Climate change

Record-breaking heat in April, global warming continued despite the weakening of the El Niño effect

Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere to store underground "sounds too good to be true", a climate expert told AFP, yet the technology to increase its capacity tenfold is already being tested.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognises carbon capture and storage among the solutions for eliminating CO2, without giving it a central place in its models.

Floods have been tearing a path of destruction across the globe, hammering Kenya, submerging Dubai, and forcing hundreds of thousands of people from Russia to China, Brazil and Somalia from their homes.

G7 energy and climate ministers agreed a timeframe Tuesday for phasing out coal-fired power plants, setting a goal in the mid-2030s, in a move hailed as significant by some environmentalists but described as "too late" by others.

Asia was the world's most disaster-hit region from climate and weather hazards in 2023, the United Nations said Tuesday, with floods and storms the chief cause of casualties and economic losses.

Global temperatures hit record highs last year, and the U.N.'s weather and climate agency said Asia was warming at a particularly rapid pace.

Europe is increasingly facing bouts of heat so intense that the human body cannot cope, as climate change continues to raise temperatures, the EU's Copernicus climate monitoring service and the World Meteorological Organization said on Monday.

Europe endured a record number of "extreme heat stress" days in 2023, two leading climate monitors said Monday, underscoring the threat of increasingly deadly summers across the continent.

In a year of contrasting extremes, Europe witnessed scorching heatwaves but also catastrophic flooding, withering droughts, violent storms and its largest wildfire.

Climate change caused by CO2 emissions already in the atmosphere will shrink global GDP in 2050 by about $38 trillion, or almost a fifth, no matter how aggressively humanity cuts carbon pollution, researchers have said in the journal Nature.

A recent report by the non-profit think tank InfluenceMap has unveiled startling insights into the world's carbon dioxide emissions landscape. According to the Carbon Majors report released on Thursday, a mere 57 fossil fuel and cement producers have been accountable for a staggering 80% of global CO2 emissions from 2016 to 2022.

The world is getting hotter and humanity will have to shield itself against the new conditions in the coming years, according to Spyros Pandis, professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the University of Patras and researcher at the Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences of the Technology and Research Foundation in Greece (FORTH).