Reacción a "Extreme weather events in 2025 pushed adaptation capacity to its limits"

The burning of fossil fuels has released enough CO₂ into the atmosphere to change the climate in just a couple of centuries. This is a remarkable process even in the long history of the Earth, as there is no known precedent for such a rapid atmospheric change. The climate is a chaotic system by nature, with a very high degree of natural variability, and attribution studies emerged to understand the extent to which extreme weather events are due to climate change or natural variability. They are based on modelling extreme phenomena and comparing their probability of occurrence with and without climate change.

The WWA report therefore makes it possible to quantify the extent to which climate change has increased the probability of these extreme weather events. In this regard, some of the data is shocking. In Sudan, for example, the probability of experiencing a heatwave like this year's was one in 1,600 in 1850, whereas today it is one in two. The data indicate how heatwaves, droughts and torrential rains are becoming more frequent due to climate change.

There are processes for which we still do not know to what extent climate change is increasing their frequency, such as tropical cyclones. Recent studies (such as this one from Nature Geoscience) indicate that the recent increase in their activity is probably temporary, as it is due to processes unrelated to climate change. The WWA report does not yet include these new studies.

The report gives too much influence to climate when discussing processes such as fires and floods. We must separate purely meteorological processes, such as heat waves, from those that result from the interaction between climate and infrastructure. There is no doubt that climate change has lengthened the fire season and contributes to drier fuel, for example, but fire burns fuel and fire activity is not entirely attributable to climate change. Nor are floods, as they again depend on the interaction between meteorology and forest and hydraulic infrastructure.

In this sense, just as denialism is fatal to climate inaction, “climatism” that exaggerates the influence of climate change can generate antibodies and encourage the rise of denialism. This year's heatwave in Spain, with an anomaly of 4.6 °C during the first two weeks of August, undoubtedly fuelled the extreme fire season we are experiencing. The WWA report indicates that this heatwave was 40 times more likely with climate change. However, fire activity could have been reduced to a large extent with adequate preventive management.

Climate change is here to stay, and what we are seeing in recent years is just the beginning. We cannot prevent heatwaves from increasing, but we can, and must, adapt in advance to the negative impacts of climate change.