Climate change could make sections of North Africa and the Middle East uninhabitable, according to a recent study.
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Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute have determined that North Africa and the Middle East could become uninhabitable by mid-century as global temperatures rise. And the second, called RCP8.5, assumes that greenhouse gases will increase continuously and the temperature of the earth will rise by more than four degrees Celsius. Experts estimate that by the middle of the century, summer temperatures won’t ever go below 30 degrees at night, reaching up to 46 degrees during the day.
By the end of the century, midday temperatures on hot days could even climb to 50 degrees Celsius.
“Climate change will worsen the living conditions in the Middle East and North Africa continue to clear”.
Climate change may render parts of the Middle East – now home to over 500 million people – too hot for humans, according to a new study.
Whether our climate change efforts improve our not, Lelieveld and Hadjinicolaou believe that the deterioration of living conditions for people living in the Middle East and North Africa is nearly inevitable and that sooner or later, people will be forced to leave the region.
Many areas in Africa are already incredibly hot – it’s only going to get worse in the future. The number of extremely hot days has already doubled since the 1970s, heat waves are ten times more common, and the effects of climate change are drastically visible. Was it in the years 1986 to 2005, the average for 16 days very hot, it is more than 80 days and the end of the century to be unusually hot mid-century to more than 118 days, even if greenhouse gas emissions are reduced again from 2040 is approached.
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.
We still don’t fully understand the social effects climate change will undoubtedly have, but many areas of the world are already hard to cope with, temperature wise. They based their projections on two separate scenarios, one in which greenhouse gases start decreasing by 2045, and one in which they don’t.
In addition to the rising temperature and heat waves, increasing air pollution caused by desert dust blown by the wind can greatly damage the environmental conditions of the two lands making it impossible for people to survive. Therefore, this assumption is also called business-as-usual scenario. Furthermore, they believe that the current goal to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius will not be sufficient to prevent this scenario. By 2100, the study predicts, there could be more than 200 days a year where the average temperature is 122 degrees.
These projections were made using two separate scenarios: one that assumed greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 2040 (if everyone follows the United Nations guidelines) and one that had them continue to rise – a condition they refer to as “business-as-usual”.
Unfortunately, both scenarios yielded dramatic temperature rises in these desert regions, particularly during the summer months when it’s already very hot.
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Deserts do not buffer heat well, which means the hot and dry surface can not cool by the evaporation of ground water.
