“We’re losing the seasons”

A Sep­tem­ber of rain, but also of hot nights. Is this weather nor­mal?

I don’t re­mem­ber see­ing it be­fore, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t hap­pened, we need re­li­able data to prove it. It’s more fre­quent in mid-Au­gust, but in our coun­try we’ve al­ready seen how sum­mer is ex­pand­ing into au­tumn, al­though spring has also been af­fected. We’re in­creas­ingly ex­pand­ing to­wards what would nor­mally be sum­mer con­di­tions. This sit­u­a­tion is not a cli­matic ex­treme, but rather an un­usual sit­u­a­tion.

Are we los­ing spring and au­tumn?

We’re los­ing all of the sea­sons. The dif­fer­ent stud­ies we’ve done at the URV on the evo­lu­tion of tem­per­a­tures in the whole of the Iber­ian Penin­sula in the last 40 years show how the sea­sons heat­ing up most are sum­mer and spring, fol­lowed by au­tumn and then win­ter. That’s not to say that au­tumn or win­ter aren’t heat­ing up, they’re al­most the same, but it’s a lit­tle faster and more no­table in sum­mer and spring. Now the win­ter is much warmer than it was in the 50s or 60s and much warmer than it was in the 19th cen­tury, but the biggest warm­ing has oc­curred in the sum­mer and spring. We’re in an area of Mediter­ranean cli­mate, which is al­ready char­ac­terised by a long warm sea­son, a be­nign win­ter and some tran­si­tional sea­sons, and if you add warm­ing to these char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­tures, the re­sult is warmer springs, sum­mers and au­tumns.

Should we at­tribute it all to cli­mate change or are these cy­cles nor­mal?

Al­though we don’t carry out stud­ies to at­tribute the trend we’ve es­ti­mated to a cause, I’m ab­solutely con­vinced that the main fac­tor in the warm­ing we’ve been ex­pe­ri­enc­ing from the early 1970s to the pre­sent day is the in­crease in green­house gases in the at­mos­phere and there­fore human in­flu­ence on the cli­mate. Over­all, we’ve found that the warm phase that af­fected the planet as a whole in the mid­dle of the last cen­tury – from the 1920s to the 1940s – may have been more reg­u­lated or mod­u­lated by fac­tors of nat­ural ori­gin, such as the evo­lu­tion of sunspots, as well as an in­crease in green­house gases. There’s been a sec­ond episode of global warm­ing since the late 70s, which can’t be ex­plained by the strength­en­ing of sunspots and can only be ex­plained by the in­crease in con­cen­tra­tions of green­house gases.

We’re in an area where the tem­per­a­ture rise is more pro­nounced than in other re­gions, aren’t we?

In the Mediter­ranean area and in the Arc­tic, the in­crease in tem­per­a­ture is more pro­nounced; these hot spots are of con­cern. We’ve es­ti­mated that in the west­ern, and now also in the east­ern Mediter­ranean, the in­crease in tem­per­a­tures is dou­ble the in­crease recorded on a global scale. In the Arc­tic, there are fewer in­for­ma­tion points and fewer data, but here we have longer se­ries of stud­ies, we’ve stud­ied from 1850 to the pre­sent day, and if we cal­cu­late the total ac­cu­mu­lated trend for this pe­riod, it al­most dou­bled the rate of warm­ing on a global scale. This should worry us lo­cally, be­cause global warm­ing data are world­wide and it’s clear that the earth is warm­ing up more than the oceans, which log­i­cally trans­mit heat to the depths and the sur­face is never as warm. The earth is gen­er­ally warm­ing, but there are some re­gions, such as the south­east­ern United States, where the warm­ing trend is not sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant and re­mains more or less the same as be­fore.

Have we only ad­dressed cli­mate change after it be­came a cli­mate emer­gency? And are we in time to re­verse the sit­u­a­tion?

We still have time if gov­ern­ments and the com­pa­nies emit­ting the green­house gases re­ally get down to work. It hasn’t been taken se­ri­ously enough, re­gard­less of the “green­wash­ing” they are try­ing to im­ple­ment, whereby they say we’re fac­ing a unique and un­prece­dented en­vi­ron­men­tal chal­lenge and make speeches like great word man­agers when they are reg­u­lat­ing very lit­tle, badly and with a lot of delay. There has to be an end to shift­ing re­spon­si­bil­ity or so­lu­tions for cli­mate change onto so­ci­ety, like call­ing for more ef­fi­cient use of en­ergy or turn­ing off ma­chines to save en­ergy costs and emit less. Small mea­sures like these lead nowhere, what’s needed are pro­found changes in the sys­tem and model of life and pro­duc­tion that will lead us to a more en­vi­ron­men­tally sus­tain­able world. The IPCC [In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change] says that if we start now we’ll be in time to sub­stan­tially re­duce emis­sions by 2030, with the goal of zero net emis­sions by 2050. This doesn’t tell the full story, be­cause this con­cept of zero net emis­sions not only ac­counts for real emis­sions but also ac­counts for and coun­ter­acts the elim­i­na­tion of ex­cess car­bon diox­ide con­tained in the air that en­gi­neer­ing can achieve in the fu­ture. I’m also op­ti­mistic and sure that ef­fi­cient tech­nolo­gies will be de­vel­oped, but to go from that to say that there will be no new emis­sions be­cause we will have these tech­nolo­gies and be able to re­duce con­cen­tra­tions be­cause we will ab­sorb car­bon diox­ide from the air in 2050... I don’t know, this is dan­ger­ous be­cause in re­al­ity what you’re say­ing is pol­lute now and pay later, and with a sce­nario like that nei­ther gov­ern­ments nor the big com­pa­nies will do their home­work.

What needs to be done ur­gently?

What is needed is to clearly reg­u­late and de­velop spe­cific reg­u­la­tions to en­force the law. It’s true that laws have been passed in the Eu­ro­pean, Cata­lan and Span­ish par­lia­ments. How­ever, most sci­en­tists say that these are not enough, that they have fallen short, that they don’t get to the root of the prob­lem, which is the en­ergy sys­tem we have now, based mainly on car­bon.

When plans are pre­sented to pro­mote re­new­able en­ergy they’re re­jected. Peo­ple don’t want wind tur­bines or solar pan­els next to their house.

There are things that politi­cians like be­cause it doesn’t cost them a penny and it puts the re­spon­si­bil­ity on the peo­ple. I’m con­vinced that peo­ple are the sim­plest way of look­ing at solv­ing the prob­lem and I wouldn’t say that there is op­po­si­tion from so­ci­ety, per­haps some group with a voice in the media... If you ex­plain that en­ergy trans­for­ma­tion is needed, that we must base the fu­ture on a spe­cific form of en­ergy and that, since fu­sion en­ergy has not yet been in­vented, re­new­able and clean en­er­gies are needed that will con­tribute to im­prov­ing the health of the planet and of the peo­ple... I’m sure peo­ple will un­der­stand this and we’ll trans­form our habits with­out too much trou­ble, as long as the rules of the game allow it. We can­not long for the times of our child­hood be­cause if we do noth­ing every­thing will change be­cause of cli­mate change.

The L’Es­pluga floods in 2019, storm Glòria, floods in Bel­gium and Ger­many this sum­mer, and now Al­ca­nar. Will we have to get used to this?

Yes, the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity is clear on this, and in the case stud­ies that are being car­ried out, it’s al­ready clear that global warm­ing is lead­ing to an in­creased fre­quency and in­ten­sity of cli­mate ex­tremes. Cli­matic, me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal and hy­dro­log­i­cal ex­tremes have al­ways ex­isted, with anom­alous sit­u­a­tions when it comes to rain, wind or heat, and now cli­mate change adds to these nat­ural vari­a­tions, ex­ert­ing a pos­i­tive force on them; that is, if the at­mos­pheric cir­cu­la­tion mech­a­nisms de­ter­mined that in an area of the planet there were high tem­per­a­tures, for ex­am­ple, then cli­mate change adds to this and makes these tem­per­a­tures even higher. The WWA [World Weather At­tri­bu­tion] group, which at­trib­utes cli­mate causes, has done many stud­ies on spe­cific sit­u­a­tions, such as the heat­wave in Canada in June or the floods in Ger­many, and they show that with­out cli­mate change these sit­u­a­tions would not have oc­curred with the in­ten­sity that they did. There­fore, both fre­quency and in­ten­sity are in­creased by the greater en­ergy avail­abil­ity of the cli­mate sys­tem, and are there­fore as­so­ci­ated with human cli­mate change.

You said we were still in time to re­verse the sit­u­a­tion. What will hap­pen if we don’t react?

We’re in time not to make it any worse! It’s not the same to warm the planet by 1.5 de­grees, which is al­ready dan­ger­ous and the me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal, cli­matic and hy­dro­log­i­cal ex­tremes are al­ready soar­ing and in­ten­si­fied, as to warm it by two de­grees. At two de­grees there is a 40% in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion of the ex­tremes, so more im­pacts, more losses of every­thing. But if noth­ing is done, as is the case now, we’re going to see a three or four-de­gree in­crease in pre-in­dus­trial ther­mal lev­els to­wards the end of the cen­tury. And this fig­ure would be out­ra­geous, as it could trig­ger a sit­u­a­tion of ir­re­versible col­lapse for other sys­tems or sub­sys­tems within the cli­mate sys­tem, such as the oceans, the per­mafrost or the Ama­zon rain­for­est. That’s why I have col­leagues who talk about the sixth great ex­tinc­tion of species, be­cause if with a small warm­ing of 1.1 de­grees the ex­tremes have al­ready in­ten­si­fied or there has been a 6% loss of crops, then a two, but es­pe­cially a three or four-de­gree in­crease, will lead to a sit­u­a­tion of un­known con­se­quences.

There’s talk of cli­mate mi­gra­tion and de­ser­ti­fi­ca­tion...

Cli­mate change has been caused by de­vel­oped na­tions but the con­se­quences are being mostly suf­fered by the less de­vel­oped coun­tries. Droughts caused more than 600,000 deaths in 2017 and 2018. The least de­vel­oped coun­tries are more vul­ner­a­ble be­cause they don’t have the eco­nomic and fi­nan­cial re­sources to adapt to these sit­u­a­tions and are the ones who suf­fer the most. But those who bear the high­est costs in these ex­treme events are the de­vel­oped coun­tries, be­cause they have used and ar­tic­u­lated the ter­ri­tory much more and often in a com­pletely un­nat­ural way, oc­cu­py­ing riverbeds and flood­plains.

Con­sid­er­ing these new cli­matic sce­nar­ios, are dif­fi­cult mea­sures needed, such as de-ur­ban­is­ing the seafront if we want to have beaches?

Com­pletely. That’s the way it is. Among other things, one of the im­pacts of cli­mate change in Cat­alo­nia, com­bined with the rise in sea level that is al­ready being felt through­out the Mediter­ranean, is that not only do we have the typ­i­cal prob­lems re­gard­ing the salin­i­sa­tion of coastal aquifers, but flood­ing by sea storms is also be­com­ing more fre­quent, coastal ero­sion is ac­cel­er­ated, and many square miles of beaches are lost. And if the gov­ern­ment’s so­lu­tion is to pro­vide com­pen­sa­tion for camp­sites, who com­plain that they have suf­fered a cat­a­stro­phe, in­stead of de­sign­ing plans to grad­u­ally move, with­out mak­ing too many sac­ri­fices, re­mov­ing fa­cil­i­ties, then they’re just wast­ing money. It’s the same with beach re­gen­er­a­tion: they throw sand at the prob­lem and along comes the next storm and it’s gone. We should be opt­ing for soft so­lu­tions that ac­com­pany nat­ural dy­nam­ics. The ex­ist­ing line of coastal dunes and la­goons, which grad­u­ally dis­ap­peared in the 1960s be­cause apart­ments had to be built and tourists brought in, had a role to play and no one thought about that.

in­ter­view en­vi­ron­ment

in­ter­view en­vi­ron­ment