Greece should brace for another scorcher of a summer, expert warns
Weather events and patterns in the Mediterranean indicate that the region, including Greece, will experience a summer as hot if not hotter than the last, which brought successive heatwaves and raised the climate change alarm.
“We are watching the evolution of [weather] events in Spain and other countries in the Mediterranean, which, we need to note, is basically a hotspot for global warming,” Efthimios Lekkas, a professor of disaster management at Athens University and head of Greece’s Earthquake Planning and Protection Organization, told state broadcaster ERT on Tuesday.
“Why is that? Because we have a desert to the south – with the exception of a few areas, this is what it is – and this stands in sharp contrast to what is happening in the northern Mediterranean, where systems are in a precarious balance,” Lekkas said.
“There’s a very high probability that we’re going to have a hotter summer this year,” he said.
According to the European Environmental Agency, Europe as a whole is facing its warmest decade on record, with an average temperature increase of 1.11ºC to 1.14ºC warmer than pre-industrial levels. This is translating into more frequent, lasting, and intense heatwaves.
Greece experienced successive heatwaves last summer, with the temperature in many parts of the country topping 40 degrees Celsius for several says in a row.
