Europe To Continue To See Extreme Summer Conditions
Pastor Dale Morgan
Europe To Continue To See Extreme Summer Conditions*
Devastating floods struck parts of Europe in 2002 and 2005 (a cemetary
in Romania in the the 2005 floods, pictured) while in 2003, the
continent was gripped by a record heatwave that claimed as many as
35,000 lives.
Paris (AFP) Sep 14, 2006
Continental Europe's extreme summers of recent years, characterised by
heavy floods or killer heatwaves, could be commonplace by the turn of
the century, a climate study says. Its authors believe that changes in
the complex relationship between air temperature and land moisture,
driven by global warming, will cause European summers to suffer from
chronic variability by 2100.
Publishing on Thursday in the weekly British science journal Nature, the
Swiss research team say that the hot, dry climate zone of the
Mediterranean rim is destined to creep northwards as temperatures rise.
As a result, central and eastern Europe will suffer a "positive feedback
mechanism" -- in essence, a vicious circle in which higher temperatures
cause the soil to evaporate more and vegetation to breathe out more
moisture.
In damp regions, more airborne moisture and warm air help to fuel the
precipitation cycle, causing more and more rainfall and thus boosting
the risk of flooding.
But in dry regions, moisture is swiftly driven out of soil and plants,
leaving nothing to cool the atmosphere. As a result, the effects of a
heatwave worsen.
Complicating this process is the likelihood that as the climate changes,
the vegetation that it supports will change, too. For instance, in drier
areas, forests may be replaced by scrubby, heat-loving plants, and this
in turn will affect the moisture-atmosphere exchange.
Lead researcher Sonia Seneviratne, of the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, told AFP that the work was based on a new computer model
which predicted the effect of the land-moisture link on a map of Europe
with nearly twice the resolution of previous models.
It focuses in particular on the mechanisms that led to more frequent
heatwaves, but confirms there will be high variability from year to
year, with extremely hot spells or very heavy rainfall, she said.
Devastating floods struck parts of Europe in 2002 and 2005 while in
2003, the continent was gripped by a record heatwave that claimed as
many as 35,000 lives.
Previous research into climate change in Europe has also sketched the
risk of huge variability from one year to the next, but the underlying
causes for this were unclear.
Meanwhile, a separate study published in Nature said there was no
evidence to suggest that changes in the Sun's brightness over the past
millennium had had any significant effect on global warming.
Some scientists -- now a tiny minority, but backed by powerful lobby
groups in the United States -- doubt that the rise in global
temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution has been
caused by greenhouse gases released by fossil fuels.
Instead, they have suggested changes in the amount of heat and light
that Earth receives, either because of sunspots or because of tiny
shifts in Earth's orbit.
Source: Agence France-Presse