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Air Pollution in Madrid (pages 3,4, 19 and 20 blue page numbers) 

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Air Pollution in Madrid (pages 3,4, 19 and 20 blue page numbers) 

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"Time for Action" is the motto of the United Nation's COP25 climate conference and the demand made by thousands of protesters as they took the streets in the center of Madrid on Friday.

Environmental activists dancing and playing music were joined by grandmothers and families with children as people from all different walks of life came together to protest in an atmosphere akin to a festival.

But the message was much more serious and very clear: "Climate Action Now!," read one sign. "One Earth = One Chance," said another.

Protesters said they wanted world leaders to take immediate action to protect the planet

Protest organizers said 500,000 people took part in the demonstration, while police put estimates at 15,000.

Read more: Climate change near 'point of no return'
Little government interest in climate protection
"Governments are ignoring the climate. They're only interested in their own interests and not in the common interest - the interest of the next generations," 15-year-old Danny, who traveled from Colombia with her parents to take part in the protest, told DW.

Her comments echoed those of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

"People want everything to continue like now, and they are afraid of change and change is what we young people are bringing," she said. "That is why they want to silence us, and that is just the proof that we are having an impact, that our voices are being heard, that they try so desperately to silence us."
Establishing Paris accord ground rules
Friday's protest took place just miles away from where representatives from all over the world are meeting over two weeks at the United Nation's COP25 climate conference to discuss measures to decrease carbon emissions as part of the Paris Agreement.

Under the accord, ratified by almost 200 countries, nations have drawn up their own targets to reduce carbon emissions with the aim of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

In the four years since the agreement was made in 2015, negotiators have been working on the so-called "rule book" - a set of regulations that will govern the implementation of the Paris agreement set to take place next year.
Read more: How satellites will help solve the climate crisis
But clashes among countries over how to monitor their emissions and proposed carbon markets have hindered the process.

"We have to unite as a global team, otherwise we won't manage to solve this climate crisis, which is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced," said Jenny, who came from Germany to participate in the Madrid demonstration. "Governments are not doing enough, so we as civil society have to take the lead."

Funding to help developing countries to adapt to climate change and pay for the damage that has already been inflicted is also another sticking point in negotiations.

Unambitious national targets
The world will need to pull together for real change to happen, protesters said

Meanwhile, experts have said that national targets to reduce their emissions are not ambitious enough to be in line with the Paris Agreement and would potentially see a temperature rise of at least 3 degrees Celsius.

"We can achieve a change if we act all together, but we need to really engage," said Spanish protester Pilar, who was at the protest with her husband and daughter. "We need money to stop being the most important thing, to have companies that only seek economic benefit with no limit. If we unite, we can achieve the necessary change."

Global leaders are set to descend on the COP25 climate conference for the second week of negotiations, but whether their attendance will lead to higher ambitions and the change protesters are calling for remains to be seen.

What is clear is that for protesters like 15-year-old Danny, only action will give her the life that others have had before her and that she desperately wants her own children someday to enjoy.

"I want to offer a bright future to my children," she said. "I want them to be able to drink clean water and breathe clean air."

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COP25: Protesters call for action at Madrid climate rally | DW | 06.12.2019

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"Time for Action" is the motto of the United Nation's COP25 climate conference and the demand made by thousands of protesters as they took the streets in the center of Madrid on Friday. Environmental activists dancing and playing music were joined by grandmothers and families with children as people from all different walks of life came together to protest in an atmosphere akin to a festival.

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European Satellites Could Help with the Next Climate Change Disaster 

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European Satellites Could Help with the Next Climate Change Disaster 

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Barcelona: Spain began the new year battling Storm Filomena, a once-in-a-generation weather event that blanketed Madrid in snow and paralyzed the economy. Health workers were stranded, supermarkets shut, and the army was called in. At least four people died.

"Now, consider a government or company that knew two weeks ago there was a risk that this would happen," said Francisco Doblas-Reyes, a physicist at Barcelona's Supercomputing Center. "Knowing the risk that a 1-in-20-year event was going to happen would have given more possibilities to prepare."

Doblas-Reyes and his team are working on complex models that they hope can better detect the next Filomena, a job that's become increasingly important as climate change makes weather more unpredictable - and extreme. The data collected by European satellites is at the heart of the continent's multibillion-euro Destination Earth program seeking to develop the world's best digital simulation of Earth.

"We have the gold standard of satellite infrastructure in space," said Josef Aschbacher, the geophysicist who'll become Director General of the European Space Agency this year. Europe's space agency has 16 Earth observation satellites in orbit with some three dozen under development and, according to Aschbacher, is in talks with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to assume even greater responsibility for climate monitoring in the next decade.

As U.S. climate research took a backseat to human spaceflight, deep-space exploration and the creation of a military force for outer space during the Trump administration, European scientists have focused on finding new ways to understand the changing atmosphere. In November, the EU launched a satellite on board a NASA-backed Space X rocket that can track miniscule changes in sea levels, down to the millimeter. New projects are underway to monitor freshwater flows and greenhouse gas emissions, technical challenges akin to forecasting how a drop of ink will disperse inside a choppy pond.

By using artificial intelligence and supercomputers, the first digital-twin simulations of Earth could be ready by 2028, according to Aschbacher. The ESA's data is publicly available, allowing everyone from the scientists in Barcelona to farmers and insurers to improve their own models at the same time. "If you really want to make it useful, you have to make sure the information is available in a way that people can visually use it," he said. "What the people really want to know isn't just the status of today but a projection of the future."

U.S. researchers running their own Earth-system simulations - an idea first conceived by Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s - say the EU has taken the lead in boosting climate-model resolutions. The new tools will enable researchers to drill down and detect changing patterns within a kilometer area, compared with about 10 square kilometers at present. That should give scientists new insight into phenomena like cloud formation and how ocean eddies transport heat.

The new climate models also have the potential to help investors make better decisions. Storms, fires and floods killed at least 8,200 people and cost the world $210 billion in insured losses in 2020, according to a report published this month by Munich Re. Those damages could swell as the world inches closer to crossing the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold that scientists predict will lead to more frequent superstorms and higher sea levels.

"There's a lot of information there but too much information is also bad," European Central Bank Governing Council member Robert Holzmann said in a November interview. "You cannot get the right signals from it. The information has to be brought down to a handful or two of criteria that are the most critical."

To solve that problem, European scientists are working on a series of easy-to-read climate indexes that could inform investment decisions in the future, according to EU documents. They've teamed up with traders and weather analysts from European utilities including Electricite de France, EDP Renovaveis SA and Vattenfall AB to develop such tools - with varying degrees of success.

"Meteorologists at EnBW trust the science and statistical methods on which the tool is based," said Michael Christoph, a weather analyst at German utility Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg AG. "However, building the same trust among energy traders will take some time."

At present, seasonal weather models published by the ESA's climate service aren't always up to the task of supporting longer-term investment decisions because they aren't calibrated to catch events like Storm Filomena and only generate broad probabilistic forecasts. But that could change in coming years as 8 billion euros pours into a new generation of supercomputers capable of calculating billions of equations every second, according to Doblas-Reyes.

"There is a continuum of information that these companies need, information ranging from the next hour to the next day to the next weeks," he said. "We need to help government prepare and companies to profit from these events." - Bloomberg
Also read: Humans have created an ecological Ponzi scheme that even scientists can't grasp
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European satellites could help catch the next climate change disaster

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Barcelona: Spain began the new year battling Storm Filomena, a once-in-a-generation weather event that blanketed Madrid in snow and paralyzed the economy. Health workers were stranded, supermarkets shut, and the army was called in. At least four people died.

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1: Hotter, Longer Summers in Spain

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It's more than a feeling: there are figures to back it up. Climate change has come to Spain, and its effects are mainly noticeable in the higher temperatures. The summer season now lasts almost five weeks longer on average than it used to in the early 1980s. And it is also hotter.

These are some of the conclusions of a new joint report from the national weather agency AEMET and the Ministry for Ecological Transition. Both institutions have offered data from the Open Data Climático project, which collects evidence of the impact of global warming on Spain in the last 40 years.

An increasingly warm Mediterranean has an impact on coastal regions, with a rise in tropical nights

Beatriz Hervella, AEMET

According to the ministry, more than 32 million Spanish people are affected by global warming. Beatriz Hervella, an AEMET spokesperson, said that these people live in parts of Spain where the summers are now longer and hotter.

There has been an accumulation of very warm years in the last decade, and an increase in so-called "tropical nights," or nights with a minimum temperature of 20ºC.

Minister Teresa Ribera underscored the cause of climate change: the greenhouse gas emissions cause by human activity. She also noted that the International Energy Agency has warned that emissions of CO ₂ - the main greenhouse gas - by the energy and industrial sectors reached a new record in 2018.

Earlier heatwaves

Emilio de Benito

The rising temperatures also mean that the first heatwaves of the year are coming earlier and catching us by surprise, says Julio Díaz of the National School of Public Health, which is part of the Carlos III Health Institute. "It's not the same having one in May as it is in August."

These higher temperatures are also bad for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, especially in older people. This expert on public health and the environment says the heat also increases visits to the doctor by people with kidney problems and those with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's. It likewise causes a rise in premature babies and low weight at birth.

The heat is also linked to approximately 1,200 deaths a year in Spain, a number that could soar to 12,000 by the end of the century if something is not done, warns Díaz. "It all depends on how we adapt."

His study group has analyzed the effect of rising temperatures on the combined rate of morbidity and mortality, and observed that for every extra degree there was a 14% rise in 1983, but only a 2% or 3% rise in 2013, which shows that humans are adapting, or adopting "what the Americans call the heat culture": a set of measures ranging from more air conditioning units to more green areas in cities and prevention plans for at-risk groups.

The AEMET report also highlights that in Spain, the surface area with a semi-arid climate has increased in the last 50 years by 30,000 km ² - similar in size to the entire region of Galicia. The most affected areas are the region of Castilla-La Mancha, the Ebro valley and southeastern Spain. These are areas with classic or continental Mediterranean climates that have turned into semi-arid places with less rainfall, according to Rubén del Campo, another AEMET spokesperson.

The analysis is based on data collected by 58 observatories, 52 of which are located in or near provincial capitals and in the exclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa. Six more were added because of the particular historical relevance of their data sets.

The analysis found that for at least five years since 2011, 37 observatories registered "average annual temperatures within the hottest 20% in the reference period." The most extreme example was the Barcelona-Airport observatory, where every year since 2011 has been very hot.

As for the four seasons, their average temperatures are higher, although "the rise is more noticeable in the spring, and especially in the summer." Summers in Spain are also getting longer and hotter, says the report. The study found that "the summer season now lasts five weeks more than it did in the early 1980s."

The summer season, which AEMET defines solely by the temperatures, now starts earlier. According to the Madrid-Retiro weather station, in the 1970s the summer used to begin on July 15 and end on September 16. These days, it starts on June 11 and ends on September 22.

Mediterranean Sea

The report also analyzed the temperature of surface water in the Mediterranean, and concluded that it has been rising by 0.34ºC every decade since the early 1980s. This in turn is causing the sea level to rise. Since 1993, the global sea level has been rising 3.4mm a year.

"An increasingly warm Mediterranean has an impact on coastal regions, with a rise in tropical nights," said Hervella. These hotter nights make it difficult to sleep, which in turn "has an impact on health." A clear example of this is Alicante, she said, although inland cities such as Madrid can also experience tropical nights because of the "heat island effect" created by buildings that trap warmth.

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More than a feeling: summers in Spain really are getting longer and hotter

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It's more than a feeling: there are figures to back it up. Climate change has come to Spain, and its effects are mainly noticeable in the higher temperatures. The summer season now lasts almost five weeks longer on average than it used to in the early 1980s. And it is also hotter.

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2: Heat Wave Solutions

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​According to the latest Global Climate Risk Index (GRI), prepared by the NGO Germanwatch and presented in Madrid at the COP25, Spain is among one of the 30 countries most vulnerable to this phenomenon. This is not news to its inhabitants: droughts and flash floods are increasingly frequent, alternating with powerful hailstorms and heat waves.

Given this situation, it is not surprising that our nation is also one of the most committed to working towards stopping it. According to data from the US think tank Pew Research, 81% of Spaniards believe that climate change is a threat. A figure very similar to that of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) just a year ago and slightly lower than the one recently published by the British market research and data analysis firm YouGov.

This latest ranking places us as the third most aware country in the world in this field, while the Pew Research ranking places Spain in fourth place. These positions are linked to the general sentiment of the population but also to the measures being adopted by public and private organisations who are working towards curbing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

The measures being taken

Over the last year, Spain has developed an environmental plan which includes a series of measures, organised by the Ministry of Ecological Transition following the guidelines of the European Commission. In addition to putting an end to the so-called sun tax and developing regulations for energy self-management, the first draft of the Climate Change Bill has already been sent to Brussels.

Another measure that is already underway and is being adapted to social and environmental changes is the Integrated National Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), a strategic document that includes the course of action that Spain will take in this area and has been positively assessed by the European Commission and independent entities.

On top of these measures is the Just Transition Strategy, which follows the guidelines on this matter developed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and which the Government has already begun to implement through agreements in territories affected by the closure of thermal power stations. Its aim is none other than to maintain and create new activity and employment in these areas in order to avoid a negative impact on the labour market.

Committed to the SDGs

The fight against climate change is the crux of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations in its 2030 Agenda. Spain is highly committed to complying with each and every one of them. In fact, it ranks 21st out of 162 countries analysed in the Sustainable Development Report 2019, prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

This document bases its results on data from international organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the OECD and is audited by the European Commission. Specifically, Spain obtains its best results in SDG 6 - clean water and sanitation - and in SDG 7 - affordable and non-polluting energy.

According to the latest report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), our country is the world's 12th largest renewable energy power. 17.5% of the energy consumed in our country is renewable, and almost 50% of the electricity we use comes from inexhaustible sources, taking into account data from Red Eléctrica Española (REE) and the Asociación e Empresas de Energías Renovables (APPA).

​

SOURCES:

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Spaniards, are highly aware and concerned about the impact of climate change

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​According to the latest Global Climate Risk Index (GRI) , prepared by the NGO Germanwatch and presented in Madrid at the COP25, Spain is among one of the 30 countries most vulnerable to this phenomenon. This is not news to its inhabitants: droughts and flash floods are increasingly frequent, alternating with powerful hailstorms and heat waves.

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"Time for Action" is the motto of the United Nation's COP25 climate conference and the demand made by thousands of protesters as they took the streets in the center of Madrid on Friday.

Environmental activists dancing and playing music were joined by grandmothers and families with children as people from all different walks of life came together to protest in an atmosphere akin to a festival.

But the message was much more serious and very clear: "Climate Action Now!," read one sign. "One Earth = One Chance," said another.

Protesters said they wanted world leaders to take immediate action to protect the planet

Protest organizers said 500,000 people took part in the demonstration, while police put estimates at 15,000.

Read more: Climate change near 'point of no return'
Little government interest in climate protection
"Governments are ignoring the climate. They're only interested in their own interests and not in the common interest - the interest of the next generations," 15-year-old Danny, who traveled from Colombia with her parents to take part in the protest, told DW.

Her comments echoed those of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

"People want everything to continue like now, and they are afraid of change and change is what we young people are bringing," she said. "That is why they want to silence us, and that is just the proof that we are having an impact, that our voices are being heard, that they try so desperately to silence us."
Establishing Paris accord ground rules
Friday's protest took place just miles away from where representatives from all over the world are meeting over two weeks at the United Nation's COP25 climate conference to discuss measures to decrease carbon emissions as part of the Paris Agreement.

Under the accord, ratified by almost 200 countries, nations have drawn up their own targets to reduce carbon emissions with the aim of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

In the four years since the agreement was made in 2015, negotiators have been working on the so-called "rule book" - a set of regulations that will govern the implementation of the Paris agreement set to take place next year.
Read more: How satellites will help solve the climate crisis
But clashes among countries over how to monitor their emissions and proposed carbon markets have hindered the process.

"We have to unite as a global team, otherwise we won't manage to solve this climate crisis, which is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced," said Jenny, who came from Germany to participate in the Madrid demonstration. "Governments are not doing enough, so we as civil society have to take the lead."

Funding to help developing countries to adapt to climate change and pay for the damage that has already been inflicted is also another sticking point in negotiations.

Unambitious national targets
The world will need to pull together for real change to happen, protesters said

Meanwhile, experts have said that national targets to reduce their emissions are not ambitious enough to be in line with the Paris Agreement and would potentially see a temperature rise of at least 3 degrees Celsius.

"We can achieve a change if we act all together, but we need to really engage," said Spanish protester Pilar, who was at the protest with her husband and daughter. "We need money to stop being the most important thing, to have companies that only seek economic benefit with no limit. If we unite, we can achieve the necessary change."

Global leaders are set to descend on the COP25 climate conference for the second week of negotiations, but whether their attendance will lead to higher ambitions and the change protesters are calling for remains to be seen.

What is clear is that for protesters like 15-year-old Danny, only action will give her the life that others have had before her and that she desperately wants her own children someday to enjoy.

"I want to offer a bright future to my children," she said. "I want them to be able to drink clean water and breathe clean air."

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COP25: Protesters call for action at Madrid climate rally | DW | 06.12.2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Time for Action" is the motto of the United Nation's COP25 climate conference and the demand made by thousands of protesters as they took the streets in the center of Madrid on Friday. Environmental activists dancing and playing music were joined by grandmothers and families with children as people from all different walks of life came together to protest in an atmosphere akin to a festival.