5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe

robtherobber 115 points 158 comments August 12, 2026
www.severe-weather.eu · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (14 comments)

Devasta

Enjoy it while it lasts; it'll never be this cool again.

thibaut_barrere

Just in France, cost of this year heat waves has been estimated between 10 and 15 billion euros (figure shared by a ministre today).

Y-bar

If we ever manage to halt this accelerating crisis we should seriously consider a modern-day equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands needlessly dead, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766 (from 2024)

wing-_-nuts

I've been reading up on the inevitable collapse of the AMOC (the potsdam institute has a number of really good videos covering the subject). Everyone hears 'winters will be up to 10C cooler', but few realize that this will also cause the jet stream to be more wavy, and exacerbate the number of heat waves as well. Sad that europe's mild climate is about to get a whole lot worse...

12as109q

More data centers for plagiarizing code and solving 10 unimportant Erdos problems per year will fix this!

jp57

The warming is terrible and deadly, AND ALSO Europeans are negligent in not protecting themselves however they can. The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation .

yread

It will probably be warm but this is from the GFS model that was forecasting 50 degrees during the last heat wave. Apparently, it tends to "overegg temperature projections for Europe in the summer by around 2-2.5c. ... it dries out soil too fast in its models." https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/1um7tyn/sometimes_...

inglor_cz

As of now, our worst problem in Central Europe seems to be drought. Some of the mightiest rivers of the continent are barely there. You can walk across the Danube, the Rhine or the Wisla in some places, drenching yourself a bit, but never losing contact with the bottom.

Noaidi

This is a harbinger for insane weather in the United States this fall and winter. I am expecting my homeless life in in minivan to be choatic trying to chase where the weather will be favorable. My main concern if is there is heavy rains in California after the drought of rain they have had this summer. The Salton Sea is at an all time low[1] and many people do not know that a rapid fill of water into the Salton Sea from the Cochella Valley is a known trigger for earthquakes on the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults[2][3]. [1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-10254005... [2] https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2023/07/drying-salton-sea-has-stav... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXqOn0GILtA Adding... https://subjecttoclimate.org/news/study-las-earthquake-risk-...

Noaidi

"2027 is likely to be WAY worse than this 2026 in terms of extreme heat, drought, fires, crop losses. WAY worse. In the Northern hemisphere, we have half a year to prepare for next summer and save some lives. Everyone is acting like 2026 is a blip. No: far worse is to come." https://nitter.catsarch.com/JKSteinberger/status/20874034329...

fl4regun

Seems likely that within our lifetime multiple countries in europe may turn into deserts, and there is little we can do against it except for maybe attempt to terraform the climate by seeding clouds or changing ecosystem flora to something resilient in the face of 40C weather. Losing a huge amount of food production would be my greatest concern.

KingTravis

It's not targeting the area though is it? It's not like someone is moving this dome across to Europe and saying "Yeah, take that, that'll show 'em".

throwaway_7274

Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism. I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound. It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum. There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.

mo7061

Just ask yourself if your wealth was tied to sp500 would you be ok with it dropping? Well then green house gases rising I don’t give a shit

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