"I have never experienced this," Mari Carmen told Reuters news agency.
She is forced to fill water bottles and take it home, the water in the tap at home has run dry. Spain is currently living through what the Spaniards themselves call the drought from hell. In April, heat records were broken, harvests are withering away – and summer hasn't even begun. This will partly lead to increased food prices in Europe and partly affect tourism. Barcelona, for example, has already imposed water restrictions.
The Mediterranean countries are plunged into chronic drought. Water reserves have not recovered during the winter because it has snowed and rained too little. Lake Garda, Italy's most important drinking water reserve, is only half of its usual level. Tourists can currently walk out to a small island where they previously had to take a boat.
Abnormally warm oceans
Climate scientists put their foreheads in deep folds. The heat waves that hit Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Algeria in April with heat of up to 41 degrees would have been virtually impossible if it were not for man's impact on the climate. This was the conclusion of a group of climate scientists for WWA, World Weather Attribution, in a report on May 5. The world's oceans are also abnormally warm.
There are many signs that the warming of the earth's global average temperature is exceeding 1.5 degrees. This is ten years earlier than forecast.
By then, the world will have failed in the common goal of the 2015 Paris climate negotiations – not to cross that line. The 1.5 degree target was not set at random but is a pain threshold: warmer temperatures will, among other things, have serious consequences for the earth's coral reefs and knock out agriculture in the large area. A new research study from the Potsdam Institute shows that it risks leading to a permanent slowdown of the Gulf Stream, that the Arctic's summer ice will melt 40 percent faster than today and also have long-term consequences with the permafrost thawing. There will be more water vapor in the atmosphere with more extreme precipitation and extreme drought.
May be due to El Niño
Now researchers are speculating whether it is the first effects of the El Niño weather phenomenon that are already making themselves felt. The El Niño phenomenon consists of a part of the Pacific Ocean warming up. The phenomena are natural but are amplified by climate change.
"This will change weather and temperatures all over the world," said meteorologist Wilfran Moufouma Okia of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
With a 70% probability, we will see the consequences as early as July. Sweden, among others, may see a repeat of the summer of 2018, when 700 Swedes died of heat-related stress.
One of the world's best-known climate scientists, Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, says El Niño will be most felt in 2024, but that warm waters in the oceans are now being pulled to the surface and could lead to the warmer temperatures we are already seeing.
No one knows with one hundred percent certainty. But speculation highlights that we are taking enormous risks with the complicated systems that govern our climate. You can't send a text message and say we regret it.
We are challenging the very foundations of human life on the planet.