Soaking Up Spain’s Global Warming Expo
GLOBAL warming is making Spain as dry as, well, Spain in the summer.
On the BBC website, on May 13, 2008, David Shukman writes:
In a year that so far ranks as Spain’s driest since records began 60 years ago, the reservoir is currently holding as little as 18% of its capacity – at a time of year when winter rains would usually have provided an essential boost by now.
We are lost. Spain is lost:
But they may buy time for a highly controversial pipeline to be completed by the end of the year…. And it may also remind people of the forecasts from climate scientists of still drier conditions to come in the approaching decades.
As the newswires say:
The Spanish government said Friday it has cancelled a 180-million-euro (280-million-dollar) scheme to channel water from the river Ebro to the Barcelona region, after heavy rains eased drought fears. Deputy premier Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said the government decided the scheme was “no longer necessary.”
What happened? The Guardian knows:
After months of the worst drought for 60 years, Spain has experienced the wettest May since 1971; it rained on 18 days of the month.
At Expo2008 in Zaragoza, Spain:
And there’s water, water everywhere: dripping, splashing, trickling and hammering, cascading down the side of Europe’s biggest freshwater aquarium, meandering through the cathedral-like gloom of the Aragon pavilion and surrounding the Spanish pavilion like a moat.
The architect Patxi Mangado says he got the idea for this wonderful building – an immense roof supported by hundreds of slender terracotta columns – from a Pyrenean forest.
On the costas:
The heavy rain seen along much of the Spanish coastline during the Spring will help to keep the banks of jellyfish away from the shore this summer.
We must act before it’s too late…
Posted: 14th, June 2008 | In: Broadsheets Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
