It is so dry that some in despair turn to higher powers in the hope of help from above. In Jaen, southern Spain, earlier this week thousands of parishioners gathered in the streets with a statue of Jesus – to pray for rain for the first time since 1949.
– We are in the midst of a continuous drought and the purpose of the procession is to invoke the Lord so that He can help us and save us, participant Ricardo Cobos tells AFP.
severe dehydration
In some parts of Spain and Portugal, it is much drier than it has been in over a thousand years. Also, it’s not as hot in April in Spain as it was in Cordoba last week.
A record high of 38.8 degrees is a more typical July or August temperature for the region. But the dry and warm air from the Sahara led to an unusually early heat wave in Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Algeria at the end of the month, when several record highs were recorded on thermometers.
And extreme heat almost certainly would not have set in so early in the year were it not for today’s global warming, according to a so-called attribution study from World Weather Ratios (WWA). It’s a network of international researchers who report that human emissions of greenhouse gases have made such an early heat wave at least 100 times more likely, with temperatures up to 3.5 degrees higher than normal.
– We will see more intense and frequent heat waves in the future as global warming continues, says Sokokji Philip, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, in a briefing on the results of the study.
It rises quickly
The study also indicates that extreme temperatures around the Mediterranean are increasing faster than climate models previously predicted.
The analysis was performed at standard speed and has therefore not been peer-reviewed by other researchers. But WWA researchers use scientifically recognized methods and their studies are not infrequently reviewed and published in journals at later times, according to the AP news agency.
World Weather Attribution is an international research network that analyzes the potential impact of climate change on extreme weather events such as storms, extreme precipitation, heat waves, cold spells and droughts.
In the past, the Academy concluded, among other things, that this year’s floods in Nigeria and other parts of West Africa were exacerbated by climate change. However, the Academy determined that global warming was not the main cause of the food crisis in Madagascar in 2021.
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