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Trump donor fined for pollution leads a fight to end methane emission penalties
Detailed plans from 30 oil and gas producers come amid historic levels of potent planet-heating emissions
A powerful US oil and gas industry lobby group has drawn up detailed plans to kill off penalties for emitting methane, a potent planet-heating gas that’s increasing at the fastest rate in decades, with this effort led by a major donor to Donald Trump whose company has just been fined for methane pollution.
Leaked internal documents from the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC), a group of 30 oil and gas producers, outline a push to repeal a fee levied on methane emissions should the former US president win this week’s election and Republicans gain control of Congress.
Continue reading...Spain floods: searchers scour car parks and malls amid fears death toll will rise
Day after king and PM pelted by angry residents, search focuses on areas where people could have been trapped
Hundreds of civil and military emergency workers are searching shopping centres, garages and underground car parks for more victims of floods in the Valencia region that have killed at least 214 people, as public anger mounts over Spanish authorities’ handling of the disaster.
Yellow and amber weather warnings were in place for parts of Valencia and neighbouring Catalonia on Monday, with people in the affected areas advised to stay off the roads and keep away from the coast and rivers.
Continue reading...A Vote for Harris Is a Vote for the Planet
‘Two sides of the same coin’: governments stress links between climate and nature collapse
Representatives at the Cop16 summit in Colombia negotiated against a backdrop of extreme weather and ecosystem collapse
As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil’s enormous wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada’s wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades – behind only last year’s burn, which released more carbon than some of the world’s largest emitting countries.
In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks, and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting damage from global heating, and vice versa – emphasising that climate and biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.
Continue reading...Mud flung at Spain's king as clean up and search efforts continue in flood aftermath – video
The search for people missing in Spain's flood-hit areas continued on Sunday as volunteers helped clear the damage caused by the flooding. On Saturday, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced that thousands of troops would be deployed to help response efforts. The death toll from the floods has risen to more than 210
Continue reading...Residents throw mud and insults at Spanish king on visit to flood-hit town
King Felipe heckled in Paiporta, one of the municipalities worst affected by last week’s floods
Hundreds of people have heckled Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, as well as the prime minister and the regional leader of Valencia – throwing mud and shouting “murderers” – as the group attempted an official visit to one of the municipalities hardest hit by the deadly floods.
The scenes playing out in Paiporta on Sunday laid bare the mounting sense of abandonment among the devastated areas and the lingering anger over why an alert urging residents not to leave home on Tuesday was sent after the floods began surging.
Continue reading...Drone footage shows scale of devastation caused by Spain floods – video
Drone footage from Torrent, a city just outside Valencia, shows the scale of devastation caused to it by the floods last week. Authorities have announced that the number of casualties from the floods has risen above 200, with Spain's prime minister saying that thousands of troops, police and civil guards would be sent to affected regions to support response efforts
Spain floods: 10,000 troops and police drafted in to deal with disaster
The Guardian view on climate-linked disasters: Spain’s tragedy will not be the last
‘We didn’t realise how hard it is’: small farmers in Europe struggle to get by
Brutal economic situation has inflicted misery on farmers who struggle to turn a profit and forced some to look for alternative streams of revenue
When Coen van den Bighelaar first spoke to school friends about taking over their parents’ dairy farms, he was the only one of the four to voice serious doubts. Fresh out of university, he was making more money in a comfortable office than his father did toiling for twice as long in the field.
But six years later, Bighelaar has followed in his parents’ footsteps, while his friends’ enthusiasm has waned. One quit farming to take a job in logistics. Another opened a daycare centre to supplement the income from selling milk. A third is thinking about buying land and moving to Canada.
Continue reading...Chris Bowen on Trump, science and coal: ‘We’re living climate change. What we’re trying to do is avoid the worst of it’
The climate change minister is ‘disturbed’ by rising temperatures and increasingly unnatural natural disasters – but that’s what gets him out of bed every day
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In Spain, more than 200 people have been killed after the deadliest floods in the country’s modern history. Australia is heating faster than the global average, meaning more extreme heat events, longer fire seasons, increasingly intense heavy rain and sea level rise. And globally, this year is highly likely to be the hottest on record, beating the current title holder, 2023. For some, this escalating scientific evidence can be alarming. But the person in charge of Australia’s response to the climate crisis says that is not a word he would choose.
“If alarm implies concern, sure. But alarm implying surprise? No,” says Chris Bowen, the country’s climate change and energy minister.
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Continue reading...Amid Flood Cleanup in Spain, Residents Try to Make Sense of the Disaster
Spain floods disaster: 5,000 more troops drafted in to deal with aftermath
Pedro Sánchez orders largest ever peacetime troop deployment to deal with flooding that has killed 211 people
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has ordered the country’s largest ever peacetime military deployment, announcing that another 5,000 troops will be drafted in to help deal with the aftermath of this week’s devastating floods, which have killed at least 211 people in eastern, southern and central regions.
Speaking after chairing a meeting of the flood crisis committee, Sánchez said the government was mobilising all the resources at its disposal to deal with the “terrible tragedy”, which stuck hardest in the eastern region of Valencia. He also acknowledged that much of the help still wasn’t getting through and called for unity and an end to political bickering and blame games.
Continue reading...How a Trump Win Would Upend Major Climate Court Fights
¿Las estufas de gas son malas para la salud?
How the U.S. Election Matters for the Rest of the World
Biden Won’t Attend COP29 Climate Talks in Baku, Azerbaijan
How a Year of Rain Flooded Spain in Eight Hours
The week around the world in 20 pictures
Flash floods in Spain, Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon and the New York Halloween parade: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Continue reading...The Guardian view on climate-linked disasters: Spain’s tragedy will not be the last | Editorial
More than 200 deaths and widespread destruction in Valencia are the latest sign of danger in a warming world
The death toll from floods in Spain’s Valencia region has topped 200. A huge clean-up is under way amid desperate conditions, with severe weather warnings still in place. The storms which caused this devastation – with roads turned into muddy rivers, thousands of homes deluged and cars swept into piles – were unprecedented. The gota fría, or “cold drop”, is a regular occurrence when cold autumnal air moves over the warm Mediterranean, causing dense clouds to form. But this rain, according to the Spanish weather service, was 10 times stronger than a normal downpour.
Extreme weather in Spain, and the rest of southern Europe, is more commonly understood to mean dangerous heat, drought and wildfires. The regional government is under attack regarding the lack of sufficient warnings and there is no doubt that the severity of these floods came as a terrible shock.
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Continue reading...Climate-Fueled Extreme Weather Events Are Worsening. We Need Action at COP29.
2024 will be a year to remember. As a result of fossil fuel-driven climate change, it’s on track to be the warmest year in recorded history. This heat fueled extreme weather events across the world, with most having significant impacts on human life and infrastructure and ecosystems.
In the United States, communities are still recovering from Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton. Each storm made history in its own right: Beryl was the earliest Category 5 storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean, Helene broke rainfall records in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and destroyed tens of mountain communities, and Milton was the second fastest intensifying storm since 1979. I wrote about the unprecedented Hurricanes Helene and Milton in an earlier blogpost.
In other parts of the world, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and droughts made headlines. Flooding in Central Europe this summer killed 27 people, while extreme rains in Pakistan and Afghanistan left hundreds dead and thousands of families homeless. In Brazil, the world’s largest grassland caught fire; a rapid attribution study found the fire to be 40% more intense due to climate change. And in the African Sahel, including countries like Senegal, Mali, and Niger, an extreme heatwave at the end of Ramadan would not have occurred without human-caused climate change.
How exactly does human-caused climate change lead to more frequent and more intense extreme weather events? In this blog, I explain the science behind these extreme weather events and pinpoint how additional heat-trapping emissions in Earth’s atmosphere are responsible.
The Earth is warmingThe burning of fossil fuels has led to an increase in pollutants such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began in the 1800s. Carbon dioxide and other pollutants trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise leave the Earth, acting as a sort of blanket that doesn’t allow the Earth to emit as much heat as it used to.
This is fossil fuel-driven climate change—more heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere results in a warming planet, with a clear warming trend observed over the last few decades (Figure 1).
It didn’t have to be this way—the fossil fuel industry was broadly aware of the danger its products posed to the global climate since at least the mid-1960s, but chose to downplay and distort the evidence of climate change while engaging in a decades-long global campaign against climate action. And now we’re dealing with the consequences: as global warming has progressed, it has also amplified extreme weather events around the world.
Figure 1. The global average surface temperature since 1880. Source: NOAA (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature)
Droughts and floods are worseningTo understand why droughts and floods are worsening on a warming planet, there’s a concept in atmospheric science called the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship that we’ll need to review (bear with me here, I promise it will help!). It states that the atmosphere can hold 7% more water for every one-degree Celsius increase in temperature.
In my previous blogpost, I explained the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship through an analogy where I envision the atmosphere as a sponge: as the temperature increases, that sponge gets bigger and bigger, allowing the atmosphere to hold more and more water.
How does this affect the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods? If the sponge (atmosphere) can hold more water, it can hold off on raining out (imagine squeezing a sponge) longer. So, one of the reasons droughts are getting worse in some parts of world is due to the atmosphere being able to hold more water before that water leaves the atmosphere. As just one example, climate change is worsening the megadrought in the western U.S.
For the same reason, this “sponge effect” also results in more floods—when the atmosphere finally rains out, it dumps much more rain than it used to in a given period of time. This is one of the reasons why we’re observing unprecedented heatwaves and droughts in the Sahel, while record-breaking flooding is occurring just a few thousand miles away in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
This simple analogy works great when considering the global average change in droughts and floods. However, the change in the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods varies for different regions (Figure 2).
For example, there is a clear increase in heavy precipitation over Europe mainly due to a warmer atmosphere being able to hold more water. Specifically, many regions in Europe will see an increase in rare heavy precipitation events, while only a slight increase in less rare events. Climate change is also causing a “precipitation whiplash” in some cases—abrupt shifts between extreme dry and extreme wet conditions in the same place, including in California.
Figure 2. Observed changes in heavy precipitation (top) and agricultural and ecological drought (bottom). More information can be found in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf.
Storms are breaking recordsThe atmosphere is warming rapidly, yes, but it’s actually warming slower than it could be thanks to the Earth’s oceans, which are absorbing 92% of the heat from human-caused climate change. However, all this additional heat in the oceans is leading to record-breaking heat content levels, which also result in record-high ocean surface temperatures. According to the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central, record-breaking ocean surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made 400-800 times more likely due to fossil fuel-driven climate change.
Tropical cyclones such as hurricanes develop in the tropical oceans due to an imbalance in heat between the cool upper atmosphere and the warm ocean surface. If there is a greater imbalance in heat between these two regions, for example, a warmer ocean surface, then the hurricane can strengthen faster and become a more intense storm.
This is exactly what happened this year with Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton. Beryl reached Category 5 strength so early in the season because it traveled over waters that were significantly warmer than usual due to climate change. Helene and Milton experienced rapid intensification in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, respectively, due to record high heat level content.
In the future, as the world continues to warm due to additional heat-trapping emissions, storms like Beryl, Helene, and Milton will become more common.
COP29, the L&D fund, and climate attributionIn less than two weeks, the world’s governments and organizations will convene at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 29th annual Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The backdrop will be the news of 2024’s unprecedented year of extreme weather fueled by fossil fuel-caused climate change.
At COP29, nations will decide how to fund lower-income countries’ climate adaptation and mitigation needs; my colleague, Rachel Cleetus, nicely lays out what we’ll be following this year at COP29 in this blogpost. These contributions to lower-income countries are critical as extreme weather events worsen in a warming world; we need to be sure that every country has the money necessary to adapt to climate change.
I’ll also be following the discussion on the operationalization of the Loss and Damage fund. L&D is a term that accounts for any loss or damage, economic or non-economic, due to an extreme weather or climate event. As part of my science fellowship with the Union of Concerned Scientists, my goal is to first identify gaps in scientific literature that could help bolster and reinforce the L&D fund, and then apply a machine learning method to fill that research gap.
Specifically, I’m interested in summarizing the current state of climate attribution science, which is a subfield of climate science that basically answers the question, “was this extreme weather or climate event more likely due to climate change?” Currently, we know that there are large gaps in climate attribution literature, for example, a lack of attribution studies in more vulnerable regions—especially in the Global South.
Following the L&D conversation at COP could better clue us climate scientists into what those on the frontlines of the climate crisis need and help us advocate for that at COP.
As we enter an era where years like 2024, with its unprecedented number of extreme weather events, become more common, it is up to the world’s governments at this year’s COP to resist fossil fuel industry lobbying. Governments must signal more ambitious emissions reduction commitments while agreeing on a robust climate finance goal that can, among other priorities, enable further strengthening of the world’s infrastructure to prepare for more extreme weather and climate events.