The CLIVAR-Spain Network(community of Spanish researchers who study climate variability at a regional level and as well as on time scales between seasonal and secular) has just presented the document “Climate in Spain: Past, present and future”. This is a regional climate change assessment report that synthesizes and evaluates the existing information on the physical aspects of recent climate change observed in the Iberian Peninsula, trying to improve the understanding of the climate changes that are being generated in order to better anticipate the impacts of future changes in climate at different time scales.
The report is based on contributions from more than 100 researchers and has been peer-reviewed by both the contributors themselves and external reviewers. In addition, the report includes conclusions published by other foreign and national authors with the purpose of documenting all relevant results. As the report indicates, it should be noted that the information contained is fully supported by publications submitted to external scientific evaluation and indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI). I draw some of the conclusions:
Records from the 20th century show a progressive increase in temperature that has been especially pronounced in the last three decades (1975 – 2005), when an average warming rate of approximately 0.5 ºC/decade is recorded. Regional projections in the Iberian Peninsula for the end of the 21st century show a significant increase in the average seasonal temperature, maximum in summer (6ºC in scenarios with greater anthropogenic impact) and
minimum in winter (2-3ºC).
Annual precipitation in the three recent decades has decreased significantly compared to the 1960s and 1970s, especially in late winter. Still, it is noted that overall, the anthropogenic signal in precipitation has not clearly emerged above the natural ‘noise background’. In particular, the marked decrease in summer precipitation projected by climate models for the end of the 21st century has not yet manifested itself in observations.
In closing, I refer to the recently concluded United Nations Bonn meeting on climate change ( little progress has been made on the road to COP 16 in Mexico), and at Obama’s statements at the end of March announcing the search for oil off the coast of the United States:
We will discuss the latter in subsequent posts; as Gorka Bueno said, fossil fuels are going to play a fundamental role in the transition towards an energy model based on renewables, so the remaining reserves must be used efficiently. .