“I remember in my childhood, in Galicia, the persistent rain in the face of the current drought, not to mention the suitcase of clothes that you had to carry when you traveled there in summer from the Mediterranean…”
The words are from Sergio Alonso Oroza, 76 years old, emeritus professor of meteorology in the Balearic Islands, who relates his experience of what many others explain about his land, starting with the one who writes these lines about his now not so cool native Basque Country, but half as old (38).
There are, therefore, those who long for better times. But has so much changed?
142 years ago, in 1881, La Vanguardia was born in another world, one in which the industrial was modern and there were already records. It is written how it was. That's why checking climate change often starts here.
And the data is surprising.
The year in which the first issue of this newspaper appears, in 1881, the average annual temperature in Barcelona, for example, was 14.1ºC. Today it would seem that it was cold: in recent years the Catalan capital has exceeded 16ºC, in 2022 it reached 18ºC.
An exception? Not at all. The average annual surface air temperature on the planet is now 1.2ºC higher than the average for the second half of the 19th century. And in the Mediterranean basin, the same one that encompasses Barcelona and a large part of Spain, it is even worse: 1.5ºC higher.
But there is more.
If we talk about rainfall, it has hardly changed in more than a century. In Barcelona at the end of the 19th century and today, the annual amount of rain is around 600 mm. The exception was two wet periods in the 1930s and 1960s. Problem? The last two years, 2021 and 2022, rainfall has barely exceeded half the annual average and they are the two driest years of the last century, a shock often accompanied by its opposite extreme, torrential rains.
And the same thing happens when viewed globally: “The projections depict a Spain with heat waves and droughts as the two most critical meteorological extremes, punctuated from time to time by torrential rainfall. We will have to be prepared,” says Javier Martín-Vide, professor of Physical Geography at the University of Barcelona.
Then there is the pollution. In a century and a half, Barcelona has gone from housing 250,000 people to more than a million and a half, not including its metropolitan area; The planet ended the 19th century with 1.5 billion humans and now nearly 8,000 inhabit it; The first car circulated through the streets of the Catalan capital in 1890 and today 500,000 enter the city every day! In the world it is estimated that there are about 1.4 billion.
All of this implies more consumption, more waste and more pollution despite the fact that many cities since the end of the 19th century have expanded and improved the quality of their urban planning. The numbers: global CO2 emissions from industrial activity and fossil fuels rose slowly since the 19th century until reaching 5,000 million metric tons and then skyrocketed since the 1950s and today exceed 40,000 million.
Coal heaters and stoves from almost a century and a half ago produced very polluting smoke and particles, especially inside homes. The industrial colonies were also there due to their intensive use of coal, as expressed in the photograph that opens this article. But even so, experts do not hesitate to say that today the quality of the air we breathe, for example in that same Barcelona, in a largely service-based economy, “is, in general, worse than that of our ancestors due to the excessive park automobile and its emissions of nitrogen oxides and particles,” continues Martín-Vide.
In addition, there are changes in the distribution of winds and sea currents, melting of continental ice, increase in sea level... continues Alonso Oroza. Changes that are summarized in a scientific anecdote: at the end of the 19th century, just over 50 years ago, Joseph Fourier had identified the role of the atmosphere in the transfer of radiation (what is now called the greenhouse effect) and Svante Arrhenius, Nobel Prize winner Chemistry in 1903, he had managed to estimate for the time the “benefit” that his country could obtain if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere were doubled...
-Climate crisis?
-What climate crisis? It is likely that the answer was then.
Today the world is different.
