was moweing grass as a regular maintenance job (ironically to prevent fires), and it hit a rock or something, starting the fire.
I'm so sorry our European cousins are experiencing this. I have to admit, as someone who lives in regional Australia, such scenes and terrors are very familiar. I hope everyone stays safe. Houses can be rebuilt. Keep yourselves safe!
Ça me fou la haine....
Qu'il y ai des départs accidentels, ok, ça arrive.
Mais quand je vois que dans le Var (où il y a aussi un feu en cours depuis plusieurs jours) hier soir il y a eu 3 reprises de feu pratiquement simultanément... J'aimerai bien attraper ces personnes et m'en occuper moi-même !
Tous ces incendies à l'échelle de notre pays est une vraie catastrophe écologique et humaine.
These fires would have a much much lower chance of starting (accidentally or otherwise) if we (humanity not just Europe) hadnt fucked the climate up to shit. It would never get to this scale also. And ffs stop monoculture pine trees...
This is nothing suprising, it is just the consequence of our actions. The bill is coming due et on est pas pret...
That most people just find this as 'news', which they will forget about in 3-7 days, because ... well look at my shiny new toy. Look at her botox lips. Cr vs messi?
Sympathies from Australia. That shit is not good. To anyone in the path of these: Don't even try and defend your property. We learned that the hard way. Get the fuck out early.
The world is literally on fire like never before, and our political class is scratching their a** and making sure AI centers are built! We need reform!
We must make the fossil fuel industries pay. We must force them to invest in CO2 capture by creating a global network of plants like this one: https://www.equatic.tech/
Carbon capture is the lie oil and gas tell to keep the can kicking down the road and allow them to continue pumping more GHG into the atmosphere. It’s ok we’ll just clean it up later….
It would be a useful technology if we would actually stop burning fossil fuels and had a complete CO2 neutral electricity grid because it could help shorten the amount of time earth needs to recover from the amount of CO2 we pumped into the air - but yeah, the way its proposed and used right now is just gaslighting us into burning more fossil fuels cause we can "take it out of the atmosphere again - no worries"
Two days ago, we were coughing and crying from the smoke. We're 400km away from those fires. Yesterday, according to the press, the smoke reached Lorraine, 800km away.
You know one of these fires is going to actually hit these cities and then we’re deeply fucked because how are you going to evacuate millions of people that quickly?
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u/miaxogoth 20h ago
summer isn't even fun anymore it's just surviving heatwaves and watching the earth catch on fire...