ok ok ok I think I'm justified in whining about the heat now - the weather station near a nearby small town reported 40.5°C (104.9°F) temperatures yesterday. And those are, and let me empathise this properly, THE HIGHEST WEATHER TEMPERATURES EVER RECORDED IN GERMANY.
(this is on top of young forests dying because their trees roots can't reach the groundwater anymore because the groundwater levels have sunk so much after two extremely dry years)
(and fish dying en masse in some lakes because there's not enough oxygen for them, which in a roundabout way was also caused by the extreme heat) (this was last year but a repeat seems likely sometime this summer)
Oh hey turns out I was wrong about that record - a different town a little further away recorded temperatures of 40.9°C/105.6°F so the previous record from 2015 or so got broken even... more??
(stores tend to have airconditioning to entice people to come in (same for movie theatres ad the like), and some official building like the municipality office and the likes are required to have them but 99% of homes? Schools? Many many workplaces that aren't high-class office jobs? Nooooope.)
(predictably, the replies to this tweet are a mess, with people either going full out with the "then maybe join us in the 21st century, have you heard of electricity??" or being the 29475th person to ask "why not just buy a small portable AC unit?" as if there haven't been 2974 replies pointing out that
our windows work differently and are not build for that and also building codes and landlords wouldn't allow for it anyway in almost all cases and an individual melting in the heat can't just snap their fingers and change that..)
I did learn that those temperature recordings - you know, the one where the previous two days both broke the previous record - started aaaaallll the way back in 1881.
I come from a very hot and humid part of the country (Maryland is a literal fucking swamp and in August the average high is 97) and the entire concept of doing without AC in those conditions is just
....also it's kind of fascinating to me that a couple years ago I was seeing a bunch of, hmm, American responses to (some) Europeans being like WHY DO YOU HAVE AIR CONDITIONING AT HOME THINK OF THE EARTH with maps pointing out that all of the US is latitude equivalent to N Africa instead of, say, Finland
just like the "why are you complaining about 5 cm of snow on the ground, that's nothing" vs "we literally have no plans to deal with even that much snow because we never got that much before??"
can we all just. Admit that we're seeing changes in both the climate and the local weather that aren't quick or easy to adapt to and focus on getting through them (people are dying both from extreme (espcially for the region) cold and heat ffs) instead of telling each other that there's no reason to complain
ice bowl in front of a fan helps a bit at least, and doesn't make me feel like I'm just adding a ton more humidity to the already humid air the way the "wet towel in front of the fan" trick does
And yeah I remember when President Obama was like I'm gonna show DC how to deal w snow and then was like "oh. I see. Never mind." (The biggest "blizzard" of my childhood - 7 inches - closed school for a week. Here it MIGHT delay school 2 hours.)
Meanwhile, this tweet speaks to me