TERESA GUERRERO
@teresaguerrerof
Madrid
MAITE VAQUERO AND ALBERTO HERNÁNDEZ (INFOGRAPHIC)
@albertohv_
Updated on Thursday, 4February2021-01: 33
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Send by email
Comment
Cold wave This is how extreme temperatures are measured in 'Spanish Siberia'
Thaw Earth's poles are melting: are we heading towards an ice-free world?
The historic snowfall that Filomena brought sank Javier Abad's ship in El Molar, a Madrid town where up to 60 centimeters of snow accumulated on January 10.
The two vehicles that he kept there were crushed, the cars destroyed and the feed for his 200 animals useless.
"We have died three cats that had just been born and could not resist the cold, and we did not find a cow that went to give birth after the snowfall, we believe that it will be dead", says this farmer, who estimates that he will spend 20,000 euros on rebuild the shed, to which he adds 500 euros of losses for each deceased calf.
You don't have high hopes of receiving compensation.
"Within a month nobody remembers this," he says.
The snow has also sunk the greenhouse in which Elena Velasco grows green asparagus in San Martín de la Vega: "It has ruined everything. We have lost all the harvest, which just now we were going to start harvesting, and it has twisted all the irons", This farmer tells us that she estimates the damage to the greenhouse at 10,000 euros and 15,000 euros for the ruined harvest.
Nor does he believe that in that town of Madrid they can have access to aid because he assures that they cannot provide all the documentation that they are asked to access them.
"Two roofs have fallen on our farm. One collapsed in the area where the cows sleep, on top of three chotas that were injured but luckily they have not died, and the other where we keep the machinery and alfalfa," he says. Rocío Elvira, owner of a dairy farm in Pedrezuela that has seen its production greatly diminished "because the cows are very delicate and become very stressed."
These three cases in the Community of Madrid are just one example of the thousands of small businessmen who have suffered losses in the eight Spanish autonomous communities declared a catastrophic area due to this historic snowfall and the subsequent cold wave that caused some of the towns in Guadalajara o Teruel will drop below -25 ºC.
This extreme episode has claimed the lives of five people throughout Spain.
It remains to quantify in detail how much Filomena's bill will amount but the damage has been great in Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Andalusia, Asturias, Aragon, La Rioja and Navarra, both for many citizens and for administrations.
Only in the repair of the damaged roads the Madrid City Council estimates that it will spend 110 million.
"These natural events, such as the great snowfall in Spain, have always existed - in 1904 there was a very large one - and will continue to exist, but the truth is that the trend we observe is that
these extreme phenomena are going to occur more frequently and more intense, "
says Alfonso Delgado-Bonal, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Center, from Washington.
We interviewed this Spanish researcher specialized in atmospheric sciences on the occasion of the presentation of NASA's annual report that places 2020 as
the warmest year since there are records
,
tied with 2016.
"The most important thing is not the ranking itself, that it shows that the last seven years have been the hottest, but what we see in the whole record, that is, what matters is the long-term trend. And the trend towards warming is indisputable. "
Cold waves, heat waves that cause droughts and fires, torrential rains, hurricanes ... Globally, the number of weather-related natural disasters has tripled since the 1960s.
Each year they directly or indirectly cause more than 60,000 deaths, mostly in developing countries but also in rich ones.
Although the balance varies by year.
In the heat wave that Europe suffered in the summer of 2003, for example, there was an excess of mortality estimated at 70,000 deaths, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
According to the Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index (CRI),
Mozambique, Zimbabwe and the Bahamas were the nations most exposed and vulnerable to climate change in 2019
in a world ranking in which Spain ranks 32nd.
The same work estimates that
between 2000 and 2019, a total of 475,000 people died as a direct consequence of more than 11,000 extreme weather events
that caused economic losses that amounted to about 2.56 trillion dollars.
Much of the damage was caused by storms and their direct consequences: rainfall, floods and landslides.
Figures that have set off the alarms of economists and businessmen, who are increasingly concerned and interested in climate change.
In fact, extreme weather events, failure of climate action, damage to the environment by human action and infectious diseases are identified as the main global risks by the Global Risks Report 2021, the report prepared by the Economic Forum World based on a survey of more than 650 business leaders and which was presented last week, coinciding with the virtual celebration of the Davos Forum.
"
Extreme events are occurring more frequently and there is an increasing proportion of the population affected by them.
Scientific models suggest that this will continue to be the trend. For example, a recent study predicts that they could increase up to a 50% between now and 2100 ", indicates by telephone from Asturias María Dolores Cima, PhD in Biology, professor at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and researcher at the 'Industry, Energy and Sustainability' Group.
The NGO Christian Aid has analyzed the 15 most damaging climate events of 2020 - almost a dozen of them caused losses of at least $ 5 billion each.
Although most took place in Asia,
Europe was hit by two cyclones that in total caused damage of almost 6,000 million dollars
and the United States suffered losses of 60,000 million dollars from the hurricanes and severe fires.
Several countries in Africa saw their crops ruined by a massive locust infestation that caused an estimated $ 8.5 billion in damage.
Sudan suffered one of its worst floods in 2020, destroying crops and killing 138 people.
Cyclone Amphan hit the Bay of Bengal in May, causing losses of $ 13 billion in a few days.
Other extreme events lasted for months, such as the floods in China (278 deaths) and India (2,067 deaths), which had a cost of $ 32 billion and $ 10 billion, respectively.
South America suffered severe fires, some caused and others worsened by droughts.
But even in some of the coldest parts of the planet heat records were broken in 2020. On the Antarctic continent, it was 18.3 ° C on 6 February.
Nor was it normal what happened in Siberia, where another record of heat was broken: Verkhoyansk, in the Arctic Circle, reached 38 ° C during a brutal heat wave (with temperatures 10 degrees above normal) that unleashed large fires .
In Spain, Filomena has overshadowed Gloria, the storm that a year ago caused a great storm that hit the Mediterranean for days, causing serious damage and at least 13 deaths.
Its ferocity activated the red warnings for winds of up to 90 kilometers per hour, torrential rains in which more than 400 liters per square meter accumulated, copious snowfalls, hurricane-force winds and broke wave records in Valencia and Menorca, reaching heights of 8, 44 meters and 14.77 meters.
It was raining when it was wet.
Gloria arrived before the Mediterranean coast had recovered from the DANA (Isolated Depression in High Levels) which in September 2019 left a dozen deaths and losses of more than 2,000 million euros, especially in the southeast of the peninsula (Valencian Community, Murcia and Balearic Islands).
The image of tens of thousands of dead fish in the Mar Menor portrayed the devastation in the Murcia region, aggravated by the overexploitation of aquifers and the environmental problems caused in this area for decades.
Nor was the Cantabrian free from extreme phenomena.
In October, Alex, considered an explosive cyclogenesis, mainly caused a great storm of wind, sea and rain there.
María Dolores Cima believes that "what is expected for the next few years is precisely greater instability.
We are going to have both periods of heat waves that are going to lengthen as well as extreme phenomena due to the cold and torrential rainfall
. more water evaporates and concentrates in the atmosphere and when a storm comes the intensity of the rains are more intense ".
It is already happening with hurricanes.
November 30 officially ended one of the most destructive hurricane seasons in which 30 formed, surpassing the 2005 record with 28 tropical storms.
"The warmer the atmosphere, the more the ocean warms and hurricanes are more frequent.
But the important thing is not so much the number of hurricanes that form but those that reach land, and more and more arrive, that year have been a dozen, "says Delgado-Bonal.
"We are also seeing it with the fires. The increasingly higher temperatures have caused California to suffer the most extreme fires that there has been in many years," he adds.
The NASA scientist believes that little by little "governments are realizing that prevention is better than cure and take action sooner."
In the US, remember, Hurricane Katrina was the turning point
.
The worst natural disaster in the country's history in 2005 killed 1,833 people and caused damages of between 125,000 and 250,000 million dollars, according to the source.
"Prevention is not only saving a billion, which is good. Preventing the death of people is priceless. We cannot prevent hurricanes but we can mitigate their effects," he says.
To do this, he considers that "we must attack the root problem, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, which is one of the causes of climate change and making changes in our way of life, but also preparing ourselves to face these extreme phenomena because if the current trend continues, we know they will happen more often. "
In the state of Louisiana, he recalls, a macro dam was built to mitigate the impact of future hurricanes in the area: "It was not done overnight. There was a very rigorous study to which scientists, economists, engineers and politicians contributed. he understood the problem and the best possible solution was sought ", points out this Spanish scientist, who believes that this should be the way to tackle any other extreme phenomenon such as floods: take the necessary actions based on science."
AKIRANT
For her part, María Dolores Cima believes that in order to face future extreme phenomena "the first thing is to count on them, know that they are very likely to occur and be prepared. And for this, adaptation strategies must be put in place both by administrations as well as citizens. The way in which we design cities, how we plant trees, public transport or traffic routes can be adapted with that objective ".
"Obviously, it would be best if they did not happen and therefore
mitigation strategies must be applied wherever possible
, moving towards an economy that is not based on fossil fuels, since they are the ones that generate the greatest amount of greenhouse gases,
and promoting renewables
and moving towards the circular economy to take advantage of what is now waste and avoid adding degrees to global warming ", says this PhD in Biology.
"Our job," says Delgado-Bonal, is to try to do the best possible science so that the rulers can take the necessary measures. "
Because as Irene Santa, meteorologist at the www.eltiempo.es portal, points out, "from time to time events as extreme as the snowfall that Filomena brought remind us that
we are vulnerable and
we should never underestimate the potential of atmospheric phenomena".
DEATHS ASSOCIATED WITH CLIMATE CHANGE
According to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), between 2030 and 2050 the phenomena associated with climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths.
Of these, 95,000 will be caused by child malnutrition due to the destruction or reduction of crops, 60,000 by malaria -as a consequence of the proliferation of breeding sites for disease-carrying insects-, 48,000 by diarrhea due to water pollution and 38,000 by the exposure of elderly people to heat (38,000), which contributes directly to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
On the other hand, the WHO estimates that the cost of direct damage to health from climate change, excluding closely related sectors such as agriculture, water or sanitation, will amount to between 2,000 and 4,000 million dollars from here to 2030
.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
science
Science and Health
Environment
Climate crisis Justice condemns the French State for "not respecting its commitments" on climate change
EnvironmentFBBVA Frontiers Award for the creators of the largest inventory of the plant world
Borrasca Filomena If we melted all the snow that fell in Madrid for 30 hours ...
See links of interest
Work calendar
Coronavirus
Barcenas
Raise - Villarreal
Granada - Barcelona, live