Scorching Summers in Store for Mediterranean

[villager]

Source: LiveScience.com

Scorching Summers in Store for Mediterranean

Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer

Scorching heat could spell more dangerous summers for the Mediterranean over the next 100 years, a new analysis finds.

A 2003 heat wave took 15,000 lives in France and 3,000 in Italy as temperatures soared over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but if greenhouse gases continue to build up in the atmosphere at their present rate, temperature rises could dwarf those in Europe during that summer.

“Rare events today, like the 2003 heat wave in Europe, become much more common as greenhouse gas concentrations increase,” said study team leader Noah Diffenbaugh of Purdue University in Indiana.

In a simulation using emissions scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sweltering temperatures “become the norm and the extreme events of the future are unprecedented in their severity,” he added.

The analysis, funded by the National Science Foundation and others, indicated that daily temperatures currently found in Europe’s hottest two weeks of the summer will become the normal temperatures for the coldest two weeks.

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Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070614/sc_livescience/scorchingsummersinstoreformediterranean

[kurth]

1. Time to buy real estate in Norway

[sutz12]

2. Nice idea, but....

If the Gulf Stream shuts down (the great ocean conveyor) Norway will freeze.

[villager]

3. "Old Europe's" change to "New Europe" ain't gonna be easy....

n/t

[smirkymonkey]

4. Even Central Europe has been getting Mediterranean like

temperatures all spring. It's been in the 80's & 90's in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Munich since May.