What is happening is not “normal”. “In fact, we have experienced a series of summers which are not at all normal, but rather extraordinary if we refer to the temperature records we have had for a century and a half”, warns the researcher.r of CSIC Fernando Valladares. “And worst of all: we’re going to remember those hot summers like the freshest of those we have left“.
“This year, historical maximums have been recorded in different points on Earth, and the records are being shattered at a very high and to some extent unpredictable speed,” says Valladares. “In Spain, without going any further, we had a series of four heat waves: the first at the beginning of summer, and the last at the end of August, in a very unusual seasonbecause the days are not that long”.
And the energy that stores heat, especially in the seas, is what triggers extreme events, like hurricanes, storms and DANAS (Isolated high-level depressions) more and more frequent in the Mediterranean, and that we suffer in the Peninsula. “In a warm atmosphere, precipitation tends to be increasingly torrential and catastrophic“, specifies the expert of the CSIC. “We are in an exponential phase in which more and more changes occur per unit of time. Everything continues to grow, including variability. The word “normal” does not find its place anywhere. »
“Each heat wave is more intense because of climate change,” he warns. Friederike Otto co-leader of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group and author of furious times. “Northern Hemisphere heat waves in 2024 would have been impossible without the underlying factor of global warming.”
The German climatologist refers to recent WWA reports, which conclude that climate change is resulting in more intense heat waves, between 2 and 2.5 degrees, in Europe and the United States. “The fires of Canada between May and July were twice as likely and 20-50% more intense under the conditions of heat, drought and wind caused by climate change”, concludes the German climatologist, who minimizes the impact that The boy (the periodic and natural phenomenon of Pacific warming).
“This year’s fires, heat pockets, storms and droughts are a taste of what lies ahead if we don’t act now,” warns Otto. “The North suffers the consequences and bears a great responsibility. To prevent temperatures from rising by more than 1.5%, there is no other option: to halve CO2 emissions during this decade and rapidly reduce the burning of fossil fuels”.

EUROPE: FIRE AND WATER (TORRENTIAL)

In full DANA at the beginning of September, Spain has already tried this phenomenon in 2024, as you well know in Mallorca. In Spain, the fire season has been brought forward with the “impossible” heat of April (38.8 degrees), even though the fires have finally consumed 30% of everything burned in 2022. Asturias and the Canary Islands were the communities hardest hit, with the fires in La Palma (Tijarafe) and Tenerife (Candelaria) the worst recorded on the island in 40 years. In Tasarte and other points in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, nighttime temperatures reached 40 degrees.
The four heat waves wreaked havoc across the peninsula, with 43.3 degrees in Zaragoza and 39 degrees in Bilbao as a benchmark.
It was another fiery summer in the Mediterranean, comparable to that of 2021 in which Sicily set the European record (48.8 degrees). Palermo this time reached 47 degrees and had to close its airport due to the fires declared in its perimeter, as in Catania. Rome set the record of 41.8 degrees during the heatwave Charon, while red alerts were raised across much of Italy.
In Greece, Athens was approaching 45 and temporarily closing the Acropolis to prevent tourists from roasting. In the Peloponnese, a new record of 46.4 degrees was recorded, with hundreds of fires declared throughout the country, such as the one which forced the evacuation of 16,000 tourists from the island of Rhodes. On August 18, what is already considered the largest declared fire in the territory of the European Union broke out in Alexandroupolis, with more than 85,000 hectares burned (the equivalent of almost the entire burned area in Spain throughout the year).

Nearly 600 firefighters from nine countries, 10 planes and seven helicopters are still dedicated to extinguishing the fire in northern Greece which devastated a large part of Dadia National Park and killed at least 20 people (including 18 immigrants who arrived from neighboring Turkey).

CHINA: HISTORIC FLOODS

Residents of the city of Zhuozhou, devastated in August by the worst flooding in northern China’s memory, were not amused that, to save the capital, authorities ordered divert water from overflowing reservoirs around Beijing to other populated areas in neighboring Hebei Province. “Elsewhere, we saw leaders coordinating the rescue efforts, but no one came to Zhuozhou. They abandoned us,” complains a resident who spent three days locked in his apartment without electricity.
In Zhuozhou, 80 kilometers south of Beijing, a sixth of its 600,000 inhabitants have been evacuated. Typhoon Doksuri, which caused deadly floods and landslides in the Philippines, hit the capital and surrounding areas hard, bringing the heaviest rains in 140 years.
There were millions of evacuees, nearly 80 dead, massive power cuts, thousands of homes destroyed, roads submerged under water and rice paddies destroyed. But the worst was in Zhuozhou, where residents demonstrated in the middle of the month to demand the compensation they deserve under the law: when they found themselves in one of the so-called “flood storage areas”. .
In just three days, the passage from Doksuri It left more water in the area around Beijing than falls in northern China in a normal summer month, amounting to 744.8 mm of rain, an all-time record. Experts say the storms have become much more intense and unpredictable, exposing highly urbanized megacities, but with poor drainage.
The terrible floods were preceded by an unprecedented heat wave that also hit the Chinese capital, where temperatures hit record highs for several consecutive days. In the far northeast region of Xinjiang, came up to 52.2°Canother historic record.
It was late July, when the first floods, before the tropical rains caused by the super typhoon in August, were already wreaking havoc in the southwest and center of the country. Going back a month earlier, around Midsummer night, temperatures averaged 21.1°C, almost a degree above normal, and virtually all monitoring stations in China are beating new records.
Heat waves have also boosted demand for electricity to cool homes, shopping centers and offices, overloaded power supplycausing power outages in several provinces and pushing authorities – making energy security a priority – to approve new coal-fired power plants (thereby jeopardizing Beijing’s climate targets for reducing carbon emissions).
As floods and high temperatures vied for the news of the day in the Mekong basin, the news was a prolonged drought shared by Asian neighbors Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. This situation is worrying in China’s Jiangxi province, where Poyang Lake, the country’s largest freshwater body, which plays a key role in regulating the flow of the Yangtze River, has fallen to its highest level. low since records began.
September has already begun, but extreme weather events continue to give the Asian giant no respite: in the mountains of Sichuan, western China, at least 48 people are missing due to new floods .

USA: AND CANADA UNDER SMOKE

On June 8, Washington smelled of smoke from a wood fire, like it was New Year’s Eve. But there was no party. Children were not allowed out during recess., and people with respiratory diseases should not set foot on the streets. The sun was a sort of orange globe blurred by the blackish smoke that covered it and limited the field of vision to a kilometer.
Flames They were 2,000 kilometers to the north, in the Canadian province of Quebec, in fires that covered the skies of Washington and New York, converted for a few days into the most polluted city on the planet, ahead of New Delhi.
The United States and Canada started the summer with giant wildfires sparked by the usual culprits: drought and higher than usual temperatures. In other words, the defining characteristics of “climate change”, which should perhaps be reclassified as greenhouse effecta term that the government of George W. Bush succeeded in eradicating it twenty years ago because it seemed so much more dramatic.
The fires have not been as intense as in other years in western North America, which has also experienced its share of disasters. Some of the California desert’s iconic Joshua trees were charred in a fire. In Alaska’s capital, Juneau, a monstrous flood caused by melting snow the nearby Mendenhall Glacier washed away two apartment buildings. Paradoxically, the largest fire in US history, that of Lahaina, Hawaii, does not appear to have been caused by climate change, but rather by severe drought combined with hurricane-force winds.
Every day, news agencies publish a long list of American cities that have broken their own temperature records. In states with large populations of retirees, such as Arizona and Florida, authorities fear for their growth model, in the face of a possible flight of elderly people who cannot resist what happened in Phoenixthe capital of the first of them, where the thermometer did not even drop below 43.3 degrees for a month.
In the Gulf of Mexico, the sea broke its temperature record by reaching in July 38.3 degrees Celsius, that is to say the level at which you put the water when you take a very hot shower. This sea-jacuzzi it was just one more sign of how the temperature of Earth’s real lung is changing, which is not the Amazon, but the ocean. Florida said goodbye to August with the onslaught of Hurricane Idalia.
In Maine, fishermen they stop fishing the lobsters that made to this coast: over the past 50 years, the fisheries have moved 300 kilometers north due to warming seas and are now in Canada.