More and more heat waves will condition our future

Central Spain has always suffered from hot summers, and as I write this from my home in Madrid, the temperature is around 36º Celsius, and set to reach 40º over the next few days. But as the #ShowYourStripes bar graph created by climatologist Ed Hawkins at the UK’s University of Reading shows, Spain’s temperature has increased sharply over the last 170 years, in line with the global median, reflecting the development of an economy based on the use of fossil fuels.

The graph could not be more explicit: if you want to see how fast the climate emergency is happening, you only have to look at today, or more and more, with each passing day.

As said, Spain traditionally has hot summers. The problem is that in reality, the boreal summer doesn’t start until June 21: what we are increasingly experiencing are earlier and longer summers. That said, the writing has been on the wall for some time: we face a climate emergency that is the result of doing nothing to avoid it.

Spaniards like me are fortunate to live in a developed country where we can can take shelter indoors or we live in apartments with conditioning, unlike countries such as India, where the climate emergency has multiplied the probability of heat waves by a factor of 30, and which is simply not prepared for combinations of humidity and temperatures that…