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Comment by littlecranky67

4 days ago

Canary Islands are part of Spain and probably unaffected from climate change - we have 19-22°C all year round. If it raises to 25° still pretty livable.

It isn't that simple, Canary Islands already counts with 2.2 million + tourists people and the fresh water is a highly risk resource even when desalinization plants are widespread, the groundwater aquifers are severely compromised. The mild weather heavily depends on the trade winds. But models predict that due to fact of being so close to Africa heat waves are prone to be more and more frequent compromising the water resources.

    and probably unaffected from climate change

No place is unaffected.

  • Most places will be unaffected. It'll only affect places where humans are, and we're not even close to filling up the planet

    • Climate change affects places where more people live in the sense that more suffer from it, resources get depleeted fast but the wild temperature fluctuations won’t spare much of the planet in various ways from wet bulb effects, costal erosion, air major currents changing, glaciers melting and so on.

Ok but most of the populated areas of the Canary Islands are a tourist shithole, not somewhere you would want to live.

  • The two capitals (Santa Cruz and Las Palmas) are pretty good spot to live in. Tourism focuses on the south on both islands. Las Palmas has a beach with a bit touristic activity, but its not drinking tourism like Mallorca or Benidorm. Combined with nice weather all year round overall a greaet place to live. Very walkable cities, you can do without a car. Due to nice weather, you can always go by bike or scooter. Taxis are cheap. Thanks to the tourists, cheap flights all year round, every day, to all major european cities.

    But yeah, if you come with kids, factor in private schools. The public system here is broken. As for internet, I pay less than 10€/month for 500Mbit fibre - I couldn't even get that in Germany and if could it would be north of 80€.

    • There's very little decent work though. If you live there you're either fully remote which is rare these days, or you work in the tourist industry.

      3 replies →

Are you sure? It is sometimes close to 30°C in summer in Fue. BTW, did you forget sealevel rises, dust from Sahara, what is you have many days of > 40km/h winds. all those are climate change.

Canary Islands will be affected (severely) for any change on the sea currents. Because the marine trophic chains will change.

A warmer ocean means much bigger storms over the islands. This has both positive and negative aspects.

Islands are extremely vulnerable to climate change all over, as they are completely dependent in near-term precipitation for all their water (no rivers, no aquifers).

  • No rivers and no water is reality here for quite a while already. The islands rely a lot on desalination, and there is a big EU-funded project going on to create a desalination plant that not only is used to supply tap water, but the water basin of a new hydroelectric plant [0]. Desalination pretty much solves water issues, IF you have the energy (ideally renewable).

    [0]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/construction-starts-on-200-mw...

    • Desalination solves water issues for tap water. Islands may be short on surface area.

      I would also never use the word "solve", as this is just for human usage. The ecosystems themselves are irreversibly destroyed.