Experts sound alarm as winters get warmer and drier
An unseasonably warm winter may be welcome to households struggling to pay the elevated cost of heating, but it may also spell trouble.
“The upward swing in temperatures in December and January from the averages of 2010-2019, also a warm decade, has been striking,” says Kostas Lagouvardos, chief scientist at the National Observatory’s Meteo weather service, which reported that January was the warmest since 2010 and December in the past 12-13 years.
The impact of steadily rising winter temperatures has already been seen in the shorter hibernation of bears in northern Greece and the premature blossoming of spring flowers and bee activity.
Aridity is also a growing problem, with snow coverage this past November and December coming to just 2-3%, well below the 6-10% average of 2004-2021.
Such scant snowfall leads to a risk of “extensive shortages in groundwater and a drop in the water table levels,” warns Christos Zerefos, Greece’s top climate change expert.
