Forum Debate: Where Are the Drought Predictions?

Drought, Ozone, and Sea Levels: The Warnings That Faded

Six consecutive weeks of winter rain and reservoirs at capacity. The start of 2026 in Almería broke the dry trend of previous years: January arrived with cold and snow in high areas, and by early February, accumulations exceeded 23 liters in spots like El Saliente, in Albox. With this scenario on the table, the question sweeping half the country is not meteorological, but one of memory: where are those who spent a decade predicting desertification?

The discussion is not new, but the shift in weather has turned it around. For years, a mild winter was dismissed as "normal." Now that it rains non-stop, that same argument is used in reverse. And here lies the logical trap no one dismantles: if what peine before was normal and what happens now is also normal, then there is nothing to explain. If what happens now is extreme, so was what peine before.

Why Did Ozone Depletion and Acid Rain Disappear from the Debate?

Because they were resolved, which breaks the narrative of permanent catastrophe. The ozone hole was addressed with the Montreal Protocol, and the substances causing it were phased out. Acid rain was tackled with industrial filters and low-sulfur fuels. In 1984, the German weekly Der Spiegel estimated between 2,000 and 4,000 annual deaths of children under one year old in West Germany due to infections associated with this phenomenon, attributing the death of a third of German forests to air pollution. That was a real, measurable problem with a technical solution. It was solved. And it disappeared from headlines.

That is the pattern that causes discomfort. The major environmental scares of the eighties and nineties had an identifiable cause, a responsible party, and an exit. Climate change, however, is a complex system where each year becomes evidence for or against depending on convenience. Hence why the question "where are they?" works so well as a meme: it points to the suspicion that the problem is not the climate, but the use of climate.

The Winter That Breaks the Scale: What Is Normal in Spanish Climate?

The short answer is that the temporal scale of climate is beyond human memory. Glaciations, even mini-glaciations, arrive after more or less intense warm periods. Europe experienced a Little Ice Age between the 13th and 19th centuries, with famines and plagues that stagnated populations for generations. And Spain has been covered with holm oaks for centuries, precisely because of their resistance to extreme heat, cold, drought, and excess humidity. If Mediterranean climate is characterized by its irregularity, six weeks of rain are not a cosmic anomaly: they are a streak within a very wide distribution.

What is true is that public perception is built through news broadcasts. When in June they announce the hottest summer since records began, the same faces will return with the same script. And in February, when it rains, they will disappear. Short-term memory is not a defect of the public: it is the result of a system that rewards alarming headlines and punishes nuance.

The Business of Climate Antiestéticar and the Energy Bill

There is an economic reading that almost no one puts on the table: while oil and gas came from Algeria or Russia, every barrel was a "terrible danger" to security and the planet. When supply shifted to depend on US liquefied gas, more expensive and transported by ships, the environmental dangers of the matter blurred. The price, however, did not blur: the consumer pays it on every bill.

One does not need to subscribe to the full conspiracy theory to recognize the pattern. Geopolitical objectives and climate objectives have overlapped until becoming indistinguishable. And when that happens, the credibility of the message suffers. Every time a public administration asks for sacrifices in the name of climate while signing contracts with regimes that are far from exemplary, it gives arguments to those who deny the problem at its root.

Estela, Vaccines, and the Rest of the Package

The conversation drifts, as always, toward the margins. Plane contrails appear, vaccination campaigns, public bodies as alleged cover-ups for an elite paid by taxpayer money. These are claims without evidentiary support, but they work as social glue: those who doubt official climate data often doubt the rest of the institutional narrative too. It is not coincidence; it is the internal coherence of a skepticism that has become identity.

The underlying problem is that this skepticism has a reasonable core. The scale of climate is enormous, models have uncertainty, and human action on a planetary system is difficult to isolate. Acknowledging that uncertainty is not equivalent to denying physics. Confusing both things is what turns a scientific debate into a trench war.

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With reservoirs full and a waterlogged winter, the narrative of eternal drought has lost its stage. It will return in June, with the first heatwave. And then no one will remember that it rained in February. That selective amnesia, more than any climate model, explains why the discussion never advances.