climate change

The DANA that devastated the province of Valencia on 29 October, leaving more than 200 people dead and many missing, has been followed by another one, still located over the peninsula. How can we adapt to these extreme phenomena? What repercussions do they have on public health? How can the public prepare for them? The Science Media Centre España organised a briefing session with two experts and an expert from the CSIC to discuss these questions. 

The largest carbon balance report shows that carbon dioxide emissions have not yet peaked and are projected to reach 37.4 billion tonnes by 2024. In a briefing organised by SMC Spain, Pep Canadell, one of the people in charge of the Global Carbon Budget 2024, analysed these data and what Donald Trump's return as US president means for climate action in the framework of COP29 in Baku.

There are still no clear signs that global fossil carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions have peaked, according to the 2024 Global Carbon Budget. The report - which is published in the journal Earth System Science Data in preprint format and will be launched at COP29 in Baku - estimates that these emissions will grow by 0.8% this year compared to 2023, to 37.4 billion tonnes of CO₂. If this rate continues, there is a 50% chance that global warming will exceed the 1.5°C limit in six years.

Private flights are used by approximately 0.003 % of the world's population, but the CO₂ emissions they released in 2023 were equivalent to 1.8 % of those of all commercial aviation. These are the conclusions of a study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, which estimates that emissions from private flights increased by 46 % between 2019 and 2023. Almost half of them covered a distance of less than 500 kilometers.

Next Monday sees the start of COP29 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a summit marked by Donald Trump's victory as president of the United States on Tuesday. His denial of climate change and his commitment to fossil fuels during his previous term in office will weigh down a meeting from which no major agreements are expected and from which experts are calling for greater ambition. 

For the second time, Donald Trump has won yesterday's US presidential election. The Republican leader returns to the White House four years later, after a first term in office with climate policies that ran counter to scientific evidence. Among other controversial measures, he abandoned the Paris Agreement and repeatedly denied the existence of climate change. 

A study by a team from the ClimaMeter project claims that the intensification of rainfall from the DANA that devastated Valencia and other regions on 29 October is mainly attributed to human-induced climate change. Natural climate variability, on the other hand, probably played a modest role. According to the analysis, this DANA was driven by very exceptional weather conditions. The work also shows that the DANA-like depressions that cause flooding in the southeastern peninsular are up to 15 % wetter than they were in the past. In addition, temperatures are up to 3°C warmer, which favours storm formation in these events over the Mediterranean basin. 

The devastating effects caused by the DANA over the peninsula and the Balearic Islands in large parts of the Mediterranean area, especially in the Valencian Community and some regions of Andalusia, are a wake-up call on the relationship between these extreme events and climate change.  

Current carbon capture technologies to mitigate climate change only work well when applied to concentrated sources, such as power plant exhaust gases. An international team of researchers has developed a new method using a special porous material capable of capturing CO₂ directly from the air, despite its low concentration. According to the authors, who publish their results in the journal Nature, this technology ‘represents a significant step towards clean air’.

Research published in Nature analyses future scenarios in which the 1.5°C temperature limit set in the Paris Agreement would be temporarily exceeded, assuming that temperatures could be lowered in the long term by reducing carbon dioxide emissions using different techniques. The authors stress that exceeding this threshold would have irreversible consequences for the Earth system in key areas such as biodiversity, sea level and carbon stocks. ‘Only rapid, short-term emission reductions are effective in reducing climate risks,’ they stress in the paper.