Temperatures in the Middle East and North Africa have already risen 2 degrees Celsius and climate change has barely even started
Ruth Schuster. Dec 1, 2024
Parts of the Middle East already face barely survivable temperature spikes in summer and climate change has barely gotten started. Now a new study warns that the region can expect average temperatures to rise by as much as 9 degrees Celsius, which is a staggering 16.2 degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100.
That horror scenario is based on the “high emissions” situation in which we do not stop emitting greenhouse gases but continue to twiddle our thumbs and greenwash our filthy habits.
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We already knew that the Middle East and North Africa are warming twice as fast as the global average. Temperatures here have been rising by about 0.45 degrees Celsius per decade, and that isn’t expected to slow. It’s already about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter in the region on average compared to the preindustrial period.
The paper by Abdul Malik of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Muhammad Usman of Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates and colleagues, published in the November journal of the American Geophysical Union, speaks of averages, not the temperature spikes characteristic of the planetary destabilization already happening. Like heat waves of 40 degrees above the norm in the Arctic. Imagine a heat wave in Arabia that’s dozens of degrees above the already horrible 52.7 degrees Celsius recorded in Al-Jahra, Kuwait, in 2022.
In its press release, the American Geophysical Union calls the predicted increase “staggering.” Deadly also works. After the arbitrary cutoff point of 2100, things are expected to get even worse – but let’s burn down one tree at a time.
Do note that one cannot use air-conditioning when the heat is so great because power plants have to shut down as the seawater used to cool them is too hot. In fact, what exactly we can survive without technological aids such as air-conditioning and ice is still under investigation. If anything, scientists have been lowering estimates. Now that it’s not merely academic, scientists have been venturing beyond immobile test subjects in labs and began to factor in things like movement and sweating.
The latest research suggests that active people will start to keel over at wet-bulb temperatures beginning at 26 degrees Celsius for the young and 21 degrees Celsius among the elderly. (Wet-bulb temperature is what a thermometer measures when its mercury bulb is covered in cloth wetted with water at the ambient temperature. In other words, at 100-percent humidity.)
Of course we all differ. But scientists have been warning that a global average increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius would be catastrophic – it certainly has been so far – and prophecies of climatic destabilization are coming true. Note the flood of “once-in-a-generation” floods. So, an increase of 9 degrees on average in an already super-hot, arid region is extremely worrisome.
The American Geophysical Union points out that the temperatures could render the affected parts of the Middle East uninhabitable two to three decades before the rest of the world. Again, this is not a new prediction. Some have been warning for years about mass climate migration out of Africa and the Middle East, with as many as half a billion people seeking succor.
Is the Middle East and North Africa really the fastest-warming place on the planet? The Arctic is warming at about the same pace, if for different reasons. The deserts of the Middle East and Sahara can’t cool through evaporation of soil moisture, because they have hardly any. Up north, ice reflects sunlight and, as the ice melts, less sunlight is reflected and more is absorbed by the dark-complected seas. QED.
In one of those little ironies, separate work suggests that the world’s cities are being protected from the heating, to a degree, by some of the crud we’re pouring into our skies, a boon that may not last. “High aerosol emissions have kept some cities cool by reducing solar radiation,” according to a study published in Geophysical Research Letters. So if we reduce pollution, we risk accelerating temperature rise in the cities. Oh well.
Meanwhile, the coasts of Arabia are relatively cooler, inland is hotter and Malik clarifies that some areas in the Middle East will warm faster than others. The uptrend will be especially palpable in inland Arabia – which, it turns out in very separate research, was on the map of humankind tens of thousands of years ago. A single finger bone from 85,000 years ago found that in deep sapiens prehistory, we were present on the peninsula, crossing it while leaving Africa, and/or going back. It seems that privilege is fated to be history.