Wim Thiery

Will you live an unprecedented life? In our new paper in @nature.com and accompanying @savethechildren.org report, we detect who will face unprecedented lifetime exposure to climate extremes (🧵) 1/n Report: resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/bor... Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The 2026 UNEP Emissions Gap Report is out: The Point of Return. 🌍🌡️🔥 It's sobering but actionable. Decades of inadequate climate action have closed off opportunities to limit warming, but ambitious action today can still prevent much greater harm. A thread of some of the highlights 🧵

Interview deze week in Humo: www.humo.be/achter-het-n...

The results of our rapid attribution study, led by Maxim Sleypen of @hydr-vub.bsky.social, show that over half (665) of the heat-related deaths from the June heatwave in Belgium are due to anthrop climate change. Our addiction to oil, coal & gas is deadly - literally www.standaard.be/binnenland/k...

’After a week of contentious deliberations and some displays of temper, IPCC failed to reach agreement on either a timeline for the remainder of its Seventh Assessment Cycle or even a budget for the coming year.’ enb.iisd.org/intergovernm...

L’extraordinaire aventure d’un chercheur pour sauver les données climatiques du Congo www.rtbf.be/article/l-ex...

Day 1 of our class on the Detection and Attribution of Human Induced Changes to Extreme Weather Introduction to attribution. Detection and Attribution of trends in climatic variables. Pearl Causal Inference Extreme weather event attribution using Pearl Causal inference Extreme value statistics

So, will you live an unprecedented life? Welcome to my @erc.europa.eu inaugural lecture Thursday 22 october 17h @vubrussel.bsky.social @hydr-vub.bsky.social www.vub.be/en/event/erc...

Welcome Valerie Trouet! www.vub.be/nl/nieuws/pr...

Last days to apply for this position:

Two years plus in the making... our paper building fair effort sharing directly into how integrated assessment model (IAM) scenarios are generated is out in Environmental Research Letters🧵 @iopp-environment.bsky.social @iiasa.ac.at doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aea34d

"Current [El Nino] forecasts suggest that the 2026 event could push global mean surface temperatures in 2027 to almost 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels" 😱 Good rundown of El Nino impacts via @zekehausfather.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The FUTURA project will bridge IAM, SCM, ESM, RCM, IM and emulator communities working on climate projections in Europe. Stay tuned for many exciting research and science-policy interfacing in the coming years! @hydr-vub.bsky.social

This Chart is striking. Strongest El Nino’s on record VS the forecasts from our best seasonal models. Historically the strongest El Nino’s dating back 170 years peaked with a monthly ocean anomaly in the mid-high 2’s. Now 9 of 10 of our national models have 4°C + for late fall. #elnino 1/

We have a new paper on the response of land carbon to zero, declining, and negative emissions of CO2 across Earth System Models! w/ @ckoven.bsky.social @cristiproist.bsky.social @rosieafisher.bsky.social @benmsanderson.bsky.social & more (1/6) esd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...

@vubrussel.bsky.social haalt 4 Amerikaanse klimaatonderzoekers naar Brussel www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/20...

Projection has become reality 22 years ago, Christoph Schär et al. published a landmark paper in Nature explaining that the 2003 heatwave was a harbinger of things to come. The study featured an iconic figure - shown in countless lectures - illustrating how outlandish the event was at the time

Europees transportsysteem dreigt steeds vaker in de knoop te raken door weerextremen vrtnws.be/p.w79VW8YpM

“So next time someone tells you Canada’s fires can be solved by raking the forests, you can point out that the thing filling their sky with smoke is a lightning-struck, drought-primed boreal forest doing what a warming climate is making it do more and more often.”

With all the July model runs now in, it is very likely that 2026 will see the largest El Niño event since records began in the late 1800s – and potentially by a truly mind-blowing margin. The median estimate is now 3.6C, roughly 0.8C hotter than the prior record (2.75C). www.theclimatebrink....

Recent Belgian Heatwave Declared Deadliest on Record: “the situation during the peak weekend was so severe that excess mortality surpassed even the worst weekend of the COVID-19 pandemic. Between June 22nd and June 27th, a staggering 1,747 excess deaths were recorded.” #Belgium #heatwave #europe

June 2026 data from Copernicus ECMWF offered another stark reminder of our changing #climate: - Western Europe recorded its warmest June on record - Globally it was the 2nd warmest June according to ERA5 Our climate system is continuing to accumulate heat .

El Niño continues to grow, with sea surface temperatures clearly at record high levels for the time of year... 📈 Sign up for our next monthly briefing to learn more, including Q/A: climatecentral-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi.... We'll also have an update on 2026's U.S. billion-dollar disasters so far.

🥵 Europe has been affected by a terrible heatwave, with impacts across the continent & record-breaking temperatures in many countries. The @ipcc.bsky.social #AR6 conclusions show that that heat extremes have become more intense & more frequent across the world due to human-induced climate change.

What is the future of summers in England? Our choices matter. A high-emissions future will commit our children and grandchildren to live in a world where the summers of 1976 & 2025 are cold. A global net-zero emissions future means that we can stabilise the climate & those summers will be normal.

People will die this week. The next few days will bring record-breaking heat to France, a country ill-prepared for widespread temperatures over 40 °C (104 °F). For the French: stay hydrated, stay in the shade, exercise due caution, and seek help if you need it.

ECMWF weekly mean temperature anomaly shows the highest category (>10°C above normal) over France this week. Typically, these colors appear only during winter warm spells, when temperature variability is the largest. Seeing them in mid-summer says a lot about the intensity of this heatwave.

A 40°C in the forecast for Reading now on Wednesday. Still rather uncertain on the exact magnitude, but 3 consecutive days breaking the previous all-time record for Reading (37.6°C) is possible.

The emergency events database, EM-DAT, must be preserved as a global public good Our new commentary in the Int. Journal of Public Health with N. Speybroeck, I. Noy, A. Kettner, R. Below, G. Messori, V. Wathelet, @ajezeq.bsky.social, D. Delforge, D. van Niekerk www.ssph-journal.org/journals/int...

With June runs in for all the ENSO models and the "spring predictability barrier" mostly behind us, the odds of a record-breaking El Niño event this fall have continued to increase. Here are all the latest runs (including today's C3S updates):

I just want to point out that temperatures over land (where we all live) have warmed over twice as fast as ocean surface temperatures. The latest update through 2025 is... not great 🥴 Graphic created by www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temp...

The Amazon rainforest could be at a tipping point go.nature.com/4dVqWvY

Hard to believe I’m even writing this. Meteorological summer hasn’t even begun, yet Paris, France has already logged more days above 32°C than its annual average.

JUST DROPPED: For years I thought industrial electrification potential was limited. How wrong I was. Engineering studies point to 90%+. Long term scenarios support this. Technology is much further ahead than we think. Question is whether policy keeps up. janrosenow.substack.com/p/industry-f...

In response to recent misinformation about the use of scenarios in IPCC reports: the IPCC does not conduct its own research, run models or make measurements. The IPCC’s role is to assess the available scientific, peer-reviewed literature relevant to climate change: www.ipcc.ch/2026/05/20/i...

Burning fossil fuels has made this heatwave hotter. True for the UK today, and everywhere else, all of the time.

The paper describing the ISIMIP3b simulation protocol and climate-related forcings from CMIP6 is now available in @egu.eu GMD. Encyclopedic reference work led by Katja Frieler and the ISIMIP core team @pik-potsdam.bsky.social. What an effort! gmd.copernicus.org/articles/19/...

Every year now, the pre-monsoon heat (the hottest time of year in South Asia with temperatures well over 40°C) starts earlier & lasts longer - due to human-induced climate change - exposing 1billion people to deadly heat. @wwattribution.bsky.social www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-chan...

Rainfall intensity matters as much as how much rain falls. New in Nature: Corey Lesk and I show that daily-scale concentration of precipitation dries the land over the long-run, an effect as strong as total precipitation is climatological wetting. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The electricity-to-gas price ratio is the biggest barrier to electrifying European homes. Heat pumps deliver ~3 units of heat per unit of electricity. The maths works in Sweden but not everywhere. Much of gap is policy. More analysis in my forthcoming Substack newsletter janrosenow.substack.com