This isn’t some speculative thing. It literally happened in the 2003 heat wave, where crops failed due to the extreme heat. With even higher temperatures in this heat wave it will certainly happen this year too.
As these sorts of heat waves become more frequent, our food supply will become more unstable which, left unchecked, will eventually result in famine even in rich parts of the world like Europe.
> "Where those tracks are 40C in the air, on the ground that could be 50, 60, 70 and more, so you get a severe danger of tracks buckling. What we can't have is trains running over those and a terrible derailing. We've got to be very cautious and conscious of that, which is why there's reduced speeds on large parts of the network."
It turns out you can build railways designed to handle greater temperature variations, and these are used in other countries, but when the UK system was designed future warming wasn't taken into consideration.
Given that warming is now past the tipping point and we'll be in a steadily warming state for the next 100 years (with some control over the rate, i.e. phasing out fossil fuels over the next 30 years vs. business-as-usual for the next 30 years will have large effects on temps 60 years from now, for example), major infrastructure reconstruction is a real necessity.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] threadThis is like our couple of days of summer per year. The forecast for the rest of the week says it's back to rain and colder weather though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
As these sorts of heat waves become more frequent, our food supply will become more unstable which, left unchecked, will eventually result in famine even in rich parts of the world like Europe.
It's also glorious weather in Point Hope, Alaska currently...though 6C in July may seem a tad nippy to folks in the Lower 48.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62219556
> "Where those tracks are 40C in the air, on the ground that could be 50, 60, 70 and more, so you get a severe danger of tracks buckling. What we can't have is trains running over those and a terrible derailing. We've got to be very cautious and conscious of that, which is why there's reduced speeds on large parts of the network."
It turns out you can build railways designed to handle greater temperature variations, and these are used in other countries, but when the UK system was designed future warming wasn't taken into consideration.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/stories/why-rails-buckle-in-br...
Given that warming is now past the tipping point and we'll be in a steadily warming state for the next 100 years (with some control over the rate, i.e. phasing out fossil fuels over the next 30 years vs. business-as-usual for the next 30 years will have large effects on temps 60 years from now, for example), major infrastructure reconstruction is a real necessity.