Global Warming may increase salinity of Mediterranean

Climate change is affecting Europe faster than the rest of the world and rising temperatures could transform the Mediterranean into a salty and stagnant sea, Italian experts said recently. Warmer waters and increased salinity could doom many of the sea’s plant and animal species and ravage the fishing industry, warned participants at a two-day climate change conference that brought together some 2,000 scientists and officials in Rome. “Europe and the Mediterranean are warming up faster than the rest of the world,” said climatologist Filippo Giorgi. “It’s a climate change hot spot, one of the areas where we actually see the change happening.” Scientists still don’t know why the region is more sensitive to climate change, but Giorgi said that in the next decades, temperature increases hitting Europe during the summer months could be 40% to 50% higher than elsewhere.
Giorgi said the effects would be similar to those felt during the deadly summer of 2003, when the extraordinary heat was blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Europe and millions of dollars in agricultural losses