January has the days counted and the Valencian thermometers seem to be in the wrong month. In more than a century and a half of data, a temperature had never been recorded above 26.6 degrees In the city of Turia. Well, yesterday Aemet devices They reached 27.1.
AND It is not an isolated fact: We can travel the entire community jumping from weather station to weather station and a surprising amount of them would be for 25 degrees. In Chelva, a couple of days ago, The 30 were touched.
But is this weird? The truth is that. Normal, according to the historical series, is that temperatures They should range between 10 degrees during the nights and 16 during the day. Overcoming the 25 is nothing that can be classified as “normal.”
But it cannot be said that it is just a meteorological curiosity, it is a much greater problem than only now we begin to understand.
What is happening in that Mediterranean area? The seasonal forecasts of Aemet They already drew A warmer winter than normal. I should not miss anyone: 73% of the 2024 days had an average temperature higher than the historical average of reference (and, As they point from the agencythat “the average is already a warm period”).
Cold peaks, on the other hand, are increasingly rare. It is almost unimaginable that the Valencian garden suffer a cold wave Like 1956 or January 1891. In the latter, Castellón spent days to -10 degrees and the people of Grau could see one “immense ice belt on the banks of the Mediterranean“
That, today, is science fiction. The world, little by little, has been heating.
So it has to do with climate change? In general, attributing weather events to climate change is complicated. Because, deep down, we always talk about probabilities and, although probabilities are never zero, As Aemet explains“In a stable climate it is very likely that these warm days would not have produced.”
That’s where climate change enters. And, “due to the form that this data is adjusted to a normal distribution, the increase of 1.5 ° C of the average temperature gives rise to the fact that values before rare or impossible, Now they are probable“
What consequences does all this have? Halfway between the causes and the consequences are The very high temperatures that the sea has. Much higher temperatures than we could imagine just a decade ago and than They have experts intrigued.
To all purposes, the Mediterranean is becoming a gigantic battery of energy that “Try the strength of atmospheric phenomena“. It is inevitable to think about THE GREAT DANA OF 2024but The impact Of these new scenarios it goes much further.
Does this mean that complicated moments come? Means, above all, that socioclimatic balance in which we were installed it is changing very fast and we do not know for sure where it is directed. That complicates the forecast and hinders management, but emphasizes the need to be prepared.
A task in which, as the Dana showed us, everything remains to be done.
Image | Aemet
In Xataka | Thus, the Mediterranean is agonizing: overexploitation, contamination and now months of a terrible heat wave