Red Marten | València (EFE).- Changing what we understand by summer or winter, by cold and heat, will be necessary in the coming years due to the effect of climate change, especially in the Mediterranean area, where the “extremization of extreme phenomena” will be a constant » and the tropicalization or increase in sea temperature.
This is the opinion of the director of the Meteorology and Climatology Area of the Center for Environmental Studies of the Mediterranean (CEAM), Samira Khodayar, in an interview with EFE where she assures that “we are already seeing” the increase in intensity, extension, severity and impact on the health of rains, waves of heat and cold or storms of wind.
“The average accumulated precipitation of the Iberian Peninsula is clearly decreasing and the forecast is that it will continue to decrease in the future,” explains Khodayar, who adds, however, that it is increasingly common for it to rain in the Mediterranean basin “with more intensity in less time”.
The sea could warm up to 3.5 degrees
Added to this “extremization of extreme phenomena” caused by climate change is the phenomenon that the meteorologist refers to as tropicalization, that is, an increase in sea temperature that, in the case of the Mediterranean, from 1982 to the Currently, it has already reached 1.6 degrees, a figure that “may seem little, but it is not”.
“It affects the flora and fauna of the sea, its chemistry, generates migration of species, disappearance of habitats, impacts on nearby continental areas and even on socioeconomic sectors such as fishing,” he details.
Future scenarios, he adds, “depend on the level of emissions that we release”: if we continue as before, the average increase in sea temperature would be 2.6 degrees in the middle of the century but “the worst scenario”, with ” catastrophic consequences”, would be that this figure reached 3.5 degrees.
“Redefining the seasons” with climate change
As a consequence of this “new climatic normality”, the idea of four seasons of equal length throughout the year is now a thing of the past, adds Samira Khodayar, who points out that “today, summer is already five or six weeks longer than before.
At the same time, “autumns are getting warmer”, and days with high temperatures also increase in winters with less frost and milder minimum temperatures.
“In 2050, we will probably change the threshold of cold waves and we will consider that they start with higher temperatures,” predicts the director of the CEAM’s Meteorology and Climatology area, in addition to the fact that by mid-century there will be “an average of fifteen days less than minimum below zero in central Spain.
What we know today as a heat wave will be, he assures, more frequent and intense, although we will also have to “redefine” this concept and consider the temperatures that we now understand to be out of the ordinary as part of the “new situation”.
Marine heat waves and thermal outbursts
And all this not only on land but also in the sea, where “marine heat waves” will become widespread and intensify, that is, prolonged periods of very high temperatures in a region of water.
“The coasts of the Valencian Community, Catalonia, the south of France and the Balearic Islands are one of the areas in which we registered the highest water temperatures this summer,” says Khodayar, who remembers the summer of 2022 as “an anomaly” due to excess of heat in the sea that “began in May and continued until January of this year.”
Specifically, in the summer of 2022 there were about 80 days with records above 27 and 28 degrees at sea, while near the Balearic Islands temperatures reached “close to 30”.
“In the future this will be more frequent and intense and the severity of these waves will be up to 40 times higher than what we know right now,” highlights the meteorologist, who indicates that the future of these phenomena, which ” they can generate massive deaths of schools of fish”, points out that we will live in a “permanent maritime heat wave”.
250 million people affected by the drought
All this, moreover, in a context of widespread drought, in which Spain “is going to be one of the European areas most affected” by the lack of water, although “drought in the Iberian Peninsula is not the future, but the present that we are already seeing».
A present that will spread, to such an extent that within 20 years there will be 250 million “water poor” people, a reality that will end up generating “climate migrations”.
“We do not think we are in this situation but, in a while, the conditions in Madrid are going to resemble those of Marrakech,” says Samira Khodayar.
Cities: heat islands and climate refuges
Are cities prepared for this new reality caused by climate change? According to the meteorologist, it should not be forgotten that, by mid-century, two out of three people will live in urban environments, in which it will be essential to pay attention to the “heat island effect” that raises the temperature of these spaces from two to three degrees above mean temperature.
«A city, due to its own characteristics, suffers a higher temperature than suburban areas; if this is combined with extreme situations and heat waves, both processes feed back and magnify each other”, he indicates.
This can have “very serious impacts” on health, such as excess mortality, not only due to the daytime heat but also due to the increase in nighttime temperatures, which makes the body “unable to adapt and collapse”.
In addition, “not all neighborhoods are prepared in the same way” against high temperatures, and for this reason Khodayar considers the construction of green (gardens) and blue (with the presence of water) areas especially important.
“In these areas the temperature drops, so they can become climate refuges where the atmospheric temperature drops,” he details to indicate that they can be “outdoor or even indoor areas adapted and renaturalized, such as sports centers or schools.”
In short, the meteorologist calls for “adapting to the new conditions” as a consequence of climate change and concludes that “prevention, adaptation and mitigation are essential”, that is, “knowing what awaits us, reducing the damage of the new situation and trying to prevent the worst scenario from occurring» EFE