Reports of findings which suggest that climate change will make the weather in the Balearics "better" and the islands a "nicer place to live" don't reveal the whole story. For every better or nicer, there is also a worse or less nice.
Javier Martín-Vide, professor of physical geography at the University of Barcelona, and Elvira Carles, director of the Business and Climate Foundation, have released a report entitled "The evaluation of the effects of climate change on the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euroregion"; the Balearics being a part of this region.
The headliner good-news aspects of this report are the weather being better and the place being nicer to live in. They also cover sun and beach tourism; its future is assured, says the report. The better weather will be as a consequence of longer summers, and these will bring benefits in terms of extending the main tourism season. But there are downsides. One of them is that temperatures might just become too hot and for too long a period in the height of summer. By 2020, the number of days when temperatures will reach or exceed 30 degrees will increase by around a quarter. By 2050, the number will double - to an average of 73 days.
Some might wonder how this can be a downside. There are certainly those people, primarily holidaymakers, who like things hot, hot, hot rather than just hot. So where's the problem? For holidaymakers, I'm not sure that there is a problem. For people living on the islands, there might be. If you can recall the summer of 2003 when temperatures were 30 or higher for several weeks, then be careful what you wish for in terms of hotter summers.
The heat is only part of the story, though. Rainfall is expected to remain at its current level until 2020, but by 2050 it will have decreased. Longer summers and so therefore shorter winters will mean a lowering of water resources. But there will be a heightening of a different water resource - the sea level.
Nothing in this report is new, but its good-news aspects drown out the findings of other reports, those which estimate the rise in sea level and which also predict more extreme events - hurricanes and tsunamis. All the good news could potentially be washed away, unless decisions are taken by those in authority who might presently prefer to bury their heads in the sands of a Balearics beach but who eventually find themselves asphyxiating as the rising sea crashes over them.
The changing climate does undoubtedly offer benefits, and especially for tourism. If Balearics winters were more on a par, temperature-wise, with the Canaries, then the winter woes would disappear. Having said this, the temperatures in the Canaries, assuming those islands haven't been obliterated by tsunamis, will also rise, thus elevating the winter-tourist expectation of what temperatures should be.
But it is the disadvantages that need to be addressed, and I am unaware of their being addressed in any meaningful, strategic manner. Let's spell out some of these disadvantages: periods of drought and possibly prolonged periods; loss of up to 20 metres of beach and coasts by 2050; increased energy demand to serve air-conditioning systems; the possibility of malarial mosquitoes returning. These are disadvantages that previous reports have indicated. Of these, the energy demand may well be compensated for by a reduction in demand for heating, so this may even itself out, but it shouldn't inhibit an altogether more proactive approach to the harvesting of the natural resource of solar energy and renewables, one that currently contributes so little to the overall supply of the islands' electricity.
More pressing are the periods of drought and especially the loss of coastline because of the rising sea level. Though 20-metre loss of beach sounds like bad news, it is hard to conceive what it might mean in practice. From all the modelling that scientists have produced in studying the impact of climate change, it would be instructive to see what this rise in sea level would mean to existing coastal development. Whether it would be Doomsday or just a bit of an inconvenience, a model needs to be constructed of the effects on every coastal resort and settlement in the Balearics.
The national government's altogether more pragmatic attitude towards coastal development, as contained in its reformed coasts law, is probably to be welcomed, but does it take sufficient or any account of rising sea levels and the possibility of extreme events? It is the rise in sea level, more than any other impact of climate change, that needs to be paid serious attention in the Balearics. Not in a few years time. But now.
QUIZ: The answer to yesterday's little question - "From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station", The Pet Shop Boys, "West End Girls". Incredible to think this is nearly 30 years old.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Showing posts with label Temperatures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Temperatures. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Rattle And Hum: Air-conditioning
Could you live without air-conditioning in the heat of a Mallorcan summer? Many make do without it. Like me. I rarely even put it on in the car. To some extent, it has to do with home design and situation, especially the interaction of the position of the sun during the day and any shielding, such as an intervening terrace roof. But even without the influence of direct sunlight, the temperatures are high.
Air-con is hardly cheap to run. It can also be expensive to install. A restaurant owner recently explained to me that a new system had set him back 50,000 euros. That's a lot of lunches and dinners to be sold. Home units may not come to anything like this amount, but neither are they inexpensive.
Somewhere still lurking in the Wacky Department of the Spanish Government is a proposal for temperatures in bars and restaurants, one that would also insist on doors being closed and operated automatically, in order to limit changes to temperatures inside. The proposal was that interior temperatures would not be lower than 26 degrees (79 Fahrenheit) during the summer months. It was and is a mad proposal, but the thinking behind it was to conserve energy and to be environmentally friendly. It is still possible that it might actually be passed into law, at a stroke rendering air-con units more or less redundant. That it seems to have been put on the back burner, so to speak, probably has more to do with the politics of the smoking ban than any desire to save the planet.
Air-con has become pretty much de rigueur for bars and for hotels. Its presence forms part of the promotional mix. "We have air-conditioning." But not all hotels do, especially the older stock. I am led to believe that Bellevue - all 1400 plus apartments of it - could finally be kitted out with air-con. The new owners have an air-con company in their portfolio. It would still represent a massive investment, even given some favourable inter-company transfer pricing, to say nothing of the need for a dedicated system of power generation and also the charges to the guests.
In 2003, the summer of outrageous heat, the power system in Mallorca gave up one day in August. The outage lasted for up to eleven or twelve hours in parts of the island. We are told that there is plenty of capacity now to meet demand, but just think about the level of supply - for all those hotels, restaurants, shops, homes and everything else. One can argue that demand for electricity is very much lower in winter, thanks to all those cold hotels being closed. Open them all up and the gross demand for energy on the island would be significantly greater than it currently is. Perhaps this is a good reason for there only being limited winter tourism.
Air-con units and the demand for electricity have now moved into overdrive if not overload, but the temperatures are still not particularly excessive, despite an average two-degree above normal for the start of July. The fear is that, somewhere down the line, temperatures will become excessive and normal. The demand would be colossal.
The good news is that the island's power stations now have capacity, at least for current needs and a foreseeable future not sent haywire through climate change. The new one in Palma, that was opened in 2006, should be capable of handling estimated increases in demand of up to 6% per year. The growth in demand had actually gone up by a third in the five years before the plant started operating. The arrival of natural gas should be an advantage, albeit not to the plant in Alcúdia, which is coal-fired and which remains a bone of contention for environmentalists - Greenpeace have, in the past, tried to stop the shipping of coal to Mallorca.
The answer to the original question is almost certainly no. No you couldn't live without air-conditioning, and it may be that air-con becomes a matter of life or death, if we are to believe the predictions as to temperature rise. For now though, you can be sure that there will not be a collapse of the power system and that the air-con unit can rattle and hum away, racking up the electricity bill. There again, you could always keep the windows open. Or could you? Some would argue that an open window just lets in warm air, while at night in fly the mosquitoes. And then there is always that mad proposal. To air-con or not to air-con? Who'd be one who wants to save the planet?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Air-con is hardly cheap to run. It can also be expensive to install. A restaurant owner recently explained to me that a new system had set him back 50,000 euros. That's a lot of lunches and dinners to be sold. Home units may not come to anything like this amount, but neither are they inexpensive.
Somewhere still lurking in the Wacky Department of the Spanish Government is a proposal for temperatures in bars and restaurants, one that would also insist on doors being closed and operated automatically, in order to limit changes to temperatures inside. The proposal was that interior temperatures would not be lower than 26 degrees (79 Fahrenheit) during the summer months. It was and is a mad proposal, but the thinking behind it was to conserve energy and to be environmentally friendly. It is still possible that it might actually be passed into law, at a stroke rendering air-con units more or less redundant. That it seems to have been put on the back burner, so to speak, probably has more to do with the politics of the smoking ban than any desire to save the planet.
Air-con has become pretty much de rigueur for bars and for hotels. Its presence forms part of the promotional mix. "We have air-conditioning." But not all hotels do, especially the older stock. I am led to believe that Bellevue - all 1400 plus apartments of it - could finally be kitted out with air-con. The new owners have an air-con company in their portfolio. It would still represent a massive investment, even given some favourable inter-company transfer pricing, to say nothing of the need for a dedicated system of power generation and also the charges to the guests.
In 2003, the summer of outrageous heat, the power system in Mallorca gave up one day in August. The outage lasted for up to eleven or twelve hours in parts of the island. We are told that there is plenty of capacity now to meet demand, but just think about the level of supply - for all those hotels, restaurants, shops, homes and everything else. One can argue that demand for electricity is very much lower in winter, thanks to all those cold hotels being closed. Open them all up and the gross demand for energy on the island would be significantly greater than it currently is. Perhaps this is a good reason for there only being limited winter tourism.
Air-con units and the demand for electricity have now moved into overdrive if not overload, but the temperatures are still not particularly excessive, despite an average two-degree above normal for the start of July. The fear is that, somewhere down the line, temperatures will become excessive and normal. The demand would be colossal.
The good news is that the island's power stations now have capacity, at least for current needs and a foreseeable future not sent haywire through climate change. The new one in Palma, that was opened in 2006, should be capable of handling estimated increases in demand of up to 6% per year. The growth in demand had actually gone up by a third in the five years before the plant started operating. The arrival of natural gas should be an advantage, albeit not to the plant in Alcúdia, which is coal-fired and which remains a bone of contention for environmentalists - Greenpeace have, in the past, tried to stop the shipping of coal to Mallorca.
The answer to the original question is almost certainly no. No you couldn't live without air-conditioning, and it may be that air-con becomes a matter of life or death, if we are to believe the predictions as to temperature rise. For now though, you can be sure that there will not be a collapse of the power system and that the air-con unit can rattle and hum away, racking up the electricity bill. There again, you could always keep the windows open. Or could you? Some would argue that an open window just lets in warm air, while at night in fly the mosquitoes. And then there is always that mad proposal. To air-con or not to air-con? Who'd be one who wants to save the planet?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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