by Amanda Ines

Created on: August 27, 2010   Last Updated: March 12, 2011

I have never known such  dramatic climate changes as we have seen during the last decade and the amount of natural catastrophies that have happened. It has been horrendous and my mind boggles when I hear people insisting that we are not going through a climate change. We cannot deny it, unless we are behaving like ostriches and hiding our heads in the sand, that the climate has changed all over the world and that the recent weather patterns have become dangerous!  There have been more earth quakes and recently the biggest and most ferocious tsunami which has devasted parts of Japan.

For example, I have lived in the south of Spain for the last 30 years and had never seen a summer like last year in 2009. The norm in a Spanish summer was to have one or maybe 2 days during which the temperatures rose to 40 but last year there were about 14 days where the temperatures rose to 40 and about 2 or 3 when they rose as high as 45. One day last summer I had left my car parked out under the sun while I lunched with a friend only to find when I came back to it at about 4.30 in the afternoon that the thermometer of the car read 50 degrees centigrade. There was no way that I could get into that car as I couldn't even touch the steering wheel and certainly couldn't sit down on the seat so I had to turn the engine on and stand outside while I left the air conditioning run for at least 10 minutes in order to cool it down enough for me to be able to get in.  I know that I was guilty in that moment of adding to the harm caused in the ozone layer and consequently the climate but when faced with such heat one's logic no longer works well!

The heat was just stifling last summer and in Morroco just across the straits of Gibraltar they were registering constant records of 50 degrees in the shade!

And now in the winter, which in Spain usually only lasts at most three months, starting in December through to beginning of March, there have been howling winds and non stop rain for three solid months which has incurred villages to be flooded with water reaching up to 2 metres high in their houses, cave houses collapsing not being able to cope with the water impregnated earth above them, crops ruined, roads cut off and many houses crumbling to pieces due to the land that they stood on being almost converted to quick sand! It has been just horrific this year and due to the weather has left thousand of families completely homeless and without any of their possessions and for the ones that weren't affected by the weather, they were affected by the loss of their jobs and unable to keep up with their mortgage payments.

What a year - first the economic crisis, then the weather hitting out so hard. So I can't avoid having to say that this is all quite frightening and anyone that says that the climate of the world is not experiencing a real change has to be either unobservant or has been sleeping through the whole of the past 12 months!

There have been more earthquakes than ever before, more tsunamis, floods, massive icebergs breaking off, torrential rains causing drastic land slides and flooding of large areas and most incredible was seeing snow on the beaches of Spain!  So to repeat the observation one more time, there is definitely an evident and clear case of climate change, and in most cases this is leading to dangerous weather patterns because if each year from now on the weather that has been experienced recently repeats itself and the damage caused repeats itself, it will be too much for poor areas to recover from.

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