Did the Paris Agreement fail?

The 29th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP29) is starting today in Baku, Azerbaijan. This week, like every year, scientists, economists, and politicians gather to discuss how to solve the ongoing climate crisis. The goal of this conference is to keep acting on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, caused mainly by the use of …

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When will global warming stop?

There is a question that worries climate scientists a lot: will global warming stop when we reach zero greenhouse gas emissions? There are two schools of thought on this matter: the "optimistic" one claims that when (and if) we reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, N2O, CFC, …), the long-term increase in …

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The Day After Tomorrow

Imagine a boundless stretch of ice. Picture it in your mind. Smooth, dazzling, seemingly eternal. Something happens, though. The ice begins to break, endangering the unfortunate protagonists on the ice sheet. If you thought about the opening scene of "Ice Age", you almost got it right. Instead of an adorable prehistoric squirrel and his beloved …

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Beware of those two!

The pestiferous child modulating the earth's climate, together with his little sister. One of the most powerful climatic phenomena occurring on planet Earth. We are talking about El Niño (the child, in Spanish) and its counterpart La Niña. It’s making the headlines again because the Australian meteorological office has finally announced that an El Niño …

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What happens in Antarctica does not stay in Antarctica

Hearing news of huge icebergs detaching from the polar ice shelves is becoming increasingly frequent. The latest is about the ice mass now called A-81, which detached from the Brunt ice shelf in Antarctica. The event was captured by the ESA satellite Sentinel-2, also letting experts to monitor all the stages of formation and widening …

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Change of scenario: The climate predictions

In another post, I have summarised the history of climate change in our planet's remote and recent past. What can we say about the future? To answer, we must first understand how difficult it was to understand the role of atmospheric constituents (like the famous greenhouse gas) in the radiative balance of the Earth's atmosphere, …

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