With the recent heat wave and the ongoing drought, we are once again fearful of Climate Change – or, to be more exact, Global Warming.
The term “Climate Change” was coined by Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist, who advised the government of George W Bush in 2001 to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around the Earth heating up and drop “Global Warming” for the less scary-sounding “Climate Change”.
One term sounds like a pleasant day on the beach, while the other makes one worry for our children’s future. But the climate isn’t changing – it’s heating, rapidly!
Now, readers in Galicia may take this with a pinch of salt, but here in southern Spain, we’ve just endured a few scorching summer days… at the end of April.
We read that ‘Unusually warm April temperatures engulfed the Iberian Peninsula last week, breaking numerous high-temperature records and setting a new (preliminary) European hottest April day on record (Cordoba Airport reached 38.7°C on April 27th)’.
Of course, it could just be another anomaly, like all the other ones we have experienced in recent years; but there seems to be a likelihood that this summer is going to be long, dry and brutally hot.
"This is not normal. Temperatures are completely out of control this year," Cayetano Torres, a spokesman for Spain's meteorological office, told BBC News, (which prefers to stick to the safer ‘climate change’ terminology). The article also notes the concern over the likelihood of an increase in forest fires here in Spain this season. Last year, a record 310,000 hectares of woodland burned in Spain.
Not that we all believe this stuff. Wiki says that a whopping four out of 69,406 peer-reviewed articles on the subject of global warming published in scientific circles during 2013 and 2014 were from ‘negacionistas’, however ‘The campaign to undermine public confidence in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" organized by industrial, political and ideological interests, and supported by conservative media outlets and sceptical bloggers to fabricate uncertainty about global warming’.
One eccentric American site we found says that ‘nearly four people in every 10 believe climate change is mainly due to natural causes’, which translates as ‘it ain’t our fault, so why cut back on our contaminating industries?’.
Following from the Doñana debacle, a leading Spanish paper asks – is the Partido Popular a climate change denier? Pedro Sánchez evidently believes so.
Some denialists have taken to blaming the meteorologists for the high temperatures this past week – with the AEMET official weather forecasters complaining of endless harassment ("asesinos", "miserables", "os estamos vigilando") from Twitter-feeders and others.
Anyway, it’s now early May, with the summer set to begin on June 21st, to last until… Maybe we should have bought a vacation home in the north-west of Spain after all…