Globe Climate: Sicily illustrates Europe’s climate crisis

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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, the environment and resources in Canada.
I’m Rachel Ferstl, filling in for Sierra Bein this week.
As we wrap up the first week of fall, cooler weather is starting to kick in for parts of Canada – possibly to the relief of many Canadians who endured above-normal temperatures and heat waves this summer.
Some of those heat waves were made far more likely thanks to climate change, Environment Canada said last week when it released a batch of results from its new rapid attribution tool, which describes the influence of climate change on extreme weather.
The results showed that August heat waves in some of Canada’s most northern areas were at least 10 times more likely due to climate change, including ones in Inuvik, N.W.T., and Nunavut’s Kitikmeot and Kivalliq regions, where temperatures peaked between 12 and 13 degrees above normal.
Climate change made seven other August heat waves in Canada two to 10 times more likely, Environment Canada said, and one in Manitoba was made one to two times more likely.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Eric Reguly is the European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail and is based in Rome. For this week’s deeper dive, he talks about his trip to report on the Sicilian drought.
I have been to Sicily a dozen or more times since I moved to Rome many years ago. Each time, I flew to Palermo, the capital. To cover the Sicilian drought, I went by train. The drought is not unique to Sicily. I wanted to see how the landscape changed as I rolled into Italy’s deep south.
The view from my carriage windows looked normal on the first two-thirds of the nearly six-hour trip. When I reached the northern part of Calabria, the region that forms the “toe” of Italy, the profuse green of the farm fields and mountain valleys gave way to scattered patches of light brown, then extensive stretches of them, an indication of the lack of rainfall and irrigation water. The heat rose. When I reached the terminal for the ferry that would take me to Messina, the port city in Sicily’s extreme northeast, the temperature was a stifling 37 Celsius. At that point, I began to understand the severity of the Sicilian water shortages. “Crisis,” an overused term in journalism, seemed apt in this case.
The Sicilian coast, with its endless hotels and resorts, seemed more or less normal – the tourism industry will pay anything to fill swimming pools and water gardens. The interior was another story. Much of the land was arid, virtually indistinguishable from nearby Tunisia, a desert country I know well. Farmers I talked to were in a panic, none more so than those with livestock. Some had slaughtered their dehydrated cattle and goats because they could not get enough water for them or the price of water delivered by tanker truck was too high. It is an open secret that the Mafia steals water from reservoirs or irrigation pipes and sells it to desperate farmers at extortionate prices.
The drought is worst in the area around Agrigento, on Sicily’s south coast. I had trouble finding a hotel because so many were closed due to a lack of water for showers and toilets. Sicilians pray for rain. When I was in Enna, an ancient hilltop town in the island’s centre, we did get a short, intense burst of rain one evening. But the land was so dry that it soaked up the water immediately. By morning, when the heat shot up, the soil became hard and dry and cracked again. Sicily needs a monsoon, not a sprinkling.
Read more about drought-stricken Sicily, where shrivelled crops and depleted lakes are a harbinger of Europe’s climate crisis to come.
– Eric
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