Temperatures of 50°C will become much more common around the Mediterranean

Spring was a scorcher in the Mediterranean. A heatwave in April saw temperatures up to 20°C higher than usual in Algeria, Morocco, Portugal and Spain. Scientists used to hesitate to blame a particular piece of weather on climate change. These days they are more confident. World Weather Attribution, a network of climate modellers, reckons that the heatwave was made around 100 times more likely by the greenhouse gases that are piling up in the atmosphere.

In a paper published on May 26th in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, Nikolaos Christidis, a climatologist at the Hadley Centre, a branch of the British Met Office, look at what might be in store for the Mediterranean and the Middle East in a future, even hotter world. They were particularly interested in how often the region can expect to see days in which the mercury rises above 50°C.