It feels like 38 degrees in the room 🌵

Hi, everyone! I’m sitting here right now in a room that feels like 38 degrees, and the fan is just blowing warm air around. Outside, the lawn is already brown again, even though it’s only June. And the weather forecast... it’s going to stay this way for now—a heat wave lasting into July, with hardly any rain.

I just caught myself having a thought that I would have laughed off ten years ago… is this place actually going to turn into a desert someday? 🐫 🌵 🏜️ Not the Sahara… But this pattern—hotter earlier every year, dry soil, etc.—it doesn’t feel like an outlier anymore, but like the new normal. Experts tend to talk about more frequent droughts and heat rather than an actual desert climate, but to me, that hardly makes a difference right now.

How are you guys holding up? I can’t even bring myself to touch wool in this heat. Best regards.

True, it’s hot, but we’ve always had heat waves like this. I feel like the seasons are “shifting” a bit—spring and summer are coming earlier, as are fall and winter. When I was a kid, winter lasted from December to February; that’s shifted way “forward,” and so have the other seasons. We have to live with it, whether we like it or not. The only real problem is the dryness; we need more of the usual steady rain, not these “torrential downpours” that the dry ground can’t absorb.

I got myself a set of cooling towels... I highly recommend them! GAME-CHANGER!

I'm feeling the same way about the heat right now, and because I couldn't stop thinking about whether it used to be like this too, I did some AI-assisted research out of curiosity and checked a few things. It was more interesting than I expected.

Heat waves are nothing new at all. In 1540, Europe had such extreme heat and drought that people could partly cross the Rhine on foot – to this day, it’s considered a once-in-a-millennium event. Then the row of 1904, 1911, the famous “steppe summer” of 1947, the great European drought of 1976 with dried-up fields, 1983, and of course 2003, which was really terrible – in Germany alone, around 8,000 heat-related deaths are assumed.

So our grandparents and great-grandparents definitely experienced things like this.

I found the point about the word interesting. “Heat wave” as a term has been around for a long time; it appears in newspapers from the 1930s/40s. But in everyday life, people used to talk more about “steppe summer,” “summer of the century,” or simply “the great drought.” So this constant label “heat wave,” which we encounter every summer now, is less a new phenomenon than a new way of talking and warning.

And for me, that’s where the real difference lies. Not that there are hot summers, but how they are becoming more frequent. 1947 was the warmest summer of the entire 20th century, and today it only ranks behind 2003, 2018, 2019, and 2022. So four of the five hottest summers are in just the last twenty-some years. On top of that, the weather service has only officially been warning about heat since 2005, as a direct response to 2003. In the past, people sweated and that was that; today, the warning app pops up.

To be honest, that both reassured and unsettled me at the same time... reassured because my grandma, with her 100 degrees in the sewing room, wasn't the first, and unsettled because the pace really has increased after all. Now I'll leave it at that :-) Best wishes.

The saying about the Bavarian Forest used to go like this: “It’s winter for three-quarters of the year, and it rains the other three months!”

I’ve been living here for 9 years now and have been experiencing more of a southern climate

My neighbor, who’s the same age as me (around 60) and has lived here his whole life, tells stories of harsh winters and deep snow from his childhood.

The forester talks about the lowest groundwater level EVER and says it would have to rain continuously for three years for the groundwater levels to return to their former levels

Höimar von Dithfurt’s forecasts as early as 1978 were already warning in this direction back then

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Nothing reassures me at all, because it’s really picking up steam. 

The hottest day ever recorded in Germany so far was 41.2 degrees (July 25, 2019) in North Rhine-Westphalia. And that temperature will likely be broken in the next few days. 

The 40-degree mark has never been reached in June (since weather records began).