Projections on climate change, he says, point to longer summers, with springs and autumns with more summer characteristics.

Principal Investigator at Instituto Dom Luiz and professor at the Department of Geographic Engineering, Geophysics and Energy, both at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Pedro Matos Soares, PhD in Atmospheric Physics, is a specialist in regional climate modelling, climate change, extreme events and land-atmosphere-ocean interactions.

And it is with the aid of science that he twice tells Lusa: The climate in recent years is different from what it was two decades ago.

The climate, he explains, is portrayed on a longer scale, of 30 years, but after 23 of the new century there is already concrete data that indicates that “it is clearly different from what it was in the last century”.

“We were in a different climate until 2000. Almost every year at world, European and regional level we have records of warmer average and extreme temperatures”, he says.

With almost half of mainland Portugal (48%) in meteorological drought and experiencing a heat wave, according to the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA), the country has recorded several fires in recent days.

Pedro Matos Soares warns that the projections are that the risk of fire will increase and that they are “very worrying”. “The Government has these projections”, he says.

And the projections for temperatures? The specialist says that, for the next 20 or 30 years, the projections are all “very robust” pointing to warming and a greater frequency of weather events.

“All models point to this, but they depend on global greenhouse gas emissions. With the continuation of the growth of these emissions, the climate is of accelerated change”, but if the Paris Agreement is fulfilled, the increase in temperatures will be reduced, he explains.

Pedro Soares admits that, in societies, there is sometimes an “emotional perception” that the climate is changing very quickly, and adds that, looking at the data, there is indeed this acceleration.

The current situation contradicts the popular wisdom of “April showers”, but also the data about “very important precipitation in the spring”.

The professor points out that it is impossible to predict what will happen, but adds that he would not be surprised if the country was already entering summer, "because springs without rain tend to increase".