Spain experiences its third warmest year on record: 2024 was marked by extreme heat and floods

Spain is getting hotter and hotter. This can be seen in the daily, monthly and annual records of the country's state meteorological agency Aemet. At the end of December a tweet from the national weather authority said "It is going to be the third warmest year in the historical series". The public brings together the data stored in its database since the early 1960s. As a result 2024, which will be remembered as the year of the floods, ended with an average temperature of 15C, a milestone that has only been surpassed twice: 2022 (15.4C) and 2023 (15.2 degrees).

In a brief thread on X, formerly Twitter, Aemet described 2024 as "an extremely warm year" according to their data. Of the twelve months, only two, according to the national average, have been cold: June and September. May was normal and the rest fell into the warm category, with January, August and November being "the warmest of the series".

Looking at the details of the daily record, the increase in temperatures is more visible. "One out of every twelve days has been the warmest for its date since data has been available," according to Aemet. Some 31 days of historical data were recorded, while none of the coldest days were recorded. "In an unchanged climate, in 2024 theoretically five record warm days and five record cold days would have been expected," Aemet explained.

In 2024, 2190 deaths were attributed to heat according to the estimated data provided by the MoMo Panel, the daily monitoring register on mortality in Spain. Madrid and Catalonia were the regions most affected by deaths attributable to excess temperature. In fact, these two regions alone account for 33 per cent of deaths due to heat, one out of every three deaths.

Spain's data is not an anomaly in the rest of the planet, it is just another symptom of global warming. All global reports point in the same direction: 2024 was a historic year. And not for the better. Nasa, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) all say that this year "will be the warmest since records have been kept". In some cases, these go back to the end of the 19th century. "The world has to abandon this path to perdition, we have no time to lose, and in 2025 countries must put the planet in a safer place by drastically reducing their emissions," said Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, in his end-of-year speech on Monday 30 December.

In the absence of the official picture with the latest figures this week, the average temperature, with the latest data uploaded to the European Commission's Copernicus near real-time record, is 15.1C, well above the 14.98 of 2023 which until now held the record for the warmest year. Although these data will be confirmed in the first weeks of January, 2024 will "in all likelihood" become the warmest year since data has been available.

This figure is included in "the warmest decade on record", the World Meteorological Organisation certified on Monday in its 'State of the Climate 2024 Update'. The organisation, chaired by Argentinian scientist Celeste Saulo, issued a new red alert. For 16 consecutive months (June 2023 to September 2024), the global average temperature is likely to have exceeded any previous record, and often by a wide margin, according to the WMO's data analysis.

Throughout 2024, a series of reports from the WMO community highlighted the rapid pace of climate change and its far-reaching impacts on all aspects of sustainable development. Record rainfall, catastrophic flooding, scorching heat waves with temperatures exceeding 50 degrees and devastating wildfires were documented. "We are witnessing climate collapse in real time. This path is doomed and we must abandon it as soon as possible," Guterres warned.

One of them, according to experts from various organisations, is the historic episode experienced in October in the southeast of Spain. Although eastern Spain has historically experienced episodes of torrential rains or Danas, three different reports (World Weather Attribution, Climatemeter and Climate Central) agreed that the rainfall at the end of October was caused by climate change and an atmosphere with 15 per cent more moisture - leading to more rainfall - and an event twice as likely on a warmer planet. Climate change also intensified 26 of the 29 events.

Climatologists reiterate that "every fraction of a degree of warming matters and increases climate extremes. Climate change manifests itself before our eyes almost daily in the form of an increase in the incidence and impact of extreme weather events," Saulo said. Heavy rainfall, floods and tropical cyclones caused enormous loss of life and damage. Persistent drought in some regions was aggravated by El Niño.

In Spain, beyond the tragic rains in the east of the mainland, rainfall has left a wet year. "The first since 2018," recalled Aemet. In total, the state rain gauges have accumulated a total of 670mm throughout the year, five per cent above normal.

Thanks to this water, the reservoirs are at half their capacity with more than 28,000 cubic hectometres stored, five percentage points more than last year and above the average of the last decade. However, not all areas are in the same health. The reservoirs in Murcia barely reach a quarter of their capacity and in Andalucía they barely exceed 34% of their total. "It has been a wetter year than normal in areas in the west of mainland Spain. Also, in the north-east and the north of the Mediterranean area. In this case, much of the rain fell in a single episode. In the extreme southeast and in the Canary Islands, the year has been dry," the latest Aemet report stated.

Global warming, driven mainly by the use of fossil fuels, has reached record levels in 2024, recording the highest temperatures on the earth's surface in thousands of years. It is also necessary to go back hundreds of thousands of years to find such a high concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These gases, largely generated by the use of oil, gas and coal for energy production, are closely linked, according to scientific evidence, to rising temperatures and the intensification of extreme weather events. However, as this crisis becomes more evident, right-wing populism is advancing in democracies, promoting climate change denialist discourses and confronting policies aimed at protecting the environment.