Another 'gloom and doom' story

Today's Age has this story of pain in Spain. Excerpts:
"Of all the developed countries, it is in Spain where the warning signs of environmental disaster are most advanced. Spain's environmental ills read like the worst predictions of the panel's report come true.

A United Nations study published in 2005 warned that the Sahara Desert is poised to jump the Mediterranean, and that within 50 years one-third of Spain, including 90 per cent of Spanish territory bordering the Mediterranean, will be desert — Africa will enter Europe by the back door.
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Last year was Spain's hottest year on record. In the past 150 years, temperatures in Spain have increased by 1.5 degrees, compared with a global average of just 0.6 degrees. Madrid's average temperature has risen by 2.2 degrees in the past three decades, the greatest increase of any capital city in Europe. Rainfall in south-eastern Spain decreased by 23 per cent during the past 100 years.
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Spain's summer is also lengthening at an alarming rate, to the extent that spring arrives in Spain two weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago and autumn arrives nine days later, according to an EU study published last August.
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"The reality is that we are consuming twice as much water as our rivers and aquifers can provide," Julia Martinez, a water specialist at Murcia University, told Spain's El Pais newspaper last year. "We must make new plans. Our system of intensive tourism and inefficient farming is simply unsustainable."

Even before the building boom reached current levels, National Geographic Traveller Magazine, one of the world's leading travel magazines, agreed, announcing in 2004 that Spain's Costa del Sol (or the "Costa del Concrete" as the magazine called it) was the least environmentally sustainable tourist destination in the world. Spain's coast was, the magazine said, the "epitome of overdeveloped mass-tourism" and "the antithesis of sustainability".
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The fear remains, however, that even if Spain suddenly transforms itself into a good environmental citizen, the human impact on its environment may already be irreversible."