The bulk of steelmaking around the world still relies on coal-based blast furnaces.
As a result, the steel and iron industry is responsible for 7% of greenhouse gas emissions and 11% of carbon dioxide emissions globally, according to the consultancy firm Global Efficiency Intelligence.
This is more than the total emissions from all the world’s cars and vans.
With steel critical to the building out of decarbonised energy infrastructure, production is expected to continue to rise over the coming years, meaning the potential for decarbonisation is “enormous”, according to not-for-profit data organisation Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
GEM’s annual “Pedal to the Metal” report reveals that 93% of new steelmaking capacity announced thus far in 2024 promises to use lower emission electric arc furnaces (EAFs).
It also shows that 49% of the world’s steelmaking capacity under development now uses EAFs, up from just 43% in 2023 and 33% in 2022.
Of this, nearly all of the capacity announced since the beginning of 2024 operates using EAFs, the non-governmental organisation’s Global Steel Plant Tracker (GSPT) shows.
The tracker covers 2,207m tonnes per year (mtpa) of operating steelmaking capacity and an additional 774mtpa of steelmaking capacity under development globally, across 1,163 individual plants in 89 different countries, analysis of which is captured in its annual report.
However, while the report suggests a positive progression towards lower emission technologies in the sector, the increase in the announced projects is not yet leading to a construction of EAF overtaking coal-based production methods.
Coal-based blast furnace-basic oxygen furnaces (BF-BOFs) – where blast furnaces are used to produce iron from ore and oxygen converters then turn this, with some additional elements, into steel – continue to dominate the projects under construction, meaning “pressure must be maintained all the way through to project completion if real progress is to be seen”, the report finds.
Growth of EAFs
Incoming steelmaking capacity is more heavily EAF-based than ever before, according to GEM’s new report.
There is currently 774mtpa of steelmaking capacity under development, of which 223mtpa is in the advanced development stage.
Based on data from April 2024, the GSPT shows that nearly half of the capacity under development (337mtpa) is EAFs.
Just 36% of steelmaking capacity announced in 2020 with a known production route used EAFs, while in 2023 that number had increased to 92% according to GEM. This grows to 93% of capacity when looking at steelmaking capacity under development announced in 2024.
This “indicates a significant shift toward electric arc furnace steelmaking in the years to come”, the report notes.
Meanwhile, of the 212mtpa of steelmaking capacity slated for retirement, 88% if BOF-based.
However, a net increase in BOF-based capacity is expected over the coming years. If all planned developments and retirements take effect, an additional 171mptpa of BOFs is expected to be added to the global fleet, along with 310mtpa of EAF and 80mtpa of unknown technologies.
Despite this growth in BOFs, the surge of EAF means the steel sector is getting increasingly close to meeting the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) suggested 2030 target.
In its net-zero by 2050 roadmap, the IEA suggests that the share of steel produced by EAF should grow from 24% in 2020, to 37% by 2030 and then 52% by 2050.
Considering all planned capacity and retirements, GEM now estimates that the global steel fleet is expected to reach 36% EAF by 2030, noting: “This is still not sufficient to meet the IEA [net-zero] climate target, but with heightened momentum the goal is increasingly attainable.”
Continuing to construction
While EAF-steelmaking is being announced at “record rate”, GEM finds that less than 14% of this potential capacity has moved into construction.
Of those that have moved into construction, around 46% are still BOF-based. As such, “while we may be within reach of net-zero targets based on proposed electric arc furnace capacity, actually achieving these goals requires follow-through”, the report notes.
Caitlin Swalec, program director for heavy industry at GEM, said in a statement:
“The progress is promising for a green steel transition. Never before has this much lower-emissions steelmaking been in the pipeline. At the same time, the buildout of coal-based capacity is concerning. What the industry needs now is to make these clean development plans a reality, while backing away from coal-based developments.”
As well as the buildout of new coal-based capacity being out of alignment with a net-zero future, it poses a threat of carbon lock-in and stranded assets, GEM notes.
Blast furnaces are becoming riskier investments given the limited options to mitigate emissions from both the furnaces themselves and the upstream emissions from the metallurgical coal mining, it adds.
Estimating an investment of $1-1.5bn per mtpa capacity at an integrated BF-BOF site, GEM found that the future stranded-asset risk could be as high as $554bn in 2023, falling to $400bn in 2024 due to the continued fall in BOF capacity under development.
Astrid Grigsby-Schulte, project manager for steel at GEM tells Carbon Brief:
“As we grow closer to key decarbonisation milestones, coal-based developments get further out of alignment with the direction the industry is moving and present a greater risk of stranded assets to steelmakers. Coal-based, emissions-intensive blast furnaces represent significant investments that often require decades to recoup. This makes them extremely risky for developers, particularly in countries with stated net zero commitments.”
The limited options for mitigating the climate impact of BOF-steelmaking was also highlighted within a recent report from the thinktank Sandbag.
While carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) is often touted as a “catch all” solution, its effectiveness varies widely across applications, Sandbag’s “Steel & CCS/U” report finds.
For steel production, BF-BOFs with carbon capture are unlikely to be cost-competitive with EAFs, the report finds. Although given the slow pace of technological and market development, Sandbag anticipates capturing carbon will play a limited role in the steel industry.
China transitions to EAFs
India has now replaced China as the top steel developer globally, with a pipeline of 258mtpa of capacity, of which 177mtpa is BOFs, according to GEM.
China has a pipeline of 150mtpa meaning, collectively, China and India are responsible for 53% of all developments globally.
Asia operates 68% of all steelmaking capacity (1,508mtpa), the majority of which is in China (1,075mtpa), India (123mtpa) and Japan (109mtpa).
When looking specifically at emissions-intensive BOF production, Asia’s share of total operating capacity increases to 80% (1,181mtpa), of which 918mtpa is in China.
Currently, China has 157mtpa of operating EAFs (22% of the global capacity), followed by the US, Turkey, Iran and then India.
According to a new report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), China did not issue any new permits for coal-based steelmaking in the first half of 2023. This is the first time this has happened since the nation’s “dual carbon goals” were announced in September 2020.
During the first six months of 2024, Chinese provincial governments permitted 7.1mtpa of steelmaking capacity, all of which were EAFs marking a “turning point” for the country’s steel industry, CREA notes.
Xinyi Shen, researcher at CREA and the report’s lead author, tells Carbon Brief: :
“China’s EAF steelmaking has been developing rather slowly in the past few decades, mainly due to the constraint of scrap supply. However, as China’s steel demand reaches its peak and more scrap becomes available, a major opportunity arises to reduce emissions in the next 10 years. The government has accelerated plans to expand the national ETS to include the steel sector by the second half of 2024. By implementing carbon pricing on carbon-intensive products, EAF steelmaking would become more economically competitive and continue the growth.”
Despite India now overtaking China in terms of announced steelmaking capacity, China remains the biggest developer of EAF capacity overall, GEM’s report states. And while India has the most steel in development, 84% has not moved into construction.
As such, there is still an opportunity for India’s plans to change, with the percentage of BOFs to EAFs less set.
Chris Bataille, adjunct research fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy and lead author at the global Net Zero Steel project tells Carbon Brief:
“India’s core demand for steel is set to increase from 125mtpa to ~450mtpa by 2050, especially to meet key building and infrastructure needs. Our modelling suggests EAFs consistently rise from ~35 to 150mtpa by 2050. So the +250mtpa BF-BOFs is just barely feasible, but only over ~25 years and with some exports of BF-BOF steel.
“The difference will be between a world where strong climate policy succeeds and fails. If it fails and coal based BF-BOFs are built, then the +258mtpa looks barely feasible. If it succeeds, India is short on the necessary gas and especially clean electricity to power this amount of steel production. While the country does build a lot of EAFs, it builds up to 250mtpa of clean iron making over time, making the short term shortfall with clean HBI iron imports.”
The post ‘Significant shift’ away from coal as most new steelmaking is now electric appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Significant shift’ away from coal as most new steelmaking is now electric
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Trump’s latest climate rollback
RULES REPEALED: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun dismantling Biden-era regulations limiting pollution from power plants, including carbon dioxide emissions, reported the Financial Times. Announcing the repeal, climate-sceptic EPA administrator Lee Zeldin labelled efforts to fight climate change a “cult”, according to the New York Times. Politico said that these actions are the “most important EPA regulatory actions of Donald Trump’s second term to date”.
WEBSITE SHUTDOWN: The Guardian reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate.gov website “will imminently no longer publish new content” after all production staff were fired. Former employees of the agency interviewed by the Guardian believe the cuts were “specifically aimed at restricting public-facing climate information”.
EVS TARGETED: The Los Angeles Times reported that Trump signed legislation on Thursday “seeking to rescind California’s ambitious auto emission standards, including a landmark rule that eventually would have barred sales of new gas-only cars in California by 2035”.
UK goes nuclear
NEW NUCLEAR: In her first spending review, UK chancellor Rachel Reeves announced £14.2bn for the Sizewell C new nuclear power plant in Suffolk, England – the first new state-backed nuclear power station for decades and the first ever under a Labour government, BBC News reported. The government also announced funding for three small nuclear reactors to be built by Rolls-Royce, said the Times. Carbon Brief has just published a chart showing the “rise, fall and rise” of UK nuclear.
MILIBAND REWARDED: The Times described energy secretary Ed Miliband as one of the “biggest winners” from the review. In spite of relentless negative reporting around him from right-leaning publications, his Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) received the largest relative increase in capital spending. Carbon Brief’s summary has more on all the key climate and energy takeaways from the spending review.
Around the world
- UN OCEAN SUMMIT: In France, a “surge in support” brought the number of countries ratifying the High Seas Treaty to just 10 short of the 60 needed for the agreement to become international law, according to Sky News.
- CALLING TRUMP: Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he would “call” Trump to “persuade him” to attend COP30, according to Agence France-Presse. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that the country’s environmental agency has fast tracked oil and highway projects that threaten the Amazon.
- GERMAN FOSSIL SURGE: Due to “low” wind levels, electricity generation from renewables in Germany fell by 17% in the first quarter of this year, while generation from fossil-fuel sources increased significantly, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
- BATTERY BOOST: The power ministry in India announced 54bn rupees ($631m) in funding to build 30 gigawatt-hours of new battery energy storage systems to “ensure round-the-clock renewable energy capacities”, reported Money Control.
-19.3C
The temperature that one-in-10 London winters could reach in a scenario where a key Atlantic ocean current system “collapses” and global warming continues under “intermediate” emissions, according to new research covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- A study in Science Advances found that damage to coral reefs due to climate change will “outpace” reef expansion. It said “severe declines” will take place within 40-80 years, while “large-scale coral reef expansion requires centuries”.
- Climatic Change published research which identified “displacement and violence, caregiving burdens, early marriages of girls, human trafficking and food insecurity” as the main “mental health” stressors exacerbated by climate change for women in lower and middle-income countries.
- The weakening of a major ocean current system has partially offset the drying of the southern Amazon rainforest, research published in Environmental Research has found, demonstrating that climate tipping elements have the potential to moderate each other.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Aerosols – tiny light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – absorb or reflect incoming sunlight and influence the formation and brightness of clouds. In this way they have historically “acted as an invisible brake on global warming”. New Carbon Brief analysis by Dr Zeke Hausfather illustrated the extent to which a reduction in aerosol emissions in recent decades, while bringing widespread public health benefits through avoided deaths, has “unmasked” the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The chart above shows the estimated cooling effect of aerosols from the start of the industrial era until 2020.
Spotlight
How Carbon Brief turns complex research into visuals
This week, Carbon Brief’s interactive developer Tom Pearson explains how and why his team creates visuals from research papers.
Carbon Brief’s journalists will often write stories based on new scientific research or policy reports.
These documents will usually contain charts or graphics highlighting something interesting about the story. Sometimes, Carbon Brief’s visuals team will choose to recreate these graphics.
There are many reasons why we choose to spend time and effort doing this, but most often it can be boiled down to some combination of the following things.
Maintaining editorial and visual consistency
We want to, where possible, maintain editorial and visual consistency while matching our graphical and editorial style guides.
In doing this, we are trying to ease our audience’s reading experience. We hope that, by presenting a chart in a way that is consistent with Carbon Brief’s house style, readers will be able to concentrate on the story or the explanation we are trying to communicate and not the way that a chart might have been put together.
Highlighting relevant information
We want to highlight the part of a chart that is most relevant to the story.
Graphics in research papers, especially if they have been designed for a print context, often strive to illustrate many different points with a single figure.
We tend to use charts to answer a single question or provide evidence for a single point.
Paring charts back to their core “message”, removing extraneous elements and framing the chart with a clear editorial title helps with this, as the example below shows.
Ensuring audience understanding
We want to ensure our audience understands the “message” of the chart.
Graphics published in specialist publications, such as scientific journals, might have different expectations regarding a reader’s familiarity with the subject matter and the time they might be expected to spend reading an article.
If we can redraw a chart so that it meets the expectations of a more general audience, we will.
Supporting multiple contexts
We want our graphics to make sense in different contexts.
While we publish our graphics primarily in articles on our website, the nature of the internet means that we cannot guarantee that this is how people will encounter them.
Charts are often shared on social media or copy-pasted into presentations. We want to support these practices by including as much context relevant to understanding within the chart image as possible.
Below illustrates how adding a title and key information can make a chart easier to understand without supporting information.
When we do not recreate charts
When will we not redraw a chart? Most of the time! We are a small team and recreating data graphics requires time, effort, accessible data and often specialist software.
But, despite these constraints, when the conditions are right, the process of redrawing maps and charts allows us to communicate more clearly with our readers, transforming complex research into accessible visual stories.
Watch, read, listen
SPENDING $1BN ON CLIMATE: New Scientist interviewed Greg de Temmerman, former nuclear physicist turned chief science officer at Quadrature Climate Foundation, about the practicalities and ethics of philanthropic climate-science funding.
GENDER HURDLES: Research director Tracy Kajumba has written for Climate Home News about the barriers that women still face in attending and participating in COPs.
OCEAN HEATWAVES: The New York Times presented a richly illustrated look at how marine heatwaves are spreading across the globe and how they affect life in the oceans.
Coming up
- 16-26 June: Bonn climate talks, Bonn, Germany
- 16 June: 79th meeting of the World Meteorological Organization executive council, Geneva, Switzerland
- 17 June: International Energy Agency (IEA) Oil 2025 report launch
Pick of the jobs
- Inside Climate News, California environmental reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Southern California
- Natural Resources Wales, lead marine and energy policy advisor | Salary: £45,367-£50,877. Location: Wales
- Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, senior manager, climate | Salary: £82,000. Location: London/hybrid
- Green Party,social media and digital content officer | Salary: £33,211. Location: London/remote
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The UK’s chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the green light this week to the Sizewell C new nuclear plant in Suffolk, along with funding for “small modular reactors” (SMRs) and nuclear fusion.
In her spending review of government funding across the rest of this parliament, Reeves pledged £14.2bn for Sizewell C, £2.5bn for Rolls-Royce SMRs and £2.5bn for fusion research.
The UK was a pioneer in civilian nuclear power – opening the world’s first commercial reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria in 1956 – which, ultimately, helped to squeeze out coal generation.
Over the decades that followed, the UK’s nuclear capacity climbed to a peak of 12.2 gigawatts (GW) in 1995, while electricity output from the fleet of reactors peaked in 1998.
The chart below shows the contribution of each of the UK’s nuclear plants to the country’s overall capacity, according to when they started and stopped operating.
The reactors are dotted around the UK’s coastline, where they can take advantage of cooling seawater, and many sites include multiple units coded with numbers or letters.
Since Sizewell B was completed in 1995, however, no new nuclear plants have been built – and, as the chart above shows, capacity has ebbed away as older reactors have gone out of service.
After a lengthy hiatus, the Hinkley C new nuclear plant in Somerset was signed off in 2016. It is now under construction and expected to start operating by 2030 at the earliest.
(Efforts to secure further new nuclear schemes at Moorside in Cumbria failed in 2017, while projects led by Hitachi at Wylfa on Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire collapsed in 2019.)
The additional schemes just given the go-ahead in Reeves’s spending review would – if successful – somewhat revive the UK’s nuclear capacity, after decades of decline.
However, with the closure of all but one of the UK’s existing reactors due by 2030, nuclear-power capacity would remain below its 1995 peak, unless further projects are built.
Moreover, with the UK’s electricity demand set to double over the next few decades, as transport, heat and industry are increasingly electrified, nuclear power is unlikely to match the 29% share of generation that it reached during the late 1990s.
There is an aspirational goal – set under former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson – for nuclear to supply “up to” a quarter of the UK’s electricity in 2050, with “up to” 24GW of capacity.
Assuming Sizewell B continues to operate until 2055 and that Hinkley C, Sizewell C and at least three Rolls-Royce SMRs are all built, this would take UK capacity back up to 9.0GW.
Methodology
The chart is based on data from the World Nuclear Association, with known start dates for operating and retired reactors, as well as planned closure dates announced by operator EDF.
The timeline for new reactors to start operating – and assumed 60-year lifetime – is illustrative, based on published information from EDF, Rolls-Royce, the UK government and media reports.
The post Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades
Recent years have seen a rapid succession of climate-related records broken.
To name just a few, the world has witnessed record warmth in the Atlantic, unprecedented glacier melt, all-time low Antarctic sea ice extent, the Amazon’s worst drought since observations began and UK temperatures soaring past 40C for the first time.
In a review article, published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, my coauthors and I look at how the frequency of weather records is changing as the planet warms.
We find that the number of hot temperature records observed around the world since 1950 far exceed what would be expected in a million years in a world without human-caused climate change.
Specifically, we show that “all-time” daily hot records on land were more than four times higher in 2016-24 than they would have been in a world without climate change.
Meanwhile, daily maximum rainfall records were up 40% over the same time period and record cold events were twice as rare.
A key finding of our research is that it is the pace of global warming that controls the occurrence of records.
We show that, if the pace of warming were to slow down, the frequency of record-breaking hot events would start to decline – even if global temperatures continue to rise.
Counting records
By definition, records are supposed to be rare events, at least in a system that is not changing.
Statistics of record occurrence are remarkably simple. They are expected to become rarer the longer a measurement series gets.
The chance of observing a new record after 20 years of measurement is one in 20, or 5%. And after 100 years of observations, the chances of a new record drops to 1%.
For example, this is why it becomes increasingly difficult to break records in athletics as time goes by, unless training methods or sports equipment improve.
Record-breaking weather events – for example, the highest windspeed, most intense rainfall or hot and cold temperatures – also face these odds in a climate that is “stationary”.
However, today’s climate is not stationary, but warming at a very high pace. This has significant implications for the record count.
The plot below shows how the frequency of all-time hot records (dashed red line) and record cold events (dashed blue line) has changed since the 1960s. This is compared to the probability that would be expected under a stationary climate (black line).
(The plot uses ERA5, a reanalysis dataset, which combines observations and models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).)
It illustrates how the frequency of hot events declined more slowly than would be expected in a stationary climate since 1950, before increasing in the last 15 years. Meanwhile, the frequency of record cold events is declining more quickly than expected.
The record ratio
Tracking the ratio between the measured number of records and the one theoretically expected in a stationary climate – the “record ratio” – reveals the fingerprint of climate change.
Analysis of ERA5 data and Berkeley Earth surface temperature observations finds that the record ratio over the last decade for hot records over global land regions is more than four. For cold records, it is between 0.2 and 0.5, showing that record-breaking cold has declined
In other words, there were more than four times as many hot record events and less than half as many cold record events than would be expected without global warming.
In 2023 and 2024, the record ratio for hot events reached 5.5 and 6.2, respectively.
Record ratios tend to be higher over global oceans than on land. They are also higher for monthly or seasonal record temperatures than all-time daily records.
This is because natural variability in the climate tends to be smaller over oceans and for longer averaging periods, such as months and seasons.
Record counts directly relate to the relationship between rates of warming and natural fluctuations in the climate. This is sometimes referred to as the “signal-to-noise ratio”. (The “signal” being the long-term trend of climate change and “noise” referring to short-term fluctuations of natural variability.)
As a result, event types and regions with a higher signal-to-noise ratio tend to see a greater number of records.
Another way of illustrating the signal of climate change is by counting the total number of records in a measurement series.
In a stationary climate, there should be about five records in 100 years of temperature measurements, 7.5 in 1,000 years and less than 10 in 10,000 years.
However, our analysis of records in two measurement series shows how the number of record-breaking events has become significantly higher as the climate has changed.
For example, as the figure on the left below illustrates, a new annual record for average global temperature has been set 25 times over the past 175 years.
Meanwhile, the figure on the right shows how, in the Pacific north-west, a new five-day average heat record has been set 14 times within the last 75 years. The spike in temperature in 2021 reflects the brutal heatwave that killed hundreds of people and brought devastating wildfires that almost entirely destroyed the Canadian village of Lytton.
(In both figures, the warm records are marked by pink circles.)
According to fundamental laws of statistics, 14 new records would not be expected in more than a million years in a climate that is not warming.
It is worth noting that some climate variables, including ocean heat content, sea level rise and minimum glacier or ice sheet volumes, are changing so relentlessly that new record levels are currently set every year.
Record-shattering events
Record-shattering events are a subset of record-breaking events whose magnitude exceeds the previous event by a large margin.
In our research, we define this as more than one standard deviation, which is a measure of how spread out data is from the average.
(The exact value of standard deviation varies for different parts of the world. For example, when it comes to year-to-year average temperatures, one standard deviation is typically 2-3C in the Arctic, but less than 0.5C over the ocean).
These events of unprecedented intensity are often very impactful as they strongly exceed the conditions that society or ecosystems have experienced in the past.
The 2021 heatwave in the Pacific north-west, mentioned above, is a forbidding example.
Our research finds that the large number of record-shattering events in the past three decades is the consequence of a very high warming rate.
Using a simple timeseries model, we illustrate why the pace of warming is the key factor explaining the occurrence of record-shattering events.
In the left-hand figure, we assume a 150-year period of no warming followed by some linear warming at three different rates, which is a very simplistic approximation of historical and future warming pathways.
The right-hand figure illustrates what happens to the probability of record-shattering events in the Pacific north-west region under these three simplified pathways. It shows that the probability of record-shattering events at first rapidly increases and then stabilises. And the level at which the probability stabilises is greater the higher the rate of warming.
We therefore conclude that the high frequency of record-shattering hot extremes in recent years is controlled by the very high rate of warming caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
This tight coupling of record counts to the rate or speed of warming implies that there will be early benefits of slowing down global warming.
In our research, we look at how the probability of hot and cold records changes under different emissions reduction scenarios. To do this, we analysed the occurrence of record hot and cold events in climate model projections in the CMIP6 archive.
The figure below shows how stabilising temperatures by achieving net-zero carbon emissions (SSP1-1.9 and SSP1-2.6) will lead to a rapid decline of records, even if temperatures remain higher than in the historical period.
(It is worth noting that, while the number of records will decline under this lower-emissions scenario, the number of heatwaves would remain higher than today.)
Under intermediate (SSP2-4.5), high (SSP3-7.0) and very high emission (SSP5-8.5) scenarios, the number of records would continue to increase to levels much higher than today.
Rainfall records
We would also expect rainfall records to become progressively rarer in a stationary climate.
However, we find that record-breaking heavy precipitation occurred about 40% more often in 2015-24 than would be expected in a stationary climate. Many record-shattering heavy rainfall extremes occurred in the mid-latitudes and led to flooding which had large impacts.
(Calculating the frequency of records is more challenging for rainfall than for temperature, given small-scale variations and uncertainties in rainfall observations.)
The greater number of record-breaking rainfall events is due to an increase in precipitation intensity over most land regions as the atmosphere warms, as well as larger variations of rainfall intensity on a day-to-day, season-to-season and year-to-year basis .
We also find that the margin by which previous rainfall records are broken tends to become larger and larger in time. This is due to the “non-symmetric” distribution of rainfall – where there are many days with little precipitation, less with heavy precipitation and very few with very extreme precipitation.
It is therefore not surprising to see record-shattering precipitation events exceeding previous records by 20-50% in intensity, even if overall precipitation intensity increases by roughly 7% per degree of warming.
Preparing for the future
Efforts to adapt to climate change are typically informed by the worst events observed in recent generations.
This means that society is often underprepared for record-shattering events – which by their very definition are of unprecedented intensity.
Qualitative and quantitative storyline methods can offer insight into the many record-breaking events to come into the future – and, thus, help society prepare for escalating climate impacts.
These methods combine information from historical and paleoarchives, long measurement series, targeted climate model experiments, statistical and machine learning methods and weather forecasting systems.
Ultimately, these methods can improve society’s preparedness to climate change, so that the next record-shattering extreme does not come as a surprise.
The post Guest post: How climate change is fuelling record-breaking extreme weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How climate change is fuelling record-breaking extreme weather
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