A year ago, the report published by the working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made it clear that the increase in global warming causes extreme events “unprecedented in magnitude or frequency” and announced that each half degree of temperature rise above the average temperature of pre-industrial times “increases the intensity and proliferation of heat waves, floods and droughts.” These are not isolated phenomena. but of repeated climatic events, caused by CO2 emissions and by the hole in the ozone layer, which are already notable for their duration, their mortality and their planetary extension. It is estimated that the temperature of the planet in 2021 was already at 1.1º above reference values and according to the recent report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) the world could exceed 1.5º in the period established between 2022 and 2026. For the WMO, there is a 50% chance that this will happen. Let us remember that the Paris Agreement against Climate Change foresaw this extreme limit for 2100, while the IPCC had predicted that the dramatic limit of 1.5º would inevitably be exceeded in 2040.
In short, the climate emergency is no longer a possibility for the future or a long-term notice to mariners. It is already installed among us, in our immediate environment, in continental Europe and also in the British Isles, in the fragile Mediterranean habitat and, with different effects, in many more parts of the planet. The intensification of extreme weather not only brings with it the immediate effects that we are now experiencing, but also causes multiple problems which includes desertification, permanent drought, loss of biodiversity, environmental migrations, sea level rise, catastrophic floods and other phenomena not only meteorological and environmental, but also economic and social.
In the case of our country, it is not only the heat wave that we are currently experiencing and that we already suffered in June that is worrying, but also the persistence of a much higher than average temperature of recent years. According to the WMO, in addition, in the next five years the figures of the warmest years will be exceeded, in a spiral in which the sensation of emergency increases due to water stress, the expansion of the Azores anticyclone and the progressive increase in the forest mass to the detriment of the surface destined for agriculture. All this comes together to cause the fires that we are suffering right now. At this point, they have already devastated Spain an area that quadruples the annual average of which had burned on these same dates in the period between 2006 and 2021. The uncontrolled fires in Extremadura or Galicia, the terrifying panorama of Bages burning, join the other critical situations in the rest of the continent, from Portugal to Greece, with the aggravating circumstance of torrid temperatures that do not seem to be mitigated and with the usual complaints about the lack of comprehensive management of the territory that could mitigate the danger.
Forecasts to get the desideratum of zero gas emissions of the greenhouse effect by 2050, a sine qua non condition to prevent the increase in temperature above the limits of no return at the end of the century, since they are not a possibility but an urgent necessity of the planet. We were warned. Now, immersed in a crisis of global characteristics, we must act as a matter of strict survival.