UN confirms Europe hit record high temperature in 2021

Europe's highest ever temperature was officiallybrecorded in Sicily, seen here during a 

wildfire.

The World Meteorological Organisation confirmed on Tuesday that continental Europe recorded in 2021 its highest ever temperature of 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 Fahrenheit), and warned that new extremes were expected.

The searing heat on August 11, 2021, was nearly one degree Celsius higher than the previous record peak of 48C registered on July 10, 1977 in the Greek cities of Athens and Elefsina, it said.

That 1977 record was not independently verified by the WMO.

"An international panel of atmospheric scientists verified the temperature recorded by an automated weather station in Syracuse on the Italian island of Sicilia (Sicily)," the United Nations' weather agency said.

"It is possible, indeed likely, that greater extremes will occur across Europe in the future," said Professor Randall Cerveny, rapporteur on climate and weather extremes for the WMO.

"This investigation demonstrates the alarming tendency for continuing high temperature records to be set in specific regions of the world."

With human-caused emissions heating the planet, Europe is warming around twice as quickly as the world average—2.2 degrees Celsius over the past five years compared to the pre-industrial era.

Snapshots of our climate

The WMO said it had taken until now to certify the 2021 record because the agency took "meticulous care" to ensure it was accurate.

Europe has suffered heat waves and wildfires in recent summers, including on Greek tourist islands like Rhodes.

New confirmed records are incorporated into the WMO's authoritative yearly State of the Climate report, which informs top-level decisions on how to tackle global heating.

"Such painstaking evaluation provides the critical confidence that our global records of temperatures are properly being measured," the WMO said.

"New adjudicated records provide an authoritative benchmark for comparing record extremes for the annual WMO State of the Climate reports at global and regional scales."

Scientists say extreme weather—including heat waves, droughts and floods—is becoming increasingly frequent as the climate heats up, taking a toll on economies and ecosystems, health, farming and water supplies.

The agency's findings on the 2022 heat record were published in the International Journal of Climatology.

The WMO experts are currently conducting checks on a number of other extremes—"snapshots of our current climate"—including whether Tropical Cyclone Freddy broke the record last year as the longest-lasting tropical cyclone.

© 2024 AFP

UN weather agency affirms 2020 Arctic heat record in Siberia

Outsourcing HR v inhouse HR management

HR ALWAYS PROMOTES OUTSOURCING

by Dom Walbanke

30 January 2024

HR has the power to shape an organisation’s culture and future. Whether that’s achieved through an in-house team or outsourcing depends on your business’s priorities

Why do small businesses need HR?

HR develops the culture of an organisation, manages pay and recruitment and strives to maintain or improve employee satisfaction, as well has handling grievances and disciplinary procedures.

However, businesses with fewer than 50 people rarely have an inhouse HR department. Mostly they go down the outsourcing HR route, which is why there are many HR consultancies specialising in small businesses.

Whether you decide to manage HR in-house or decide on outsourcing to an HR agency depends on the circumstances and priorities for your business. Here, we break down the pros and cons of each.

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Pros and cons of outsourcing HR

Advantages of outsourcing HR

Here are the advantages of outsourcing HR according to Citrus HR’s Rachel Mudd:

• Cost-savings. “Outsourcing is significantly cheaper than hiring a qualified HR professional, even part time, for almost all small companies. It also fits the need better—very few small companies actually need an HR person for even one day per week, so hiring is often wasteful.”
• Access to specialist knowledge. “Outsourcing means you can keep on top of the more specialist aspects of HR, for example employment relations issues or handling a TUPE transfer. In-house professionals rarely have all that expertise themselves and have to be more generalist.”
• Legal compliance. “Good HR providers will ensure you are up to date with legal requirements for businesses, which is important, as the law changes most months, often with enormous consequences for breaches.”
• Cover for absences. “Any employee needs time off for holidays and can get sick from time to time. By using an outsourced HR service, you can ensure that you always have access to expert advice whenever you need it, which is not possible with an in-house HR pro at a small company.”
• Time efficiency. “By outsourcing these functions, employers can free up time to focus on making their business successful and profitable.”

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Disadvantages of outsourcing HR

• Less control. Outsourcing is less personal and could result in feeling a loss of control. An employee may find it easier to approach a colleague they work with regularly
• Culture disconnect. An organisation’s culture stems from its HR strategy. If the HR team is external, this may create a disconnect between its strategy and the employees
• Worries over data protection. By outsourcing HR, you’re entrusting a third party with your data

Pros and cons of an inhouse HR team

Pros to having an inhouse HR team

• Easier to find the right talent. “In-house recruiters are there to ensure the small business can get the right talent that sticks around, helping SMEs to grow in the most organic [and cost efficient] way possible,” says Anna Moore of Pollinate’s HR team. “Our own in-house recruiter has been with us from the beginning and has made a massive impact across the business, working closely with hiring managers, line managers and candidates to ensure we get the right fit, resulting in an annual staff turnover for 2021 at an impressively low 12 per cent.”
• More personal. Employees can hold a face-to-face meeting at any time, building trust and engagement between an organisation and its staff.
• Quicker resolutions. Having a member onsite should, in theory, allow for discussions to escalate quickly and for any issues to be resolved efficiently.

Disadvantages of having an inhouse HR team

• It can be expensive. Depending on the size of your business, hiring employees can be more expensive than outsourcing.Of course, you might think about hiring someone in-house to be your HR manager. According to HR outsourcing firm Peninsula, if you do decide to hire a full-time HR manager, the average national HR manager salary is £43,000. This compares to around £1,200-£3,600 per year for fully outsourced HR management, including health and safety, payroll, etc.
• An employee may have a heavier workload. By having a small HR team, each individual will have a wide range of responsibilities, from payroll management to recruitment. When this is outsourced, the third party will have experts in each area.
• Access to HR systems. The chances are, the software you have in-house will not match the capabilities of systems used by outsourcing HR agencies.

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This article was originally published in May 2022.

Offshore Wind Industry Says Germany Must Act to Boost Capacity

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Jan 30, 2024

Germany needs better auction and price policies in offshore wind tenders to provide certainty to the offshore wind developers and the supply chain to invest in a faster expansion of capacity, which is needed to meet Germany’s clean energy targets, industry groups said on Tuesday.   

Last year, Germany put into operation a total of 27 offshore wind turbines with a combined output of 257 megawatts (MW), the German Wind Energy Association, BWE, and other wind industry and engineering groups said in a statement.   

However, the expansion in offshore wind power capacity needs to dramatically rise by 2030 if Germany is to achieve its target of boosting offshore wind power capacity to 30 GW by 2030, from 8.5 GW now, according to the industry associations.

The offshore wind industry’s supply chain needs more security to be able to invest quickly, and this requires tweaks to the offshore wind energy regulations, the groups said.

Although it is encouraging that offshore wind expansion has slowly started to pick up pace again, Germany needs another 21.5 GW of capacity to come online over the next seven years if Europe’s biggest economy is to meet its 30 GW offshore wind capacity target by 2030, the associations BWE, BWO, Stiftung OFFSHORE-WINDENERGIE, VDMA Power Systems, WAB e.V., and WindEnergy Network said.

This means that Germany needs to install 3.1 GW of offshore wind capacity each year until 2030, they noted.

Political will is not enough to meet the goals, so policymakers should focus on project implementation with support and a regulatory framework encouraging investments, the industry groups said. They called for amendments to the auction schemes which, they say, currently put a considerable financial burden on the supply chain and future power prices.

Germany installed a record-high power capacity from solar and wind in 2023, but only solar additions met government targets, while wind power installations fell short of goals.

Wind power saw an increase in wind power tenders, which awarded a record-high total power capacity of 6.4 GW last year, data from wind power association BWE showed at the end of December.

But these were short of the 10 GW annual goal.

UK

PM accused of ‘playing games’ as rail strike continues

Alan Jones, PA Industrial Correspondent
Tue, 30 January 2024 

The Prime Minister has been accused of “playing games” rather than trying to help resolve the long-running train drivers’ dispute as another strike caused travel disruption across parts of England.

Members of Aslef on some of the busiest commuter routes, including many into London, walked out on Tuesday, crippling services on operators such as Southern, SouthEastern, Gatwick Express and South Western Railway.

Some areas had no trains all day, forcing many people onto the roads, leading to huge traffic jams in parts of the country.

Train drivers at Northern Trains and the TransPennine Express will strike on Wednesday as part of a rolling programme of action until early next week in a bitter row over pay and conditions.

None of the operators hit by strikes used new regulations aimed at ensuring a minimum level of service during industrial action.

Downing Street said it will consider if they can “strengthen” minimum service level (MSL) rules after train operators opted not to use the new law during strikes.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “This is something that the rail companies have asked for and we have delivered it for them.

“We believe they should be ready to use the legislation to reduce the impact of rail strikes on passengers, but we are always open to looking at how we can strengthen the rules around MSLs to ensure they deliver for the best interests of passengers.

“That’s something we will continue to look at and of course we will keep discussing with the rail companies themselves.”

Sources told the PA news agency that rail companies had not asked for the regulations amid warnings from unions and opposition politicians that they were unworkable.

Alan Jones, PA Industrial Correspondent

Tue, 30 January 2024 at 9:23 am GMT-7·4-min read

The Prime Minister has been accused of “playing games” rather than trying to help resolve the long-running train drivers’ dispute as another strike caused travel disruption across parts of England.

Members of Aslef on some of the busiest commuter routes, including many into London, walked out on Tuesday, crippling services on operators such as Southern, SouthEastern, Gatwick Express and South Western Railway.

Some areas had no trains all day, forcing many people onto the roads, leading to huge traffic jams in parts of the country.

Train drivers at Northern Trains and the TransPennine Express will strike on Wednesday as part of a rolling programme of action until early next week in a bitter row over pay and conditions.

None of the operators hit by strikes used new regulations aimed at ensuring a minimum level of service during industrial action.

Downing Street said it will consider if they can “strengthen” minimum service level (MSL) rules after train operators opted not to use the new law during strikes.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “This is something that the rail companies have asked for and we have delivered it for them.

“We believe they should be ready to use the legislation to reduce the impact of rail strikes on passengers, but we are always open to looking at how we can strengthen the rules around MSLs to ensure they deliver for the best interests of passengers.

“That’s something we will continue to look at and of course we will keep discussing with the rail companies themselves.”

Sources told the PA news agency that rail companies had not asked for the regulations amid warnings from unions and opposition politicians that they were unworkable.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak told PA: “This is a desperate attempt to distract from the Government’s failings.

“Employers from rail to health warned months ago these new laws are unworkable and would escalate industrial tensions.

“The PM should stop playing games and help resolve this dispute.”

A spokesperson for Rail Delivery Group, said: “Minimum Service Level legislation is one of many useful tools for managing strike disruption, but it is not a silver bullet.

“Operators’ guiding principle is always to make sure they can offer the best, most reliable services possible for their passengers on and around industrial action days, and to do that they need to make careful assessments of their own particular operational circumstances before deciding the best way forward.”

Meanwhile, the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) announced a strike by London Overground workers in a separate dispute over pay.

More than 300 union members will walk out for 48 hours on February 19 and again on March 4.

Security, station, revenue and control staff are among those taking industrial action.

Rail services are already being affected by a nine-day ban on overtime by Aslef members, which started on Monday.

On Tuesday, drivers went on strike at Southeastern, Southern/Gatwick Express, Great Northern, Thameslink and South Western Railway followed by walkouts at Northern Trains and TPE on Wednesday, at LNER, Greater Anglia and C2C on Friday, at West Midlands Trains, Avanti West Coast and East Midlands Railway on February 3 and at Great Western, CrossCountry and Chiltern on February 5.

Aslef says it has not met with Transport Secretary Mark Harper for more than a year despite a series of strikes which have caused travel misery and cost industries such as hospitality tens of millions of pounds in lost business.

A Department of Transport spokesperson said on Monday: “Aslef’s leadership is refusing to let their members vote on an offer that would see the average train driver’s salary increase to £65,000.

“The Transport Secretary and Rail Minister have already facilitated talks that led to this fair and reasonable offer from industry – Aslef bosses should put it to their members so we can resolve the dispute, which has already happened with the RMT, TSSA and Unite unions.

“With passenger revenues not having recovered since the pandemic, the taxpayer has had to prop up the railways with £12 billion in the past year alone – these strikes will not change the need for urgent workplace reforms that Aslef continue to block.”

Fórsa to begin ballot on public sector pay deal in February

Updated / Tuesday, 30 Jan 2024 

Agreement was reached last week following talks at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC)

By Brian O'Donovan
Work & Technology Correspondent

Ireland's largest public service trade union, Fórsa, will commence a ballot on the new public sector pay deal next month.

The union's executive is recommending acceptance of the agreement which will provide for pay increases of 10.25% and over a two-and-a-half year period.

The deal is estimated to be worth up to 17.3% for lower paid workers.

Agreement was reached last week following talks at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) involving unions, staff association and Government representatives.

Fórsa represents just over 85,000 members, most of whom are employed in public services and state agencies.

From next week, the union will commence two weeks’ of member information meetings in advance of the ballot, which is set to commence on 19 February.

Fórsa General Secretary Kevin Callinan said union members would ultimately decide whether to accept the new agreement.

"This morning the union’s executive backed the terms of the deal negotiated over the past two months, and its recommendation is based on the understanding that the pay terms represent the absolute maximum achievable through negotiations at this time, and that it is the outcome of a challenging negotiations process," Mr Callinan said.

The previous public service pay agreement, Building Momentum, expired on 31 December 2023 and the proposed new deal will run from January 2024 to June 2026.

The 19 unions affiliated to the Public Services Committee (PSC) of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), have until Monday 25 March to complete ballots of their members.

If the deal is ratified, the first of a series of pay increases will come in the form a 2.25% increase backdated to 1 January.

The pay deal will cost around €3.6 billion and includes a local bargaining mechanism to allow individual grades, groups and categories of public servants to raise specific issues.

Has Veganuary had its day? Consumer sentiment suggests possibly yes


By Nicholas Robinson

30 January 2024

The month of resolutions and abstinence is almost over. The small percentage of Brits who endured January sans animal-derived foods and ingredients, however, should perhaps be praised.

And why’s that? Aside from new year’s resolutions typically going down the can by the second week of January, many of those who vow to abstain from all meat and dairy products fail to finish Veganuary. It’s a difficult task, according to recent consumer research.

It’s not to say Brits aren’t keen to try a meat and dairy-free lifestyle. It appears they just can’t hack and sustain such a big lifestyle change for 31 days.

Veganuary’s popularity has grown, yet 72% of UK adults fail to complete the mission, 45% believe there is too much pressure to go all vegan all at once and 42% say it’s too difficult to go meat and dairy-free in January, data from dairy alternative maker Pure claimed.

Conversely Veganuary’s once less exciting sibling, Dry January, has seen a popularity uptick in 2024, with sales of low & no-alcohol drinks in pubs and supermarkets nearly a quarter up this month, and the expectation they’ll rise further this year.

Vegan products launched in Veganuary 2024

So why has it become easier to quit booze for a month and harder to be vegan? The simple argument is education and cost. Alcohol isn’t a necessity and not buying it will save consumers money, whereas buying meat and dairy alternatives can end up costing more.

The challenge of going vegan in January began in 2014. Co-founded by Matthew Glover, it gained in popularity and has, according to The Vegan Society, continued to attract a large global following.

Supermarkets, along with fmcg food and drink manufacturers, seeing a strong sales opportunity, jumped on the trend by giving more space to vegan NPD during the period.

Veganuary 2024 has been no different. A plethora of launches from big and small-name brands hit the shelves of major retailers in time for its start. Ben & Jerry’s, Walkers and Beyond Meat, to name a few, all launched new meat and dairy-free products and variants for Veganuary.

Analysis of Assosia data by The Grocer, however, shows the Veganuary hype was subdued in parts of the category this year, with 71 fewer meat-free products launched on the big four retailers’ shelves – 617 last year versus 546 this January.

Further, plant-based has struggled to maintain its throughput, particularly last year when sales plummeted and the big supermarkets pulled branded ranges and demarked shelf space previously dedicated to the category.
Is a vegan diet healthier?

Yet consumers are being urged by media, influencers, celebrities and even the government to cut down or cull their intake of animal-derived products. Pure’s data shows consumers believe eating a plant-based diet or reducing meat and dairy consumption is better for the planet, with one in six being influenced to do so by social media.

One recent mass-market push came from Netflix’s You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment serialisation of a Stanford Medicine-led trial, a docuseries that compared the potential health benefits of vegan and omnivorous diets.

In the original study, participants on the vegan diet experienced improved cardiovascular health, the result of reduced lipoprotein cholesterol levels, insulin and weight loss, which was replicated among participants in the Netflix series.

However, the docuseries was criticised for, among other reasons, being biased towards veganism, showing a restricted view of a vegan diet, oversimplifying healthy diets and not fully explaining what a healthy omnivore diet is.

So, what’s the solution for a sustainable Veganuary or increasing the uptake of plant-based diets? Clearly consumers need a better plant-based diet education. Replacing everything, like for like, with an alternative can be costly and sometimes worse nutritionally, making it unsustainable for a month, never mind permanently. Pure senior brand manager Alexandra Moston advocates small swaps throughout the year instead of going all-in for one month.

And when compared to Dry January, the argument for Veganuary isn’t as clear cut. Products dense in calories, fat, salt and sugars don’t support the health argument, while those manufactured overseas work against the sustainability argument. Dry January’s sales pitch is simple: “A total body and mind reset. From better sleep and a mental health boost, to saving money and time.”


Nicholas Robinson is editor of thegrocer.co.uk where he is responsible for The Grocer's digital strategy, setting the website's daily content agenda and commissioning the Daily Bread opinion newsletter among other duties. He has an extensive background in food and drink. 

These Paintings Reveal How the Dutch Adapted to Extreme Weather During the Little Ice Age

Artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hendrick Avercamp documented locals’ resilience in the face of freezing winters and food shortages

During the Little Ice Age, which spanned roughly 1250 to 1860, average global temperatures dropped by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

 Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Wikimedia Commons

HISTORY | JANUARY 30, 2024 
Tim Brinkhof

On the afternoon of January 2, 1565, an iceberg drifted down the harbor of Delfshaven, a fishing village in the Netherlands. According to the inscription on a 16th-century oil painting of the event, the block of ice measured nearly 20 feet tall and 230 feet wide—large enough to cut off the village’s access to the Nieuwe Maas River. No fishers would have been looking to set sail that day, though, as the water was completely frozen over, with boats great and small trapped in the ice.

The fact that artist Cornelis Jacobsz van Culemborch commemorated this iceberg’s arrival with a painting suggests it was not a regular occurrence. Dutch winters were cold, but they were rarely this unforgiving. As it happened, the year 1565 fell in the middle of the Little Ice Age (LIA), a period of widespread cooling that spanned roughly 1250 to 1860. Average global temperatures dropped by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, possibly due to a combination of volcanic eruptions and a reduction in solar activity.

Cornelis Jacobsz van Culemborch's painting of an iceberg that appeared in Delfshaven in January 1565 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons


The LIA manifested in a variety of ways. “Many [Dutch people] died in floods that were partly caused by severe storms,” says Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University and the author of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720. “Others froze to death in bitterly cold winters.” Some parts of the world saw frequent flooding, while others suffered from persistent drought. Glaciers expanded; certain pathogens spread more readily; and icebergs floated to regions that had not seen them since the last glacial period (popularly called the Ice Age), which ended more than 11,500 years ago, before the birth of civilization.

Researchers have long been interested in how early modern societies adapted to the changes wrought by the LIA. Written accounts can certainly provide insight into this period of global cooling. Reporting from Paris in 1675, author Marie de Rabutin-Chantal wrote, “It is horribly cold. … The behavior of the sun and of the seasons has changed.” Nine years later, in January 1684, English diarist John Evelyn noted, “The frost continuing more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of shops and trades furnished and full of commodities.”

Frost Fair on the Thames, With Old London Bridge in the Distance, unknown artist, 1684 Yale Center for British Art

But an especially rich source of information on the LIA is art. A 1684 painting by an unknown artist, titled Frost Fair on the Thames, With Old London Bridge in the Distance, illustrates the festival that Evelyn described. Italian artist Gabriel Bella, meanwhile, depicted the frozen canals of Venice in 1708. Other paintings and etchings of the Mediterranean city-state indicate its lagoon froze over at least twice more in the 18th century, in 1789 and 1791.

Even artworks that don’t center on climate anomalies can offer clues about the LIA. Scholars have used paintings of Venice’s historic architecture to track rising sea levels by comparing the positions of algal bands along the buildings’ walls then and now. A 2010 study of a 1571 painting by Paolo Veronese, who likely employed a camera obscura to ensure proportional accuracy, concluded that the sea level outside of the Coccina family’s palace was roughly 30 inches lower at the time than it is at present.

The Madonna of the Coccina Family, Paolo Veronese, 1571 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Little Ice Age

The LIA coincided with a period of great religious and political upheaval. In the aftermath of the 16th-century Protestant Reform

ation, Northern European artists slowly abandoned Christian imagery of heaven and hell in favor of the here and now. In Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, portraits of kings and saints gave way to paintings of parents and children, soldiers and workers, street scenes, and landscapes.

Dutch artists were especially celebrated for their commitment to realism. In 1882, French painter Eugène Fromentin declared Dutch art a “faithful, exact, complete” representation of the country’s culture; a century later, art historian Svetlana Alpers characterized Northern European painting as “an art of describing” reality, distinct from the narrative art of the Italian Renaissance. Johannes Vermeer’s The Little Street (circa 1658), for example, shows touched-up cracks in the bricklaying of a building in Delft—likely a scar from the 1654 gunpowder explosion that devastated the city and killed one of Rembrandt’s most gifted students, Carel Fabritius.

The Little Street, Johannes Vermeer, circa 1568 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As a genre of painting, winter scenes hardly existed in Europe before the LIA. This was partly because harsh winters like the one immortalized by van Culemborch were, at best, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. “The medieval world …. had been much warmer,” with Vikings settling in Greenland and grapes growing as far north as southern England, writes author Benjamin Moser in The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters. He points out that Europe’s “first notably cold winter” took place in 1564 and 1565, when that iceberg made its way to Delfshaven.

The frost stretched from Rotterdam to Brussels, where its effects were documented by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his painting Hunters in the Snow (Winter). (Art historians use the term “Flemish” to refer to Flemish-speaking towns in the medieval Low Countries, which included parts of modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany.) Part of a series depicting the seasons, the image captures the hardships of the LIA, especially when compared with other hunting scenes of the time. As journalist Harmen van Dijk writes for Dutch newspaper Trouw, “The hunters do not seem to have had any luck, returning with one little fox. Not exactly a feast. The innkeepers are trying to get a fire going. They might have some food, though that dilapidated sign outside doesn’t look promising.”

Hunters in the Snow (Winter), Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The LIA confronted the Dutch with challenges they had never faced before. In the Low Countries, rivers and canals were used to transport goods; when they froze, entire villages were cut off from maritime trade. Food shortages were common, and timber was in such short supply that in the winter of 1564 to 1565, a single bushel sold for two weeks’ wages. Households unable to afford these exorbitant prices had no choice but to look for fuel in unexpected places, tearing apart the gallows of their town squares or, if those had already been burned up, their own floorboards.

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Hunters in the Snow contrasts the hard-working hunters with a group of carefree ice skaters playing in the background. Another Bruegel painting, Winter Landscape With Skaters and Bird Trap, also from 1565, lacks this explicit juxtaposition but delivers a similar message through its subject matter. At a time when birds were considered “symbols of the soul,” wrote art historians Linda and George Bauer in a 1984 journal article, the work’s winter setting appeared deliberate, with the skaters representing “the dangerous progress of the soul as it passes through the world.”

Winter Landscape With Skaters and Bird Trap, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Hendrick Avercamp and the Little Ice Age

Bruegel’s moralizing tone—a kind of visual representation of the expression “walking on thin ice”—differs from that of later Dutch and Flemish landscape painters like Hendrick Avercamp, who was active in the early 17th century. If Bruegel’s winters appear harsh and cold, Avercamp’s are warm and fuzzy, both in color and in atmosphere. Sidelining seasonal hardship, his paintings almost exclusively show people enjoying themselves as they skate, sled or play an early form of ice hockey called ijskolf. As Moser writes in The Upside-Down World, “They show a merry Christmassy world of funnily dressed people disporting themselves on frozen canals: paintings I knew from jigsaw puzzles and holiday cards.”

These pleasant scenes may have been shaped by Avercamp’s own experiences: Moser records the oft-repeated possibility that the painter, who was probably born deaf and mute, romanticized an environment he was forced to observe from a distance. But the works also have their roots in history. Avercamp was born in 1585—three years before the Dutch Republic (consisting of seven northern Netherlandish provinces) won independence from Spain in a long and brutal war—and he died in 1634. Over the course of the painter’s life, the republic developed into one of the world’s most powerful and prosperous nations.

Winter Landscape With Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp, circa 1608 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Degroot argues that the republic’s successes were, in part, a result of the LIA. “Increased precipitation hampered Spanish invasions,” he says, “while changes in atmospheric circulation helped Dutch fleets to sail into battle with the wind behind them, an important tactical advantage in the age of sail. Dutch farmers, sailors, soldiers, entrepreneurs and inventors also found ways to cope with—and even exploit—otherwise disastrous weather.”

Shipwrights, for example, greased and fortified the hulls of their vessels, allowing them to slide past ice. Ice-breaking boats kept domestic waterways open in times of persistent frost and helped maintain a steady supply of ice for wine cellars.

But developments during the LIA weren’t all positive. “Dutch people also suffered from extreme weather that can now be connected to the Little Ice Age,” Degroot says. During bitterly cold winters, “rivers froze over that would otherwise have protected the republic from invasion, and hostile armies took advantage.” Ultimately, the historian concludes, “The Little Ice Age offered more benefits than drawbacks for the republic, but the same cannot be said for many of its citizens.”

Enjoying the Ice Near a Town, Hendrick Avercamp, 1620

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Bustling compositions like Avercamp’s Winter Landscape With Ice Skaters document not only the republic’s increasing resilience but also its growing disregard for traditional social hierarchies. “Frozen water was like carnival,” Moser writes, “an upside-down world when, for a few days, the conventions of daily life relaxed.” The polymath Hugo Grotius, a contemporary of Avercamp, agreed. “Here nobody speaks of rank,” he wrote in a poem, “here we are open and free; here the farm girl joins with the nobleman.” In time, this upside-down world would no longer be restricted to the ice.

Avercamp’s unceasing production of winter landscapes—he hardly painted anything else, leaving behind around 100 such scenes—cemented the season and its corresponding activities as a central aspect of burgeoning Dutch national identity. Today, his paintings provide snapshots of a climate that is gradually disappearing from living memory due to global warming.

“These paintings already have a nostalgic quality to them,” Moser tells Smithsonian magazine, “of sadness or loss,” particularly among Dutch people who grew up skating outdoors. “These images are over 400 years old, and the people in them look different, but we connect to them because we went outside and did the same things they did when we were kids. Now, they are the skeletons of dinosaurs.”


Tim Brinkhof | READ MORE
Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist who covers art, culture and history. He studied comparative literature at New York University and has written for Vox, Vulture, Big Think, JSTOR Daily, Jacobin, New Lines and more.

Ozone-Linked Deaths on the Rise Globally

By HealthDay

|

Jan. 30, 2024, 

Ozone-Linked Deaths on the Rise Globally

More

By Dennis Thompson 

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Jan. 30, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Deaths related to ozone air pollution will rise significantly around the world during the next two decades due to climate change, a new study warns.

Cities in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa can expect to see ozone-related deaths increase by as many as 6,200 fatalities a year by 2054 unless humans rein in global warming, researchers project.

“This paper is further evidence of the health benefits that can be achieved if more countries adhered to the Paris Climate Agreement’s goals,” said senior researcher Kai Chen, an assistant professor of public health at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Conn.

In the study, researchers analyzed short-term exposure to ground-level ozone pollution and daily deaths in 406 cities across 20 countries and regions. They used four specific climate change scenarios to predict future death rates due to air pollution.

Ozone is the primary component of smog, and it has been linked to respiratory problems, heart disease and premature death, researchers said in background notes.

Ozone forms when pollutants emitted by cars, power plants and industry chemically react in the presence of sunlight. Ozone is most likely to reach unhealthy levels on hot, sunny days in cities, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Researchers estimated that ozone-related deaths will claim as many as 6,200 lives a year in those cities by 2050-2054, up from an average 45 deaths annually in 2010-2014.

However, they also found that strong climate and air quality controls could make a difference.

In the scenario where nations stuck to the Paris climate accords, ozone-related deaths only increased by a projected 0.7% between 2010 and 2054, researcher said.

On the other hand, weak climate or air pollution controls led to an increase in ozone-related deaths of 56% to 94%.

All scenarios except compliance with the Paris accords led to an increase in mortality fractions -- the number of ozone-related excess deaths divided by total deaths.

“In all four of the climate scenarios we studied, only the scenario that aligns with the Paris Agreement would see a reduction in ozone-related mortality fraction in the future,” Chen said.

The new study was published Jan. 23 in the journal One Earth.

The researchers noted that many countries’ climate and air quality standards fall short of what is needed to stem this tide.

In the most optimistic scenario for human health, researchers set the threshold for maximum allowable exposure at 70 micrograms of ozone per cubic meter of air.

By contrast, the World Health Organization’s current air quality standard is 100 micrograms, researchers said. The standard is 137 in the United States and Mexico, 160 in China, and 120 in Europe.

“Our study highlights the need for more rigorous ozone standards,” the scientists concluded in a Yale news release. “Beyond mitigating ozone-related acute excess mortality, the implementation of stricter air quality regulations will likely yield additional benefits in terms of reducing long-term ozone-related mortality and conferring climate benefits.”

More information

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has more about ozone pollution.

SOURCE: Yale University, news release, Jan. 25, 2024

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