It's raining in the Balearics while Northern Europe is cooling off after a blisteringly hot long weekend. A report from the University of East Anglia for the European Union said that Europe could expect drastic climate changes by 2100. Over the past 12 months the Balearics, along with the rest of Southern Europe, has felt the brunt of unusually extreme weather and scientists are therefore now saying we should think not only about mitigation, but about adaptation as well. In other words, we should try not just to slow down our influence on the climate, but also to live with its consequences. The seas and oceans are gradually warming up, more slowly than the atmosphere, and even if we stopped pouring greenhouse gases into the air tomorrow, the water would still go on heating for decades ahead, if not centuries. The local agricultural industry is making the most of not having to fight against a drought for the first summer in the past decade but many will have to rethink what crops to grow because of the changing climate. Scientists believe that climate change was already measurable, and that extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will create a warmer, stormier world. But the question is what can be done. Some conservationists are against the argument that we should adapt to climate change as opposed to try and prevent it. There are other alternatives such as doing things more carefully than we do today, in particular saving energy, and even doing away with harmful items. Airlines could be made more fuel-efficient, for example and energy could be produced more in different ways by moving away from reliance on the fossil fuel trinity, coal, oil and gas, and towards cleaner energy sources. Some of these will be renewables like solar power, wind and wave energy, and crops grown specifically as fuel. Others may include fuel cells and hydrogen-powered cars. According to scientists we shall probably have to learn to live with quite a lot of climate change for a long time yet, but that does not mean it is going to rain for the rest of the summer - quite the contrary.
Climate change brings the rain