I remember in my childhood, in Galicia, the persistent rain in the face of the current drought, not to mention the suitcase of clothes you had to take with you when you traveled there from the Mediterranean in the summer…”
The words are from Sergio Alonso Oroza, 76 years old, professor emeritus 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 today not so fresh Country Born Basque, but with half the years (38).
There are, therefore, those who yearn for better times. But so much has changed?
142 years ago, in 1881, La Vanguardia was born in another world, in which the industrial was the modern and there were already records. It is written as it was. That’s why, to check climate change, you often have to start here.
And the data is surprising.
In the year in which the first issue of this newspaper appeared, 1881, the average annual temperature in Barcelona, ??for example, was 14.1ºC. Today you would say it was cold: in recent years the Catalan capital has exceeded 16ºC, in 2022 it reached 18ºC.
An exception? In no case The average annual surface air temperature on the planet is now 1.2ºC higher than the average of 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 data.
If we talk about precipitation, it has hardly changed in more than a century. In Barcelona at the end of the 19th century and today, the amount of annual rain is around 600 mm. The exception was two wet periods in the 1930s and 1960s. Problem? In the last two years, 2021 and 2022, rainfall has barely exceeded half the annual average and are the two driest years of the last century, a shock often accompanied by its opposite extreme, torrential rains.
And the same thing happens if we look at it globally: “The projections envision a Spain with heat waves and droughts as the two most critical meteorological extremes, sprinkled from time to time by torrential rainfall. We must be prepared”, says Javier Martín-Vide, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Barcelona.
Then there is pollution. In a century and a half, Barcelona has gone from hosting 250,000 people to more than a million and a half without including the metropolitan area, the planet ended the 19th century with 1.5 billion humans and now nearly 8,000 live there , the first car drove through the streets of the Catalan capital in 1890 and today 500,000 enter the city every day! It is estimated that there are approximately 1.4 billion of them in the world.
All 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 urban planning. The numbers: Global CO2 emissions from industrial activity and fossil fuels have been rising slowly since the 19th century until they reached 5 billion metric tons and then skyrocketed from the 1950s to over 40 billion today .
The coal heaters and stoves of almost a century and a half ago generated highly polluting fumes and particles, especially inside homes. Another factor was also the industrial colonies, due to their intensive use of coal, as illustrated by the photograph that opens this article. But despite this, the experts do not hesitate to say that today the quality of the air we breathe, for example in Barcelona itself, in an economy mainly of services, “is, in general, worse than that of our ancestors, because excessive car park and the 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, rise in sea level… Alonso Oroza continues. Changes that can be summed up in a scientific anecdote: at the end of the 19th century it had been a little more than 50 years since Joseph Fourier had identified the role of the atmosphere in the transfer of radiation (this is now called the greenhouse effect) and Svante Arrhenius, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903, 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 to be answered then.
Today the world is very different.
