They added that climate change can result in a slow worsening of living conditions for people in North Africa and the Middle East. They also said sooner or later, many people may have to leave the region.
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Jos Lelieveld, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Professor at the Cyprus Institute, found that the number of extremely hot days recorded in the region has doubled since 1970, and this number could increase by fivefold by the end of this century.
The results revealed that summers in both the North Africa and Middle East regions would prove to be unbearable due to a two-fold increase that will occur faster than anywhere else in the world.
Based on this, they found that the temperature in these areas during the summer is going to increase more than two times, even when the temperature of the Earth were to rise on the average of two degrees Celsius than the pre-industrial period.
Climate models suggest the region will regularly experience midday temperatures of 114 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of the century.
The study, published in the journal Climate Change, shows that either way, the region south of the Mediterranean Sea should be ready not just for blazing temperatures, but also for lengthier heat waves.
Climate change may make parts of the Middle East too hot for human beings, according to a new study. Combined with prolonged heat waves, decades-long megadroughts, and windblown desert dust, these environmental conditions would be intolerable for humans, forcing many to migrate.
In order to come up with this prediction, they analyzed climate data from 1986 to 2005, comparing it with 26 climate models over the same time period. “If humanity continues as before releasing carbon dioxide, the people of the Middle East and North Africa must even anticipate about 200 unusually hot days”, says Panos Hadjinicolaou, Professor at the Cyprus Institute and climate expert. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change.
In other climates, ground water accumulates when the weather is cool and wet, then evaporates as temperatures rise. A 2C global temperature increase doesn’t mean that temperatures go up by 2 degrees everywhere.
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The team looked at how Middle Eastern and North African temperatures will develop during the 21st century. One of the scenarios is based on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise without any limitations – or “business as usual”. Without this cooling effect, deserts heat up disproportionately under the hot sun and trapped greenhouse gases. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia daily high temperatures can exceed 40°C (104°F) for the entire summer.
