Western-Mediterranean heatwave ‘almost impossible’ without climate change. The extreme heatwave that swept across Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Algeria in April 2023 was “at least 100 times more likely” due to climate change, according to a new “rapid attribution” study. During the last week of April, temperatures surged up to 20C higher than normal across large parts of the western Mediterranean, reaching an intensity more typical of mid-summer. Temperatures exceeded 40C in parts of Morocco and Algeria. And, in Spain, temperatures reached 38.8C at Córdoba airport – not only breaking the previous April record by nearly 5C, but also setting a new April record for all of Europe. In its most rapidly produced study to date, the World Weather Attribution service, which launched in 2014, finds that the heatwave was up to 3.5C hotter than it would have been in a world without climate change. The study adds that, even in today’s climate, the heatwave was unlikely, with roughly a 0.25% chance of happening in a given year.  Mediterranean heatwave......During the final week of April 2023, a wave of “superheated air” from the Sahara desert swept northward towards the Mediterranean. Temperatures surged up to 20C higher than normal across large parts of Morocco, Algeria, Spain and Portugal, with many local April temperature records broken by up to 6C. “People in this region are no strangers to high temperatures,” Roop Singh – a climate risk adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and co-author on the study – told a press briefing. However, she added that it is “really exceptional to have temperatures near 40C near the end of April”.  Mortality data from the heatwave is not yet available. However, Dr Fatima Driouech – an associate professor at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco and co-author on the study – told the press briefing that “early-season heatwaves tend to be particularly deadly due to a lack of acclimatisation in the population and lower preparedness for heat”. For many countries around the western Mediterranean, the “summerlike” heat served to exacerbate an intense multi-year drought, which was already threatening crop yields and water security.  Spain is on track to see its driest April on record, having recorded below-average levels of rainfall for at least the past 36 months. Even before the most intense heat struck, 27% of Spain was already classified as in drought “emergency” or “alert” and water reserves were at 50% of national capacity. SImilarly, average dam storage in Morocco was only 33% by the end of April following its many consecutive years of below-average rainfall. Dr Frederieke Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London and co-author of the study, told the press briefing that the Mediterranean region is a ”hotspot” for worsening compound hot and dry extremes.           https://www.carbonbrief.org/western-mediterranean-heatwave-almost-impossible-without-climate-change/?utm_source=cbnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2023-05-06&utm_campaign=This+week+Western+Mediterranean+heatwave+almost+impossible+without+climate+change+CB+internship+open+to+application

More Than a Decade of Megadrought Brought a Summer of Megafires to Chile. As relentless drought dries out subsistence farmers’ wells, vast eucalyptus and pine plantations, remnants of the Pinochet dictatorship, are torching their communities.  In the austral summer of 2023, the 13th year of a megadrought in Central Chile, over 425,000 hectares (1,050,197 acres) of forest burned, most of it in desiccated monoculture tree plantations of highly flammable eucalyptus and Monterey pine. The megafires were the latest outward manifestation of Central Chile’s intensifying climate crisis. As of mid-February, the fires had killed at least 26 people, injured 2,000 more and destroyed more than 1,500 homes. Authorities believed a number of the more than 250 active fires burning in February were intentionally started and had arrested ten suspected arsonists. But climate, along with land and water management decisions, had set the stage for blazes to burn big. Stretching 2,670 miles from north to south, Chile is the longest nation on earth. The narrow country is a seemingly endless series of micro-climates. The south is cool and wet. The far north has the driest non-polar desert on earth. Central Chile and the U.S. state of California can seem almost like clones, so similar are their Mediterranean climates, mountainous topography and sun-drenched farms fed by wells and distant snowmelt.  Both are experiencing megadroughts, and there is a resonance to how the consequences of their lack of water manifest themselves. “Two-thirds of the drought is because of the climate crisis,” said Fabrice Lambert of the Centre for Climate & Resilience Science. The other third, he says, is because of human mismanagement of water. In addition to the warmer, drier climate, the policies of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 until 1990, still haunt Chile. “From the total national wealth in Chile in 2021,” Statistsa writes, “80.4 percent belonged to the top ten percent group. Almost half of Chile’s wealth, 49.6 percent, was held by the  top one percent. On the other hand, the bottom 50 percent had a negative wealth—their debts exceeded their assets by 0.6 percent. A plantation economic mindset still predominates here. In the region of Bío Bío, aside from a small national park and a few scattered patches of indigenous forests, all the hills are clothed in vast, densely-packed monoculture tree plantations of highly combustible, non-native eucalyptus and Monterey pine......a graphic pictorial essay- read on        https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09042023/chile-megadrought-megafires/

  Until the early 2000s, when the first attribution studies were published, it was harder to link CO2 in the atmosphere with global heating’s tangible effects. Thanks to a growing body of research, now we know. The record-breaking “heat dome” over north-western Canada and the US last summer would have been almost impossible without human-caused climate change. The same is true of heatwaves across the northern hemisphere in 2018, and in Asia in 2016. Wildfires in Siberia in 2020 were made 80% more likely by global heating, while 90% of marine heatwaves are human-caused. An increased mortality rate is evident on every continent, with scientists estimating 100,000 deaths each year. Heating was a factor in the California drought of 2012-14 and the super-typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. While extreme weather in China has been studied, far less research has been conducted in Africa and South America. Yet again, those parts of the world that are most exposed to climate change find themselves with the fewest resources to help them understand and address it. But scientists and leaders, including the UN secretary general, António Guterres, the former UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres, and the Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, are right to insist that the reality must be faced. Indeed, this is the only way to avoid the most catastrophic and tragic outcomes. Like the historical responsibility for carbon emissions, attitudes and experiences in the present crisis are unevenly and unjustly shared out. Billions of people around the world, and above all in the global south, are caught up day-to-day in a struggle for survival. Western governments must follow through on their pledges of climate finance to enable a green transition in the developing world. The purpose of attribution science is not simply to warn the world about what is happening, but to aid preparations for what has not happened yet.          https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/05/the-guardian-view-on-accelerating-global-heating-follow-the-science

Scientists agree that the earth’s rising temperatures are fueling longer and hotter heat waves, more frequent droughts, heavier rainfall, and more powerful hurricanes. In 2015, for example, scientists concluded that a lengthy drought in California—the state’s worst water shortage in 1,200 years—had been intensified by 15 to 20 percent by global warming. They also said the odds of similar droughts happening in the future had roughly doubled over the past century. And in 2016, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine announced that we can now confidently attribute some extreme weather events, like heat waves, droughts, and heavy precipitation, directly to climate change. The earth’s ocean temperatures are getting warmer, too—which means that tropical storms can pick up more energy. In other words, global warming has the ability to turn a category 3 storm into a more dangerous category 4 storm. In fact, scientists have found that the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes has increasedsince the early 1980s, as has the number of storms that reach categories 4 and 5. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season included a record-breaking 30 tropical storms, 6 major hurricanes, and 13 hurricanes altogether. With increased intensity comes increased damage and death. The United States saw an unprecedented 22 weather and climate disasters that caused at least a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 2020, but 2017 was the costliest on record and among the deadliest as well: Taken together, that year's tropical storms (including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria) caused nearly $300 billion in damage and led to more than 3,300 fatalities......much more      https://www.nrdc.org/stories/global-warming-101