MADRID: The extreme heat that engulfed the Iberian peninsula and parts of north Africa last week would have been “almost impossible without climate change,” an international scientific study found on Friday. In Morocco, local records were broken with temperatures soaring above 41C in some places, while in Algeria, they exceeded 40C. “Human-caused climate change made the record-breaking heatwave in Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Algeria at least 100 times more likely and the heat would have been almost impossible without climate change,” the WWA report found. It caused “temperatures up to 3.5 degrees C hotter than they would have been without climate change” provoking an event they described as “rare”. “The Mediterranean is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change in Europe,” said Friederike Otto, a senior climate science expert at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at London´s Imperial College.

Source: The North Africa Journal May 06, 2023 12:57 UTC