Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: How disappointing is the UN forecast for the Mediterranean

The predictions are dramatic, but we’ll probably have to get used to them. For the coming week, weather services forecast temperatures of up to 45 °C for parts of southern Italy. “We need to pay utmost attention to the temperatures we expect in the coming days,” have warned Italian Civil Defense chief Fabrizio Cursio. Behind them were already “tough and dramatic days” on the “front of fighting the wildfire”.

around him Mediterranean Sea Is it burning now, beside Italy are mainly parts of Greece and Turkey widely affected. and there is an end not in sight.

Now, the current heat wave in the region alone is no clear evidence of a climate crisis – not all seasons are created equal. Even heat alone does not immediately cause fires and other human influences also play a role. Greek investigators report arrest due to suspected arson. However, one thing is clear among experts: the Mediterranean region is so – along with other regions of the world. Arctic – a hotbed of climate change in the saddest, saddest sense of the word.

This is also evident from the draft of a document by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). AFP news agency Reported. Accordingly, the region has to be prepared for stronger heat waves, droughts and more fires – but not only: » Risks associated with rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity on land and sea, are associated risks, among other things. Health risks in urban and rural settlements due to drought, wildfires, changes in the water cycle, endangered food production, heat, as well as changed pathogens «.

The progress report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change appears in stages. The draft Working Group I, which deals with the physical fundamentals of climate research, was published on Monday (Read Here a comprehensive analysis). Among other things, it is about the basic question of which of the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes the actual warming.

Scientists involved in the report warn, among other things, that global average temperatures have already risen by 1.5 degrees from pre-industrial levels. must arrive first as compared to earlier. Especially in the early 1930s.

The new forecast also has something to do with the fact that the researchers slightly adjusted the pre-industrial period’s temperature value by 0.08 degrees, based on the new findings. The fact that the 1.5-degree mark will now probably be reached earlier doesn’t mean that the projected effects of the associated warming will happen more quickly, too. Still, the finding is dramatic.

Friedrich Otto, author of the chapter on extreme weather and head of the Institute for Environmental Change at the university, warned, “The warmer it gets around the world, the more we will see extreme events that have never been or have never been achieved before.” Were.” of Oxford.

The part of the climate report that the AFP news agency quotes for the Mediterranean region is still a work in progress. Working Group II, headed by marine biologist Hans-Otto Portner from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, is responsible for this. He and his colleagues want to present the results next February. It is clear, he tells SPIEGEL, that the details in the documents currently being discussed will still change. “What we are currently seeing at peak in the Mediterranean fits the estimates.”

The draft report warns of an above-average rise in temperatures in the region, which is about 20 percent above the global average. It is interesting that in the case of the Mediterranean region this should not translate into heavy rainfall – and although warmer air may actually absorb more water vapour.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just discovered why I »Journal of Climate« Explains: They blame a combination of changes in the winds in the upper atmosphere, the position of the mountains in the Mediterranean Sea, and the decreasing temperature difference between the land mass and the ocean.

According to a draft IPCC report, 93 million people in the northern Mediterranean could be exposed to high or very high heat stress by the middle of the century. And there’s also a prediction regarding wildfires: The area burned could increase by as much as 87 percent if the world’s temperature rises by an average of two degrees. If it is three degrees higher, it can also be 187 percent.

Vegetable dries up and becomes flammable

“Climate change means that Mediterranean landscapes are becoming more and more flammable as vegetation dries up and becomes flammable,” says Matthew Jones of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK.

As already mentioned, a single heat wave does not represent a trend. One year of wildfires cannot be directly attributed to climate change. But research now has credible findings on this. “The report makes it very clear that climate change is a game changer in the summer,” says researcher Otto, in a Working Group I lesson presented Monday, especially since combined extreme weather is more likely to occur as temperatures rise, i.e., summer. Droughts or heavy rains and storms come together due to waves and climate change.