Climate Change Is a Major Factor
It’s impossible to talk about any heat wave nowadays without mentioning the climate crisis. Burning fossil fuels has raised carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to dangerous levels, increasing the odds of extreme heat. That in turn is priming forests for large wildfires, a situation we’ve seen play out with increasing regularity. Greece itself was hit with deadly fires in 2018.
It’s not just the heat that climate change is making worse either. A 2016 study found that climate change also worsened a decade-plus drought that hit the eastern Mediterranean from 1998 to 2012. The Mediterranean as a whole is also expected to continue drying out in the coming decades, making a bad situation even more dire.
“The Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected [in climate models] as going to dry in the future [due to man-made climate change],” Yochanan Kushnir, a climate scientist at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory not involved in the research, said at the time the 2016 research was published.
