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Central Spain records temperatures of -25°C after snowstorm
- cal5k 6y agoCold-blooded Canadian here, so forgive me for asking - is this highly unusual?
- inglor_cz 6y agoSpain is kinda prelude to Africa, at least climate-wise. It gets cold and snowy in the mountains during winter, but something like that is highly unusual in Madrid.
- skrebbel 6y agoMadrid is generally considered one of the hottest places of Europe.
- otoburb 6y ago... and we wonder why so many Canadians move down south to California or Florida. Even cold-blooded reptiles like basking in the sun once in a while.
- RspecMAuthortah 6y agoYeah I am one of those cold blooded Canadians. Weird thing is if you look at what's going in Canadian real estate, the shitty weather is not reflected in price at all. Weather and the high cost of living in all the major Canadian cities (compared to the average tech income) were the two main reasons wife and I decided to move down South. Don't regret it for a moment.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIsn't Canadian real estate mostly a parking spot for foreign capital these days, and has nothing to do with the actual demand of people living there?
- mschuster91 6y ago> Weird thing is if you look at what's going in Canadian real estate, the shitty weather is not reflected in price at all. Some Chinese investor needing a safe heaven for their assets (and/or, in case some purge happens like with Jack Ma, for their family) that can't be seized at random by the CCP does not care at all about the weather, only about the country showing a spine to China. That is why the real estate market of Canada is so thoroughly messed up - a third of Vancouver's market, for example, was Chinese (https://www.fortunebuilders.com/one-third-of-vancouvers-real-estate-market-is-owned-by-chinese-buyers/ https://www.fortunebuilders.com/one-third-of-vancouvers-real...).
- bobthepanda 6y agoAlso, in terms of weather, it's all relative. Canada can get quite cold, but Vancouver is actually relatively moderate and is borderline Mediterranean due to its west coast location. Beijing gets both much colder and much hotter on a regular basis. Also, air quality in Vancouver is significantly better than in Beijing, which would have more impact on living conditions than just climate by itself.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoIt's no colder in most of Canada (the most populated parts) than most of the midwest or the northeast. Average temperatures in the winter in Toronto are only slightly colder than NYC. Yes, where I'm originally from in central Alberta, it gets cold as hell. But most of the population of Ontario (the most populous province) lives significantly south of the 49th parallel, on the same latitude as much of Oregon. Further south than Vermont, Maine, or New Hampshire, and due to weather patterns this side of the lake is actually a tad warmer on average than the south side in central NY. TDLR: Most of Canada isn't as cold as the stereotypes. Lots of Americans live in colder areas.
- antiman0 6y agoSpain almost never sees degrees below 0°C [1]. [1] https://www.climatestotravel.com/climate/spain https://www.climatestotravel.com/climate/spain
- marvel_boy 6y agoNot true. In the north range mountains there are below zero temperatures every winter.
- madia_leva 6y agoSpain has very different climates. I live only 30 kms away from the cost in the North of Spain and temperatures of -4 or -5 C are quite common in the winter. Some times we even have -10 C. So temperetures bellow zero are definitely common here.
- Xenoamorphous 6y agoIn the north it’s completely normal to have sub zero temperatures in the winter. My hometown doesn’t have a particularly high altitude (650m, i.e. not in the mountains) and the average low for January is below zero.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoSeems pretty unusual. Compared to the UK [1] which is much further North. [1] https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/top-ten-coldest-recorded-temperatures-in-the-uk/ https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/top-ten-coldest-rec...
- cogman10 6y agoInterestingly, even the UK doesn't get a lot of snow. That's because the gulf stream keeps it relatively warm for it's latitude. One of the major concerns of climate change is that may disrupt the gulf stream which would be disastrous for the UK. Their ecosystem depends heavily on the fact that water from the gulf of mexico keeps them unusually warm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream
- Ma8ee 6y agoNot only the UK, but the whole of Northern and Western Europe are kind of screwed without the Gulf Stream.
- alpaca128 6y agoFrom the article: > Spain's coldest night for at least 20 years
- soyyo 6y agoIn Madrid city it may snow one or two times a year, but not all years, also most of the time the snow goes away the same day it falls. A few years the snow remains in the city for a couple of days, but is not that common and is usually seen as a joyful event. But this time, the whole city was completely covered in snow, all of it. Cars abandoned in the middle of the street, people skying in the main avenues, it was crazy, no one I know has ever seen this here so if it has ever happened, it must been at least 80 years ago.
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- darthcoder4242 6y agoI am from Madrid, and I can tell this is in fact highly unusual. From time to time it might snow in Madrid a couple of days, but nothing like this. In the mountains of course it happen almost every year, but not in the plains... All the cities in central Spain are collapsed by the ice and snow (including the capital), there are no public transportation, emergencies services can barely make it into affected zones, a lot of people don't have water supply because of frozen pipes (including myself), trucks with food and supplies are still stuck and cannot enter in the city... This chaos is of course because we are not prepared for this extreme cold weather, and we are not prepared because this is VERY unusual. Let's say this is the same unusual as in the covid-19 pandemic,nobody would have imagined it a year ago.
- cal5k 6y agoAh. Well, that makes sense. When it gets down to -25 here (thankfully not all that often in Southern Alberta) I just don't spend much time outside... although -25C still isn't cold enough to necessitate plugging in the truck. It gets truly, bitterly cold in places like Saskatoon, Edmonton or Winnipeg... -40 is not altogether uncommon. My house of made of Insulated Concrete Forms and has an amazing r value. A hot fire in the wood stove can quickly heat the whole place up to 22C, even when it's -20 outside. It can snow 50cm over a 12hr period, though, and that's always fun to deal with. I've gotten badly stuck in my own driveway twice this year (it's 40 feet long & annoying to clear), and both times the snowblower conked out and I had to take the thing apart and fix it before I was able to go into town to get groceries. Clearing the driveway with a shovel is simply not possible unless you plan to spend an entire day doing it. Anyhoo, all this to say is - dealing with that kind of weather requires some preparation, and I can see how it would cause mayhem in a place where that's unusual. Hopefully when air travel becomes abundant again I can travel to Spain to enjoy its warmth :-P
- u678u 6y agoThe Spanish people definitely dont have Canada quality heating or insulation. Compared to most of the world Canada is pretty much like living in the arctic. :) Even Americans dont want to live in the top half of the USA any more.
- ficklepickle 6y agoLot's of Canada doesn't have "Canada quality" insulation, including my apartment but also a variety of houses I have lived in. I grew up in the Okanagan, where temps range from -20°C to 40°C. Many houses there couldn't deal with either extreme well. Even in Vancouver, -16 would freeze some pipes and kill some people. Not as bad as Madrid, but we are more accustomed to it here.
- dieortin 6y agoI don’t think heating quality or insulation is a problem for most people in central Spain.
- simias 6y agoWhy do you think that? It's a pretty big problem in old buildings in the Paris city center, I'd be surprised if Madrid fared much better given its usually hotter climate.
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- Jare 6y agoI remember back in 1984 or so, we once had snow in Madrid in May. Younger people laugh at me as if I'm just making that up, but what has just happened is way more unusual.
- logc 6y agoI remember that snowstorm, although very distantly! It must have been '84 or '85 ...
- tpmx 6y agoIn the mountains, at about 3k feet or 1k meters elevation. Yes, the headline is quite misleading. I expect more from the BBC. From the article: > The temperature plunged to -25C (-13F) in Molina de Aragón and Teruel, in mountains east of Madrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molina_de_Arag%C3%B3n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molina_de_Arag%C3%B3n > Elevation 1,065 m (3,494 ft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruel > Elevation 915 m (3,002 ft)
- dan1234 6y agoEven in Madrid it got down to -16C (average low for January is 2.7C).
- 88840-8855 6y agoTHIS. Plus, it is not that unusual. It happened 18 years ago already.
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- nend 6y agoThat doesn't seem very misleading. The estimated temperature difference for every 1000 meters in additional elevation is only 5-6C.
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- cs702 6y agoMentioning elevation without any context or reference to historical temperatures is not very helpful. Consider updating your comment.
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- antiman0 6y agoA few days ago, someone posted a blog post here on HN [1] explaining the phenomenon which causes this: https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/polar-vortex-collapse-winter-weather-europe-united-states-2021-fa/ https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/polar-vortex-co... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713704
- guidedlight 6y agoWe are also entering a solar minimum, the last one was linked to a “little ice age” in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum I don’t know how climate change will affect this. But we might be in for an interesting few years.
- throwawyeverytm 6y ago> The Maunder Minimum occurred with a much longer period of lower-than-average European temperatures which is likely to have been primarily caused by volcanic activity.[citation needed]
- Teckla 6y agoThere are literally two citations immediately following that sentence in the Wikipedia article.
- CraigJPerry 6y agoNo we just left a minimum, there’s been sunspots of opposite polarity appearing since early 2019 if memory serves - round about that timeframe anyway but the end of the minimum wasn’t confirmed until earlier in 2020. It wasn’t a Maunder Minimum. For the next 4 years or so we’ll proceed to maximum then back down to the next minimum thereafter.
- guerrilla 6y agoAs I recall, many comments there were very dismissive. I wonder if that senrinent will change.
- cs702 6y agoFor those accustomed to US/Imperial units, -25×9÷5+32=-13°F. Temperatures in Madrid dropped to -16°C (3°F). As others here have mentioned, these temperatures are unusually low for January in this region of Spain. They are the kinds of temperatures one would have seen in January during the "Little Ice Age" between the 15th and 19th centuries.[a][b][c] Let's hope this unusual drop in temperature is just a "one-off" rare climate event, and not a portend of things to come. -- [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age [b] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little-ice-age-changed-history https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little... [c] http://www.iberianature.com/material/iceage.html http://www.iberianature.com/material/iceage.html
- evgen 6y agoI believe that this is due to the recent collapse of this year's polar vortex. The same thing happened last year and pushed large amounts of cold polar air into Europe. We are expecting a few more waves of this over the next few weeks.
- PeterisP 6y agoIt absolutely is an example of things to come - scenarios like this are caused by the weakened polar vortex that generally separates European weather from Arctic weather; the polar vortex has become weaker over the last years because of recent climate change / regional warming, and it is strongly expected to become even weaker in the coming decade(s), making weather like this more frequent.
- waheoo 6y agoIs this related to the polar vortex collapse discussed just the other day, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713704
- throwaway5752 6y agoThis isn't related to the polar vortex splitting, this is the polar vortex that has split. This is a part of the cold air mass that normally sits on the North Pole, but on top of Spain. Normally the cold arctic air spins around the north pole stably because it is cold and low pressure in the northern hemisphere winter. Warm air intruded into it, destabilized it, and it spun out into lower latitudes with corresponding intrusions of equally hot temperatures elsewhere (Tibetan plateau https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1348693028022738951/photo/1 https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1348693028022738951/...)
- eznzt 6y agoGlobal warming at its finest.
- paulintrognon 6y ago*climate change ;)
- BelenusMordred 6y agoThe IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established in 1988, 32 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
- _nothing 6y agoYou can't have gone the past couple decades without anyone pointing out there's a difference between weather and climate, so I'm assuming you understand the difference but choose to ignore it in hopes that there will be people ignorant enough to believe you.
- bfieidhbrjr 6y agoMaybe we could ban them like Parler for all the WrongThink!
- just_steve_h 6y agoI know you're being snarky, but it actually IS likely a result of anthropogenic climate change! The north polar region is warming much faster than most places on the globe. Without its usual thick mass of ice, the region isn't cold enough to sustain the usual "polar vortex." Global models have been predicting for weeks that the vortex would split, and a lobe of very cold air would spin off over Europe, causing record cold temps. The debates are over and we are already living with the consequences of burning up so much fossil fuel. But your snark is, uh, really funny! Ha ha!
- yk 6y agoSo "Day after tomorrow" is the SF film that came true?
- tpmx 6y agoNo. It sometimes gets very cold in the mountains.
- duxup 6y ago>This woman in Madrid was doing her best to deal with the icy conditions on Monday No... not hot water to melt the ice and then have it freeze again.
- Jtsummers 6y agoIt was comical, but also sad, seeing people doing that in middle Georgia (US state, not country) a few years back when we had an unusual (for the area) cold spell with a lot of ice. Very few had scrapers and brushes for their cars to clear them so I was cleaning a lot of neighbors' cars while my own car was warming up.
- mschuster91 6y agoIsn't pouring boiling hot water on car glass a pretty certain way to shatter them by thermal stress?!
- Jtsummers 6y agoIt could, though I've never seen it happen when people tried it. It usually just refreezes and scraping (plus running the car heater) is the better option.
- yongjik 6y agoYes, been there, done that. Also, don't pour cold water on the windshield on a hot summer day, especially if the car is oven-hot and you don't want to be toasted alive inside, because... well...
- maaaaattttt 6y agoTo put this in context as well, most places (at the least in the southern parts of Spain) don't have central heating systems or proper insulation. A fireplace or reversible A/C if you're lucky.
- dieortin 6y agoIn the central parts of Spain they do have heating systems and proper insulation. Winters are cold there, just not as cold as this year.
- saool 6y agoI wouldn't extrapolate. Most places in Spain have and need heating, apart from a few coastal enclaves in the south. Spain is the 5th largest user of energy for residential heating in the EU, behind Germany, France, Italy, and Poland.
- maaaaattttt 6y agoI agree this is rather limited to the south coast and the islands. But I would argue that high energy consumption could, in this case, very well be the sign of poor insulation and inefficient heating installations (A/C).
- cambalache 6y agoOn what grounds would you base that on beyond your prejudices?
- maaaaattttt 6y agoI'm sorry if it came out as prejudicial. It was not intended in this way. It was more of an observation after having lived there for some years and witnessed it first hand. I did a quick search for more objective observations and what I found was: Homes labelled A, B and C account for less than 10% of the housing stock. […] Most of households in the sample (52%) are E rated. F and G rated residences account for almost 25% of the sample. [1][2] In Spain, buildings are currently responsible for 31% of energy consumption. […] the classification A - the highest - involves spending up to 10 times less than the G - the lowest -. Currently, in Spain most buildings have an E, F or G rating.[3] [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516301355 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... (4. Results and discussion) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label [3] https://www.interregeurope.eu/enerselves/news/news-article/2758/world-energy-efficiency-day-challenges-in-spain/ https://www.interregeurope.eu/enerselves/news/news-article/2...
- imnotlost 6y agoSnow in Madrid is definitely unusual but Spain gets snow every year. "You can go to Puerto de Navacerrada for a few hours of skiing then return to Madrid to continue visiting the many attractions in Europe’s fourth-largest city." https://www.justapack.com/best-ski-resorts-in-spain-ski-resorts/ https://www.justapack.com/best-ski-resorts-in-spain-ski-reso...
- harperlee 6y agoIt used to be more frequent. When I was in school, there was at least a day per winter when snow would not melt and you woke up to whit(ish) streets in Madrid (city). Nothing that jammed traffic or made us skip school by far, but you got some snow to throw around. Currently that does not happen; and when it happens it seems heavier. Last traffic-disrupting snowfall was 2009 in Madrid. In Madrid (region), at less than an hour driving, we have a Sierra where we used to have 3 skiing stations. Now we only have 2 (Navacerrada and Valdesquí) because Cotos had to close. And snow melts more quickly. My father always boasts that he once skied in the Madrid Sierra on May 15th, and with current climate that's difficult to believe. But I've seen how the skiing season gets shorter year after year. 15 years ago everybody made plans for going skiing to the Pyrenees on the Inmaculada holiday (early November), and currently all bets are off even for the Constitution holiday (early December).
- tgv 6y agoBut that's over a kilometer higher.
- raarts 6y agoFor those interested in events like this. There's a guy[1] that collects reports on cold weather records and maintains a mailing list. He's a wonky guy and kinda bent on the solar minimum but if you can see past that, his list does a good job of reporting on cold extremes across the world. [1] electroverse.net
- mactitan 6y agoWell he’s saying Site is being demonetized. It’s posting this interesting comment in the articles(that seems to contradict some of the posts on this thread): Both NOAA and NASA appear to agree, if you read between the lines, with NOAA saying we’re entering a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum in the late-2020s, and NASA seeing this upcoming solar cycle (25) as “the weakest of the past 200 years”, with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoThis is killing temperature even for the hardiest palm. So I'm wondering how much of their mature trees and landscaping will be destroyed
- kace91 6y agoThe city of Madrid, where I live, is currently full of fallen trees. I went for a walk a couple days ago and could count easily 10-20 just in the nearby streets. It's been pretty chaotic, since we're not used to snow at all. After 4 days roads are still unusable, supermarkets can't restock shelves...The city's pretty much stopped.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago-16C, as has been recorded in Madrid, is definitely lethal for olive trees. I don't know about the temperatures in the all of Spain or where the main olive orchards are but that has the potential for being devastating for growers.
- melenaboija 6y agoAlso last week "Spain records lowest temperature ever at -34C (-29F)" [1]. This is in the Pyrenees where is not unusual to reach low temperatures, but still freaking cold. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/spain-weather-snow/spain-records-lowest-temperature-ever-at-34c-idINKBN29B2BX?edition-redirect=in https://www.reuters.com/article/spain-weather-snow/spain-rec...
- spapas82 6y agoWow that's really strange because here in Greece we have probably the hottest January of the last years with temperatures around 20c!
- _Microft 6y agoIt’s not that surprising. While climate change is often discussed in terms of increasing average temperature, the change will come with much larger variations than we are currently experiencing. A lot of these extremes will ‚average out‘ but that won’t make hot summers or cold winters less unpleasant (or deadly).
- mobilio 6y agoIn Bulgaria too. But this weekend temperatures are going to drop to -10 to -15.
- renedet 6y agoWhere's the global warming(lie)?
- jwcacces 6y agoThis is global warming. The globe as a whole gets warmer, and the weather gets more erratic. See: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/climate-change-colder-winters-global-warming-polar-vortex/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/clima... https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/30/this-is-why-global-warming-is-responsible-for-freezing-temperatures-across-the-usa/?sh=67dc540ad8cf https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/30/this... https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/12/if-global-warming-is-real-why-is-it-cold-outside/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/12/if-global-warming... or anything else you get when you search "global warming colder winters"
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- tgv 6y agoIt's been called (anthropogenic) climate change because of insipid replies like yours. It's like my daughter saying that's she having social interaction because she's looking at tiktok, "and it's called social media."
- imtringued 6y agoThe name is based on an early paper from the 50s [0]. Global warming is an Algore rebranding that got lots of public awareness. Once the science took over it was back to climate change again. But yeah you are right. A lot of people just attack the used language and then shout "deception" when people are just talking colloquially because explaining everything from scratch gets very tiring eventually. The problem with climate change deniers is that they refuse everything so you have to actually explain everything from scratch time and time again. That's part of the strategy. Look for tiny mistakes and then deny the whole thing. Clarifying that one is talking about anthropogenic climate change instead of just "regular" climate change is a pretty good example. Ultimately the difference is meaningless because non anthropogenic climate change is insignificant on human time scales. Give me 500 years to prepare and I won't care. Give me 50 years and I will always fail. The worst part is that I don't even see any long term benefits to denying climate change. Even if it was completely fictional I still don't see any reason to not adopt technologies that would ultimately reduce the impact of climate change. Coal is a dying industry because of the economics. Oil is too precious to burn in cars (planes and ships are good use cases though). There is a general lack of investments to put central bank money into. Oh, did I just say "climate change denier"? I obviously mean "climate change skeptics". (I am awaiting a response that skeptic is also wrong) [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1956.tb01206.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2153-3490....
- pengaru 6y agoIt's predicted that Europe will get colder due to climate change. "Europe will get cold toes" - NASA [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DldSBIja2Kw&t=46s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DldSBIja2Kw&t=46s
- qayxc 6y agoOnly Spain isn't Europe - meanwhile 12° further north, temperatures are normal (even a bit on the warmer side) for the season. A single night of record breaking low temperatures doesn't mean much. 24 years ago today, it was -18°C in my little corner of the world, the next night it was more than 12°C warmer already. Freak weather extremes will increase in both intensity and frequency, but doomsday predictions usually don't hold much water as we know too little about the system as a whole and the feedback mechanisms involved.
- peshooo 6y agoWell, only the west coast of Europe. And only if the Gulf Stream stops.
- arcturus17 6y agoMadrid continues to be in utter disarray after this weekend's snowstorm, with most streets still covered in ice, many hardly penetrable even by foot. Supplies in some downtown supermarkets are low, with fresh produce completely out-of-stock. The fact that snowplows are nowhere to be seen and streets continue to be in such a poor state suggests to me that not only we are completely ill-equipped for this situation (which is normal), but that the situation is overwhelming and the few resources we do have are spread thinly across the country.
- throwaway5752 6y agoThis is completely abnormal weather for Madrid. It would be objectively stupid for them to have prepared well for arctic weather, given the average temperature in January is not even below 0 C and they get on average almost no snowfall in an average year.
- arcturus17 6y agoThat’s what I meant when I said it’s normal that we are ill-prepared for this situation.
- maxerickson 6y agoJust for the sake of comparison, Detroit gets ~33 inches of snow a year (~84 cm) and takes a number of days to clear out after much of a blizzard. It's not real worth it to have an excess of equipment that really only sees a few days of use a year (or decade!).
- OldHand2018 6y ago> It's not real worth it to have an excess of equipment that really only sees a few days of use a year (or decade!) That’s just silly. Almost every garbage truck in Chicago has the equipment to allow a plow to be attached to it. They can nearly double their fleet of plows for big storms, which are pretty rare. There was a unexpected blizzard in 1979 right before the mayoral election and the mayor lost because the city didn’t plow the streets fast enough. Ever since then, Chicago has always had more snow plows than needed. Even political cronies go out and shovel sidewalks because they are so afraid of losing due to snow.
- loosetypes 6y agoThese same areas have also seen increasingly warmer summers in recent times, right? While it may be hard to speculate short and long term regional changes, does anyone have a recommendations for interactive tools to explore, say, monthly temperatures for a given area for the past however many years?
- m12k 6y agoIt's worth reiterating that the problem is climate change, not just global warming. There's more energy in the atmosphere, and that can lead to warmer weather (on average this is the case) but it also means there's more energy to whip up storms or move regions of hot or cold air much further, to places that are not used to them. So unusually cold weather can in fact be a result of climate change.
- jansan 6y agoSorry, this is too cheap. Basically all you are saying is that climate may change (which it always has) and whenever there is an unusaual weather event, you can blame it on man made climate change. I am not buying this. If you were right, we should see at least "some" sort of trend, but at least in this official graphics, I just do not see it: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-tropical-cyclone-activity https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
- imtringued 6y agoI think the parent merely wanted to point out that accelerated climate change (which is primarily driven by humans) can cause both record high and record low temperatures.
- GnarfGnarf 6y agoThat's brutal. What kind of heating do these people have? Central heating, or electric registers in some rooms?
- simias 6y agoI can't speak for Madrid but here in Lisbon at roughly the same latitude we have no central heating and we usually go by with a single small ~900W space heater. According to wikipedia the all time record for low temperatures was -1°C, so it's usually fine. If the temperature was to drop to below -10°C I'm not sure what I would do. I'd try to buy a better heater, but so would half the city so that might be a problem. Madrid tends to have more extreme weather than here though, I suspect because the ocean offers us a certain thermal inertia.
- switch007 6y agoI lived in Madrid over winter years ago, and it dropped to -6c for a few nights. I'm from the UK so I'm somewhat used to colder temperatures (it's 0c currently for example), but my god, that is the coldest I've ever felt in my life. I went to bed dressed in 3 layers of clothes and I was still freezing.
- cosmodisk 6y agoI did work at -20C some years ago in Lithuania in one of my construction gigs. It's bloody cold, yet we kind of are( or used to be) used to cold winters and people usually are well prepared: clothes, tyres, etc. At -25C it becomes difficult to breathe. Now it's all good and nice for northerners,but how the hell the Spaniards can survive it?!