Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Net-zero media storm
NET-ZERO ATTACKED: The UK’s Labour government had to defend its net-zero policies after comments by former prime minister Tony Blair in a thinktank report sparked a frenzied media storm. Former Labour leader Blair said the world’s current approach to tackling climate change is “failing”, the Independent reported. (More accurately, Blair stated that “phasing out fossil fuels in the short term…is doomed to fail”, rather than at all, as highlighted in a factcheck by Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans on social media.)
MEDIA FRENZY: Blair’s comments were featured prominently – and inaccurately – by the UK’s climate-sceptic right-leaning media. In frontpage coverage, the Daily Telegraph described Blair’s comments as a direct “attack” on prime minister Keir Starmer, despite acknowledging in its coverage that Blair did not mention the UK. A frontpage Times story called Blair’s intervention the “latest sign that the mainstream consensus on green policies is collapsing”. (Carbon Brief has just published an analysis showing the same media have published 65 editorials attacking energy secretary Ed Miliband in the first four months of 2025.)
‘CLUMSY’ CRITICISM: BBC News reported that Starmer has since defended his net-zero policies in parliament. According to the Guardian, Downing Street “forced” Blair to “row back from his criticism”, after “furious Labour politicians warned he had given a boost to Tory and Reform on the eve of the local elections”. A former employee of Blair called his intervention “clumsy” and his ideas “expensive” and “unpopular” in Prospect magazine.
Around the world
- CANADA FOR CARNEY: Mark Carney’s Liberal party won this week’s Canadian elections, Climate Home News reported. The outlet said that Canadians chose the “former central banker and UN climate envoy” over the “anti-climate action Conservative party of Pierre Poilievre”.
- 100 DAYS: As the Guardian and other outlets covered Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, the New York Times reported that his administration had dismissed hundreds of experts working on the country’s National Climate Assessment report.
- UPHILL BATTLE: The COP30 president has “admitted” that this year’s talks will be a “slightly uphill battle” due to economic turmoil and Trump’s removal of the US from the Paris Agreement, the Guardian reported.
- AIRLINE EMISSIONS: European airline emissions are on course to exceed pre-pandemic levels this year, according to the Financial Times.
- NEW NORMAL: Much of India and Pakistan is “sweltering” under early heatwaves, the Guardian reported. The newspaper highlighted that a Pakistani city in Sindh province recorded temperatures of 50C – nearly 8.5C above the April average.
38%
The percentage of global losses from “natural catastrophes” that were insured in 2023, according to a report by Zurich Insurance Group. The analysis found total losses of $280bn.
Latest climate research
- A combination of climate change and failure to meet sustainable development goals could contribute to an increase in global antimicrobial resistance by 2050, according to a study published in Nature Medicine.
- A paper published in Science Advances found that “co-exposure” to extreme heat and wildfire smoke has increased across 11 states in the western US over 2006-20.
- Just 2% of the UK Climate Change Committee’s (CCC’s) recommendations to the UK government over 2009-20 were accepted in full, according to new research published in Climate Policy.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
On Monday, a blackout across most of Spain and Portugal plunged the countries into chaos. While the initial trigger remains uncertain, the nationwide blackouts took place after around 15 gigawatts (GW) of electricity generating capacity – equivalent to 60% of Spain’s power demand at the time – dropped off the system within the space of five seconds (as illustrated above). At the time, solar accounted for 59% of the country’s electricity supplies, wind nearly 12%, nuclear 11% and gas around 5%. As the crisis was still unfolding, many media outlets were quick to blame renewables, net-zero or the energy transition for the blackout, despite very little available data or information. Carbon Brief has examined what is currently known about the power cuts and how the media has responded.
Spotlight
Trump’s ‘cascading’ impact on European climate science
This week, scientists attending the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna tell Carbon Brief how cuts to science funding and the dismantling of climate agencies in the US is impacting their work.
Dr Shouro Dasgupta, environmental economist at Fondazione CMCC in Italy:
“Trump’s decision to cut funding on climate science in the US will likely have cascading effects on both European research and global climate resilience. The transatlantic partnership is built on shared values and decades of cooperation. It has been crucial for advancing global understanding of climate change through joint efforts in Earth observation, including data infrastructure and joint policy innovation.
For example, several European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts products that rely on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data streams will now face gaps in input data.
A major loss has been the defunding of Famine Early Warning Systems Network – a critical system that operated in more than 30 famine-prone countries and was the only consistent source of regular famine and food insecurity early warning.
Trump’s actions will slow our ability to understand and respond effectively to the climate crisis, a loss that, ultimately, impacts everyone.”
Dr Carl Schleussner, climate scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria:
“I’m concerned about the credibility of science and communication. Attacks on science and scientific integrity are being driven by social media and alternative media platforms – and artificial intelligence (AI) systems can generate something that looks like a scientific paper, [but] is complete rubbish. [AI] basically drives down the cost of fakes to zero. We are running a heightened risk of climate misinformation.
Trump’s special advisor [Elon Musk] owns one of the largest social media networks and Grok [an AI system] can produce something like a paper in no time. Trying to undermine [science] by flooding the zone with sh*t is a declared strategy – and it is the total antithesis to science.
It is one thing to rebut people that are paid to ask stupid questions about the validity of climate science, as we’ve done for decades. [But it is another] to fight an AI system that produces all this bullsh*t in no time. As a scientific community, we are not equipped to fight back…I hope other actors in society are thinking about how to support climate science and the integrity of science and its role in society.”
Dr Eva Pfannerstill, atmospheric chemist at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany:
“The NOAA cuts are definitely impacting the air-quality research community and rippling to Europe. For several months this year, our NOAA colleagues were not allowed to join online meetings with us anymore, stalling the fruitful discussions and collaborations we have had for many years. One NOAA colleague was supposed to give an invited talk at EGU, but he was not allowed to travel.
Thinking back to last year’s EGU where we hung out with many NOAA colleagues, it was such a short time ago – but seems almost like another era where trans-Atlantic scientific cooperation and US leadership in atmospheric research were a given. Now our US colleagues are scared – scared to put anything in writing that could be used against them, scared of losing their funding and/or jobs.”
Prof Sonia I Seneviratne, climate scientist at the Institut für Atmosphäre und Klima at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change Working Group 1 vice chair:
“The current attacks on climate research in the US are extremely concerning. A full generation of young researchers have been fired from their positions and are unlikely to stay in climate research. While some might move to Europe or other continents, it is not in the interest of the global climate research community to see such a weakening and even a destruction of climate research in the US.
While some decisions against climate research institutions and researchers might be annulled by the courts, several might be near impossible to reverse. For instance, buildings [that] will no longer be available for research institutions and researchers [that] move on to other positions out of concerns for their job security.
Attacks on climate science won’t change the facts and the reality of climate change – but they weaken our possibilities to address the climate crisis.”
Watch, read, listen
POWER PLAYER: For Common Dreams, Bill McKibben claimed that Mark Carney knows “roughly 20 times” as much about climate and energy economics than any other leader.
CONNECTED CRISES: In a new book, Climate Injustice, climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto argued that global justice is at the core of the solution to climate change.
SONG AND SEED: Al Jazeera ran a long-read about efforts led by Brazil’s Indigenous Maxakali community to protect and restore the rainforest in Minas Gerais.
Coming up
- 2-9 May: 20th session of the United Nations forum on forests, New York
- 7-8 May: Copenhagen climate ministerial, Denmark
- 11 May: Albanian parliamentary elections, Albania
Pick of the jobs
- Carbon Brief, summer journalism internship | Salary: London Living Wage (£13.85 per hour). Location: Hybrid (London and remote)
- C40 Cities, reinventing cities project manager | Salary: 108,074,116 pesos or 715,392 rand. Location: Colombia or South Africa
- Natural History Museum, curator, algae | Salary: £34,398. Location: London
- Agora Energiewende, project manager – policy design for a just energy transition | Salary: Unknown. Location: Berlin, Germany or Bangkok, Thailand
- Possible, community heat and energy project manager | Salary: £33,962 for four days a week. Location: UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 2 May 2025: Iberian blackout; Tony Blair’s ‘clumsy’ comments; Trump’s ‘cascading’ impact on European climate science appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic pro