This article describes how Spain is already being severely affected by Global Warming Woes. In fact, it appears to be the country that is showing the most negative effects so far.
By Anthony Ham, The Age
February 10, 2007
IF LAST week’s damning report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was a wake-up call to the world on global warming, there is a sense in Spain that it may already have come too late.
Of all the developed countries, it is in Spain where the warning signs of environmental disaster are most advanced. Spain’s environmental ills read like the worst predictions of the panel’s report come true.
A United Nations study published in 2005 warned that the Sahara Desert is poised to jump the Mediterranean, and that within 50 years one-third of Spain, including 90 per cent of Spanish territory bordering the Mediterranean, will be desert — Africa will enter Europe by the back door.
A recent editorial in the conservative ABC newspaper put the implications of Spain’s degraded environment in simple terms: “If things continue like this, we won’t need to go to Africa to enjoy the tranquillity of the desert. We can just go to the Canary Islands, Valencia or Murcia.”
But it is not only in the discernible signs of global warming and in predictions of impending environmental catastrophe that Spain appears to fulfil the developed world’s worst fears as expressed so clearly in the intergovernmental panel’s report. Nowhere is the causal relationship between human activity and devastating environmental conditions more evident than it is in Spain.
