Re:France experiencing worst drought on record
by kergonath on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @12:22PM
(#32400041)
2003 was nowhere near 2022. A lot of things were improved after 2003 to reduce the number of heat-related deaths so yeah, the toll could have been higher this year. But looking at aquifer levels and the effects on vegetation, it is much worse than it was 19 years ago, which was already quite bad. Also, 2022 is not over yet, and Southern Europe will still be very dry until September at least.
> We didn’t then have quite the sensationalized global news apparatus that we do today, though
That is not helpful. It was very widely reported in 2003. From Europe, I would not say that the coverage is more sentationalised than it was. I grant you that it was not as global as today, because Americans don’t care about what happens in non-America and it wasn’t a hot issue back then in American politics. But it was definitely seen as a catastrophe and it spurred a whole bunch of laws and regulations to help mitigate the consequences of such an event (not the likelihood of an event, because we’re lemmings with 5-minutes attention spans).
> We didn’t then have quite the sensationalized global news apparatus that we do today, though
That is not helpful. It was very widely reported in 2003. From Europe, I would not say that the coverage is more sentationalised than it was. I grant you that it was not as global as today, because Americans don’t care about what happens in non-America and it wasn’t a hot issue back then in American politics. But it was definitely seen as a catastrophe and it spurred a whole bunch of laws and regulations to help mitigate the consequences of such an event (not the likelihood of an event, because we’re lemmings with 5-minutes attention spans).