Growing up in Athens in the 1980s air conditioning was not exactly commonplace. Not in our cars and certainly not at home. We first got air conditioning at my parents’ home in the late 1990s. With very few exceptions during my childhood, we didn’t feel we needed any. Nobody did. Sure, the weather got hot in the summer, but it was pretty comfortable. The elderly didn’t die from heat stroke. The state didn’t provide air conditioned rooms for them.
“It’s the microclimate in the city that has changed, mostly due to the use of air conditioning units that heat the city air, the elimination of open spaces, the burning of the forests surrounding the city” some may claim. Sure, all of those are definitely factors in why Athens today can be borderline unbearable in the summer, even with air conditioning everywhere, but I was curious about what the data says about the changing climate outside of the city, where those ‘heat island’ arguments do not really apply.
So, using publicly available data from the US NCEI (I couldn’t find a Greek source with freely accessible weather data for Greece going back decades), I wrote a short Python script that analyses and renders the temperature at Elefsina Airport, outside of Athens, from 1980 to today.
The video my script generates may not be enough to demonstrate how significantly the climate has changed these past 45 years or so, but the following observation, based on the data, should drive the point home:
The average number of days with high temperatures of 35ºC or higher per year per decade has increased from about 12 days/year in the 1980s to more than 30 days/year in the 2020s. At that airport, outside of Athens. Also note that the eighties figure includes 1987, a record setting year and an extreme outlier for that decade.
So that settles it. Now, It’d be interesting to see how much the climate has changed in downtown Athens in the same period, for example. If only we had quality data.