Climate Expert: France’s Future Weather to Mirror Morocco’s Within Decades

For several weeks now, hot air masses from the Moroccan Sahara have been causing heat records in France. Felt temperatures rise up to 39.3°C in Brest, Brittany, 39.5°C in Saint-Brieuc, 40°C in Nantes or even 42.6°C in Biscarrosse. "Each week only confirms empirically the projections that had been made by the climate models 10 or 20 years ago," said François Gemenne in an interview with Radio Classique. He notes temperature differences that "are in the order of 15 to 20°C compared to what we called the seasonal norms".

"There have always been hotter summers than others, but what is characteristic here of the impact of climate change, is both the fact that these heat waves are becoming more and more frequent - it is already the 3rd or 4th since the spring - and that these heat waves are above all becoming more and more intense. This is what explains that temperature records are falling one after the other, and in the future, these records will continue to fall. We cannot therefore compare these recurring heat waves with a few isolated heat waves that had existed in 1911 and 1976," explains the one who writes regularly for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The expert also explains the fact that temperatures are higher than the global average in France. [...] There are hot air masses that are brought from the Sahara and that are no longer pushed back as they were in the past, because the north of the continent, Greenland and Siberia are warming even faster. This means that these hot air masses remain over Europe, and this explains that heat waves will now be more frequent, in the order of 3 to 4 times more frequent in Europe than in other regions of the same latitude".

And to continue: "France will experience in a few years a climate that will approach that of Italy or Spain. And then, in a few decades, a climate that will approach that of Morocco or Algeria."