The COP30 conference in Belém (Brazil) last November ended with few bright spots and many shadows [1]. Most notably, there was no clear plan on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuels are not even mentioned in the final document. There are many reasons for this, mainly political (the U.S. did not officially participate …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading What happens in Antarctica does not stay in Antarctica
The Winter Olympic Games are being held in Beijing right now. In addition to the Chinese capital, the races are also held in the nearby mountainous areas of Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, which however are usually too dry to have a good snow cover. The chronic lack of snow is the organisers' main headache. One of …
Ready, steady, go. As soon as it took office, the new administration of President Biden made the US rejoin the Paris climate agreement. This is a nice change of pace compared to the previous administration of President Trump, who decided to quit the agreement. For the occasion, the climate scientist Ed Hawkins produced a special …
In another post, I have summarised the history of climate change across 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, …
Continue reading Change of scenario: The climate predictions
It is clear now: the earth's climate is changing and it is causing a rise in average global temperature. It is still difficult to say how and how much global warming will affect our lives. Meanwhile, we can take a look at what has happened in our (more or less) recent past to understand the …
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