“The seesaw variability of global temperatures often engenders debate about how seriously we should take climate change. But within 35 years, even the lowest monthly dips in temperatures will be hotter than we’ve experienced in the past 150 years, according to a new and massive analysis of all climate models. The tropics will be the first to exceed the limits of historical extremes and experience an unabated head wave that threatens biodiversity and heavily populated countries with the fewest resources to adapt,” the University said in a press release.
The climate changed index accounts for two scenarios. The first is a business-as-usual scenario with no reduction in C02 levels. This scenario pegs Valletta as reaching historically extreme temperatures by 2038, which is 9 years sooner than the global average of 2047. Under an alternate scenario with greenhouse gas emissions stabilisation, Valletta will reach these historical extremes by 2054, 15 years sooner than the global average of 2069.
The study predicts that the Earth’s biological systems will be faced with a fight or flight scenario, and the tropics, which hold the world’s greatest diversity of marine and terrestrial species, will experience unprecedented climates some 10 years earlier than anywhere else on Earth...
Salt pans in Gozo, Malta, shot by Thyes, public domain
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