Global warming could trigger hurricanes, or tropical cyclones, over the Mediterranean sea, threatening one of the world's most densely populated coastal regions, according to European scientists.
Hurricanes currently form out in the tropical Atlantic and rarely reach Europe, but a new study shows a 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in average temperatures could set them off in the enclosed Mediterranean in future.
"This is the first study to detect this possibility," lead researcher Miguel Angel Gaertner of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo, Spain, told Reuters on Monday.
[...]
In a paper published in the American Geophysical Union Journal, Gaertner and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, used a range of regional climate models to assess the chance of similar events in the Mediterranean.
They found rising temperatures pointed to increasing storm intensity and, in the case of the most sensitive computer model, a likelihood of strong hurricanes.
Wow. That's interesting. AFAIK, it is the first to suggest it and that is very odd, because the temperature rise in the Med region is projected as far back as 2001 as being higher than the global average. A note of caution, while this may make sense on a certain level, this is the first paper suggesting this and only in the most extreme case. That means this is very, very speculative and until we see more papers supporting this assertion, treat this as an interesting, but not likely scenario.
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