As catastrophic floods hit Spain, deadlier weather clearly linked to climate change
With the death toll close to 100 after a year’s worth of rain fell in a day in parts of eastern and southern Spain this week, rapid analysis by climate scientists suggests global heating made the event twice as likely to happen and the downpours considerably more intense.
“No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change,” said Dr Friederike Otto, who heads the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy.
Average temperatures worldwide are already perilously close to the 1.5°C above the mid-nineteenth century baseline where governments agreed to try and halt global heating in the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015.
“With every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall,” Otto said. “These deadly floods are yet another reminder of how dangerous climate change has already become at just 1.3°C of warming.”
Yet, in the run-up to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku next month, the UN warned last week of a huge gap between government action and climate science. On the current trajectory, temperature rise is set to exceed 3°C before the end of the century.
Imperial’s WWA team has developed a protocol that allows them, in cooperation with local scientists and meteorologists, to rapidly assess in the immediate aftermath the extent to which climate change triggered or intensified an incidence of extreme weather.
The deadly floods around Valencia came as the group already planned to release today a report drawing a clear link between and man-made climate change and ten of the most deadly extreme weather events of the past two decades.
The highest death toll