Bruno Colmant

As climate impacts intensify globally, the Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air … please! finds that nations must deliver dramatically stronger ambition and action in the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions or the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal will be gone within a few years. The report is the 15th edition in a series that brings together many of the world’s top climate scientists to look at future trends in greenhouse gas emissions and provide potential solutions to the challenge of global warming.

Under current emission trajectories, temporarily overshooting the Paris global warming limit of 1.5 °C is a distinct possibility. Permanently exceeding this limit would substantially increase the probability of triggering climate tipping elements. Here, we investigate the tipping risks associated with several policy-relevant future emission scenarios, using a stylised Earth system model of four interconnected climate tipping elements.

Weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights, the European court of human rights has ruled

Le débat sur les nouveaux OGM est biaisé par les lobbies qui défendent toute une série d’intérêts économiques. A la faveur de sa présidence européenne, la Belgique doit se positionner dans ce dossier en facilitant l’élaboration d’une politique européenne qui donne la priorité à l’équité, à l’autonomie des agriculteur.e.s, à la santé publique et à l’environnement.

Anthropogenic emissions drive global-scale warming yet the temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels is uncertain. Using 300 years of ocean mixed-layer temperature records preserved in sclerosponge carbonate skeletons, we demonstrate that industrial-era warming began in the mid-1860s, more than 80 years earlier than instrumental sea surface temperature records. The Sr/Ca palaeothermometer was calibrated against ‘modern’ (post-1963) highly correlated (R2 = 0.91) instrumental records of global sea surface temperatures, with the pre-industrial defined by nearly constant (<±0.1 °C) temperatures from 1700 to the early 1860s. Increasing ocean and land-air temperatures overlap until the late twentieth century, when the land began warming at nearly twice the rate of the surface oceans. Hotter land temperatures, together with the earlier onset of industrial-era warming, indicate that global warming was already 1.7 ± 0.1 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2020. Our result is 0.5 °C higher than IPCC estim

Daily atmospheric carbon dioxide data from Hawaiian volcano more than double last decade’s annual average

Finance needs of developing countries now 10-18 times as big as international public finance flows Growing gap results from rising adaptation needs and faltering adaptation finance Failure to enhance adaptation has huge implications for losses and damages

Permafrost and glaciers in the high Arctic form an impermeable ‘cryospheric cap’ that traps a large reservoir of subsurface methane, preventing it from reaching the atmosphere. Cryospheric vulnerability to climate warming is making releases of this methane possible. On Svalbard, where air temperatures are rising more than two times faster than the average for the Arctic, glaciers are retreating and leaving behind exposed forefields that enable rapid methane escape. Here we document how methane-rich groundwater springs have formed in recently revealed forefields of 78 land-terminating glaciers across central Svalbard, bringing deep-seated methane gas to the surface. Waters collected from these springs during February–May of 2021 and 2022 are supersaturated with methane up to 600,000 times greater than atmospheric equilibration. Spatial sampling reveals a geological dependency on the extent of methane supersaturation, with isotopic evidence of a thermogenic source. We estimate annual methane emissions from prog

Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security. Concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream could trigger such events, but so far this has not been quantified. Specifically, the ability of state-of-the art crop and climate models to adequately reproduce such high impact events is a crucial component for estimating risks to global food security. Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. While climate models accurately simulate atmospheric patterns, associated surface weather anomalies and negative effects on crop responses are mostly underestimated in bias-adjusted simulations. Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain. Our results suggest that model-blind spots for such high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards have to be anticipated and acc

Emmanuel Macron’s government is at least doing the bare minimum to avert the planetary crisis – and putting the UK to shame, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Flash drought, characterized by unusually rapid drying, can have substantial impact on many socioeconomic sectors, particularly agriculture. However, potential changes to flash drought risk in a warming climate remain unknown. In this study, projected changes in flash drought frequency and cropland risk from flash drought are quantified using global climate model simulations. We find that flash drought occurrence is expected to increase globally among all scenarios, with the sharpest increases seen in scenarios with higher radiative forcing and greater fossil fuel usage. Flash drought risk over cropland is expected to increase globally, with the largest increases projected across North America (change in annual risk from 32% in 2015 to 49% in 2100) and Europe (32% to 53%) in the most extreme emissions scenario. Following low-end and medium scenarios compared to high-end scenarios indicates a notable reduction in annual flash drought risk over cropland. Flash droughts are projected to become more frequent unde

This report examines the economic and business models needed to address the impacts of the plastics economy.

Global CO2 emissions for 2022 increased by 1.5% relative to 2021 (+7.9% and +2.0% relative to 2020 and 2019, respectively), reaching 36.1 GtCO2. These 2022 emissions consumed 13%–36% of the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5 °C, suggesting permissible emissions could be depleted within 2–7 years (67% likelihood).

Climate change is landing blow after blow upon humanity and the planet, an onslaught that will only intensify in the coming years even if the world begins to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report 2022: Too Little, Too Slow – Climate adaptation failure puts world at risk finds that the world must urgently increase efforts to adapt to these impacts of climate change.

A liquified natural gas (LNG) crisis is brewing for European countries dealing with energy insecurity in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as demand will outstrip supply by the end of this year, Rystad Energy research shows. Although soaring demand has spurred the greatest rush of new LNG projects worldwide in more than a decade, construction timelines mean material relief is unlikely only after 2024. Global LNG demand is expected to hit 436 million tonnes in 2022, outpacing the available supply of just 410 million tonnes. A perfect winter storm may be forming for Europe as the continent seeks to limit Russian gas flows. The supply imbalance and high prices will set the scene for the most bullish environment for LNG projects in more than a decade, although supply from these projects will only arrive and provide relief from after 2024 The European Union’s REPowerEU plan has set an ambitious target to reduce dependence on Russian gas by 66% within this year – an aim that will clash with the EU’s goal of

L’ONG Transport & Environment dénonce le recours aux biocarburants à base d’huiles végétales ou de céréales en Europe compte tenu de la menace qui pèse sur la sécurité alimentaire mondiale depuis le début de la guerre en Ukraine.

We submit that the safe operating space of the planetary boundary of novel entities is exceeded since annual production and releases are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capacity for assessment and monitoring. The novel entities boundary in the planetary boundaries framework refers to entities that are novel in a geological sense and that could have large-scale impacts that threaten the integrity of Earth system processes. We review the scientific literature relevant to quantifying the boundary for novel entities and highlight plastic pollution as a particular aspect of high concern. An impact pathway from production of novel entities to impacts on Earth system processes is presented.

Over 25 million tonnes of CO2 – equivalent to the total CO2 emissions of Denmark¹ – are exempt from the EU’s proposed carbon price for shipping, a new Transport & Environment (T&E) study shows. Arbitrary exemptions of ships such as those servicing oil and gas facilities, as well as yachts, will undermine the EU’s shipping law and let millions of tonnes of emissions off the hook, says T&E.

Le glyphosate fait encore parler de lui. Le pesticide le plus utilisé dans le monde, et particulièrement en France, est au centre d’une nouvelle recherche. L’étude publiée mercredi dans la revue Environmental Science and Pollution Research et menée sur 6 848 personnes partout en France métropolitaine et à la Réunion est sans équivoque : la quasi-totalité des urines analysées sont contaminées au glyphosate.

Les fonctionnaires technique et délégué de la Région wallonne ont donné leur feu vert à la construction d’une centrale biomasse au creux de la sablière de Mont-Saint-Guibert. C’est l’entreprise Green Belgian Environmental Solutions (GBES, une filiale de Veolia) qui pilote ce projet dont l’objectif est de couvrir 100% des besoins en énergie de l’UCLouvain (chauffage et électricité), avec une énergie considérée comme verte et renouvelable.