Global temperatures stuck at near-record highs in April: EU monitor
The extraordinary heat spell was expected to subside as warmer El Nino conditions faded last year, but temperatures have stubbornly remained at record or near-record levels well into this year.
"And then comes 2025, when we should be settling back, and instead we are remaining at this accelerated step-change in warming," said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
"And we seem to be stuck there. What this is caused (by) -- what is explaining it -- is not entirely resolved, but it's a very worrying sign," he told AFP.
In its latest bulletin, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said that April was the second-hottest in its dataset, which draws on billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations.
All but one of the last 22 months exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the warming limit enshrined in the Paris agreement, beyond which major and lasting climate and environmental changes become more likely.
Missed target
Many scientists believe this target is no longer attainable and will be crossed in a matter of years.
A large study by dozens of pre-eminent climate scientists, which has not yet been peer reviewed, recently concluded that global warming reached 1.36C in 2024.
Copernicus puts the current figure at 1.39C and projects 1.5C could be reached in mid 2029 or sooner based on the warming trend over the last 30 years.
"Now it's in four years' time. The reality is we will exceed 1.5 degrees," said Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs Copernicus.
"The critical thing is to then not latch onto two degrees, but to focus on 1.51," the climate scientist told AFP.
Julien Cattiaux, a climate scientist at the French research institute CNRS, said 1.5C "would be beaten before 2030" but that was not a reason to give up.
"It's true that the figures we're giving are alarming: the current rate of warming is high. They say every 10th of a degree counts, but right now, they're passing quickly," he told AFP.
"Despite everything, we mustn't let that hinder action."
'Exceptional'
Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming that has made extreme weather disasters more frequent and intense.
But they are less certain about what else might have contributed to this persistent heat event.
Experts think changes in global cloud patterns, airborne pollution and Earth's ability to store carbon in natural sinks like forests and oceans, could be factors also contributing to the planet overheating.
The surge pushed 2023 and then 2024 to become the hottest years on record, with 2025 tipped to be third.
"The last two years... have been exceptional," said Burgess.
"They're still within the boundary -- or the envelope -- of what climate models predicted we could be in right now. But we're at the upper end of that envelope."
She said that "the current rate of warming has accelerated but whether that's true over the long term, I'm not comfortable saying that", adding that more data was needed.
Copernicus records go back to 1940 but other sources of climate data -- such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons -- allow scientists to expand their conclusions using evidence from much further into the past.
Scientists say the current period is likely to be the warmest the Earth has been for the last 125,000 years.
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France 24
6 hours ago
- France 24
Environmental DNA, a ‘revolutionary' key to unlocking the secrets of our oceans
Pierre Jorcin slides on a pair of gloves, attaches a plastic tube to a filter, plunges it into the water, presses the start button on a small pump and then slowly begins walking through the river stream. Thirty minutes later, he has gathered three litres of water and filtered thousands of particles. The entire procedure seems simple, banal even. But Jorcin's gesture is part of a microscopic revolution. In the process, the scientist has collected fragments of environmental DNA, also known as eDNA. 'Every living organism leaves traces of DNA behind, whether in water, soil or in the air. And those traces hold out for some time before eventually degrading,' Jorcin explains. 'By collecting them, we can identify and catalogue the organisms we find like bacteria, mammals, amphibians, fish, etc.' The samples Jorcin collects are then transported a few kilometres away to the University of Savoie Mont Blanc in Chambéry, an Alpine town in southeast France. That is where the offices of Spygen are based, a French pioneer in environmental DNA and the only company in the country that markets eDNA kits. Spygen sells the kits to NGOs, universities and private stakeholders, and then collects the samples to decode them. Dozens and dozens of samples are processed in the small premises of the company, which analyses the trapped eDNA to try and identify what species it belongs to. 'We extract the DNA from the filters and then run it through the sequencing machines,' says Jorcin, who is a project manager at the company. After sequencing, a long succession of four letters emerges – A, T, C, G – representing the genetic code of all species. 'Then it's up to us to find which species the code belongs to by looking through reference databases,' he explains. A burgeoning practice Spygen didn't end up at the foot of the Alps by accident. While the practice of sampling and sequencing eDNA was first tested by a US microbiologist in the 90s, this small revolution truly began about 60 kilometres south of Chambéry. Researchers from the Alpine ecology lab in Grenoble in 2008 found that the method could be used to detect bullfrogs, an invasive species, in places it had not yet been seen. A year later, scientist and Spygen co-founder Alice Valentini came up with the idea of using eDNA in her study on Himalayan brown bears, an endangered species. 'To get a better understanding of the bear's low reproductive capacity, Valentini tested the eDNA of food in its feces, which allowed her to get a precise rundown of its diet. It was a completely new method," says Benjamin Allegrini, president of the company. "That's when we understood the full scope of eDNA. Not only can we detect what organisms or species exist in different environments, but we can also understand how they interact with one another,' he says, beaming. A passionate birdwatcher since he was a child, Allegrini kicked off his career, binoculars in hand, as an ornithologist and went on to study bats. 'Then I discovered how much we could learn from DNA," he recounts. Once he had earned a degree in molecular biology, he decided to devote himself entirely to Spygen from 2018 onwards. 'The more we know about our environment, the more we'll be able to protect it,' says Allegrini, who recently published a book on eDNA. 'That's why it's important to develop new technologies like eDNA, which can revolutionise how we see the world.' The number of scientific papers on environmental DNA has skyrocketed since Spygen was founded in 2011, with each publication confirming the effectiveness of the method a little more. It is now a widely used approach, and is even part of France's new national strategy to protect biodiversity, which was published late last year. The country plans to 'regularly and extensively' document its national biodiversity with a census creating during a 'large-scale campaign to collect and analyse environmental DNA'. An ambitious inventory for underwater species And if there is one habitat where environmental DNA is especially useful, it's in our seas and oceans. Much of the life that exists in the vastness of these underwater worlds is invisible. 'In just one litre of seawater, there are 28 million DNA sequences. But only 14 percent of those sequences are identifiable. That means there are millions and millions of genetic sequences we know nothing about,' Allegrini explains. 'Until now, traditional methods used to document marine biodiversity yielded fragmented results,' says Yvan Griboval, a sailor who is also the head of the French NGO OceanoScientific, which works to collect scientific data from our oceans. 'Environmental DNA opens up a new range of possibilities by offering a tool that is no longer based on estimates or observations, but on factual data.' Scientists traditionally rely on fishing returns, diving expeditions, underwater cameras or acoustic surveys to observe life underwater. Collecting eDNA is a less invasive procedure, with no bait or electric fishing needed to gather data. 'Above all, it allows us to detect species that are invisible to the naked eye, especially those that are rare and difficult to find, or those that only come out at night or live in habitats that are hard for humans to reach,' Allegrini adds. 'It's also much faster and cheaper than traditional methods. A diver can only make four trips 50 metres underwater per day, and their visibility is limited to two metres… Imagine if they had to cover the entire Mediterranean basin. How many species would they miss?' the head of Spygen insists. Two years ago, Spygen and OceanoScientific banded together with six other partners to take on a wild dream. Between May and July, the group decided they would make an inventory of every species of fish, crustacean and marine mammal found along the Mediterranean coast. Over the course of four months, they gathered more than 700 eDNA samples. The project was called BioDivMed. 'When we started out, we didn't really know what the outcome would be. No one had ever tried to get that broad of an inventory of Mediterranean species,' Griboval recalls. 'And the results were good news. The biodiversity of the area was much richer than we had expected it to be.' 'We often talk about the Mediterranean as a dying sea, but this project showed that the coastline is healthier than we thought,' Griboval says. A total of 267 fish species were identified. 'It was a phenomenal result. Unprecedented,' adds David Mouillot, a professor at the University of Montpellier who took part in the project. And there were other surprises. Off the coast of Corsica, eDNA identified the presence of several angel sharks, a critically endangered species that was already thought to have disappeared from the area. 'We were able to find the animal's last refuge,' Mouillot says. 'We also found DNA traces of sunfish, which we also thought had disappeared from our waters.' For Mouillot, the discoveries were not only symbolic but vital for conservation efforts of the Mediterranean's biodiversity. 'Detecting rare species has a tendency to get things moving, especially when it comes to protecting a specific area or ecosystem. No one wants to destroy the habitat of the last living specimen of an endangered species,' he says. Better protections, better catch At a time when France, like several other countries, has promised to transform 30 percent of its land and marine ecosystems into protected areas – compiling inventories of living organisms could help identify and monitor priority zones. One hundred sites in the Mediterranean were identified thanks to the BioDivMed project from 2023. Surveys are conducted annually to observe how many species are left in each delineated zone. And every three or four years, a more complete inventory is taken to allow for long-term monitoring. 'That's another advantage of eDNA,' says Mouillot. 'There is a standard protocol that is easy to replicate, so we can conduct serious species monitoring. It allows us to determine whether the protection of a given area is actually working, whether a species has moved somewhere else, or if there is a proliferation of an invasive species that could pose a threat.' 'Inventories based on eDNA also help us inform fishers about available resources,' says Griboval. 'We know when we need to reduce fishing when it puts too much pressure on a given area, and we can help by directing fishers to other locations or even diversify their catch.' Exploring the deep sea Allegrini and his team are now setting their sights on new horizons – the deep sea. While some have their sights set on exploiting the resources that can be found, eDNA could help bolster research on this ecosystem we still know very little about. For some time now, Spygen has been developing an underwater drone that could collect data from these unexplored depths. But there is a limit to their ambitions. Organisms can only be identified if their genetic sequencing has already been catalogued in the past. In other words, unknown species would not be able to be identified – there would be no match in existing databases. 'So we have a parallel challenge of enriching the existing databases,' says Mouillot. 'The good news is that the DNA we collect can be saved, even if it's unknown for now. We can always identify it later when our inventories grow.' Another major challenge is "developing our identification process', says Allegrini. 'We can find out what species an organism is thanks to a fragment of its DNA. But we need to be able to identify what family or even what individual it belongs to.' 'It would be a revolution for species monitoring, especially for those at risk of becoming extinct. We could track them with precision, understand their behaviour, their movements…' Allegrini adds. For now, however, Allegrini admits that these ambitions feel a little more like science fiction than reality. But the president of Spygen has a tendency to think big, especially when it comes to observing something small.
France 24
8 hours ago
- France 24
Scientists on the front line in climate change ocean research
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Sustainability Times
12 hours ago
- Sustainability Times
'Radioactive Dust From the Desert': Nuclear-Contaminated Saharan Sand Rains Down on France, Shocking Scientists and Alarming the Public
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