Climate Change Will Have The Mediterranean Producing Unprecedented Ecosystems For The Last 10,000 Years
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Global warming raises more and more concerns by the day, and the future of our climate is subjected to scientific theories and models to help us better prevent the effects of pollution and greenhouse gases on our day-to-day lives.
Temperatures increase all around the world, and in some particular regions heat is felt more than in others. The current temperatures in the Mediterranean basin are approximately 1.3 degress Celsius higher than the records suggest they were between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. During that period, the increase recorded was 0.85 degree Celsius around the globe.
The ecosystem triggers a biodiversity that's quite impressive for the scientific world, supplying various benefits to the region's inhabitants, from clean water to carbon storage, which makes this temperature increase all the more important.
Considering the effects of distinct thresholds established for the Mediterranean basin at the Paris Agreement, researchers used pollen from sediments, giving extensive details about the climate and ecosystem change in the area during the last 10,000 years. The scientists reconstructed past climates by studying pollen in different layers of mud lake. The degree of pollen gave them an understanding of the weather conditions.
Joel Guiot and Wolfgang Cramer, who applied the data models in a baseline estimate of the future climate change as we know it today, taking the agreements on global warming into consideration, came up with a series of scenarios for the climate and vegetation, given different possible temperature increases.
Two sets of simulations were carried out. The first one was "business as usual," and the second one was meant to double-check the data in the first one. Both of these suggested the goals of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, describing that the ecological change will tremendously exceed the Holocene episode.
The "business as usual" case suggested that the entire southern Spain will turn into a desert, with forests invading the mountain areas and wild vegetation replacing the better part of the transient forests in most of the Mediterranean basin.
During last year's conference, roughly 200 governments gathered in Paris with the sole purpose of coming up with a plan to limit the temperature rises to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial time. The ideal limit set on the conference was 1.5 degrees Celsius. In November, the same annual meeting will take place in Morocco in order to review the accord and its related policies.
The countries most affected by this climate change are southern Spain, Portugal, the northern side of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as a number of other regions such as Sicily, the southern part of Turkey and some parts of Syria, according to the same study.
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