April heat in western Mediterranean 'almost impossible without climate change': Study

MADRID – The extreme heat that engulfed the Iberian Peninsula and parts of North Africa on April 27 would have been “almost impossible without climate change”, an international scientific study found on Friday.

The “exceptional early heatwave” involved “local temperatures up to 20 degrees hotter than normal and April records being broken by up to 6 degrees”, said the report by World Weather Attribution (WWA), whose scientists study the link between extreme weather events and climate change.

A mass of hot, dry air from North Africa reached the Iberian Peninsula early on April 24. It drove temperatures to record highs for April, with the

mercury hitting 38.8 deg C in southern Spain

and 36.9 deg C in central Portugal.

Such temperatures tend to occur only in July.

In Morocco, local records were broken with temperatures soaring above 41 deg C in some places, while in Algeria, they exceeded 40 deg C.

Spain this year recorded its driest and hottest April since at least 1961, when such records began, said national weather agency Aemet.

“Human-caused climate change made the record-breaking heatwave in Algeria, Morocco, Portugal and Spain at least 100 times more likely and the heat would have been almost impossible without climate change,” the WWA report found.

It caused “temperatures up to 3.5 deg C hotter than they would have been without climate change”, provoking an event the scientists described as “rare”.

More frequent, more intense

“We will see more frequent and more intense heatwaves in the future as global warming continues,” Ms Sjoukje Philip, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, said at the report’s launch.

Such abnormally high temperatures followed “a historical multi-year drought in those regions, exacerbating the impacts of the heat on agriculture, which is already threatened by an increasing water scarcity”, the WWA said.

In Spain, which is known as Europe’s vegetable garden, the main farmers’ union, COAG, has warned that 60 per cent of agricultural land is currently “suffocating” from the lack of rainfall.

With water reservoirs at half their capacity, Spain has asked Brussels to help by activating the European Union’s agriculture crisis reserve funds.

Experts say parts of Spain are the driest in a thousand years, with the ongoing drought prompting some farmers to choose not to sow crops in 2023.

“The Mediterranean is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change in Europe,” said Dr Friederike Otto, a senior climate science expert at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London.

“The region is already experiencing a very intense and long-lasting drought and these high temperatures at a time of the year when it should be raining is worsening the situation.”

Spain forecasters under attack

After experiencing its

hottest year on record in 2022

and the extreme April heatwave, Spain’s government was on Friday forced to come to the defence of Aemet, whose forecasts have been met with a barrage of threats and abuse from climate conspiracy theorists.

“Murderers”, “Criminals”, “You’ll pay for this” and “We’re watching you” were just some of the anonymous messages sent to Aemet in recent weeks on social media, by e-mail and even by phone.

“Enough is enough,” wrote Ecology Minister Teresa Ribera on social media.

“Lying, fuelling conspiracies and fear, being insulting... impoverish us as a society and has unacceptable consequences,” she said. AFP