Hot, Steamy and, Soon, Wet Too

 

Perhaps the hot spell has come to an end (and perhaps there’s another one on the way).

I was in Seville on Sunday and it was 42ºC. Monday apparently hit a high of 44ºC, although by then I was home in Almería, where it was a bit cooler, although decidedly steamy (bochornoso in Spanish). The days are one thing, since one can always sit in a swimming pool or the sea (or a large tin bucket full of ice if nothing else is handy), but at night, the only place is bed, and if you are without air-con, as I am, then it’s a cruel and unusual punishment.

A bit like my month-long Facebook jail, which was finally withdrawn on Monday, making me once again a productive citizen and faithful poster of endless pictures of cats.

Those who accept that we are experiencing a period of global warming will point to this current heat-wave, where records have been broken in fifteen Spanish provinces. Those who don’t recognise climate change will say that it was just a very hot week, and hope that their credibility will continue to be accepted.

The Mediterranean Sea is apparently getting warmer too, reaching a temperature of 30ºC which is about the same as the Caribbean. Nice for swimming in perhaps, but also a hot sea is the first ingredient of a summer storm. Indeed, this soupy water will, so they say, be the cause of torrential rains here on the Peninsular later on down the line, maybe by the end of August.

Right now, we have the fires across Spain. Some are deliberate, some are accidents (one reforestation agency somehow caused a spark and 14,000 hectares were burned in Zaragoza) and some just began as an ‘Act of God’ (as the claims adjuster explained the other day while tearing up the cheque).  200,000 hectares (775 square miles) had been burned by last Saturday: another doleful record.

Yes, one day we shall remember the summer of 2022 as being pleasantly fresh, as a headline in El País here sets the pace: ‘"These types of heat waves will become normal or will be even more acute," says the World Meteorological Organization. The WMO stresses that the process will continue until at least 2060, regardless of any last-minute measures that might be taken against climate change’.