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The IPCC 1.5 °C report argues for a 50% cut of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Dangerous gaps lie between what is required to reach the 1.5 °C objective, what governments have pledged and what is happening in reality. Here, we develop 'climate policy gap' graphics for Portugal, Spain and Morocco to help reveal this divide and quantify the under-reaction between diagnosis and action, through layers of political intended and unintended miscommunication, insufficient action and the power of the fossil fuels industries. The climate policy gaps for the three nations reveal overshoots on even the most ambitious levels of emissions reductions pledged when compared with trajectories compatible with 1.5 °C or even 2 °C limits. This research suggests that there is a built-in feature of under-reaction in climate policy, which staves off any emission pathways compatible with stopping a temperature rise above 1.5 °C by 2100. It shows that the climate policy gap is a political and methodological tool that reveals systemic shortcomings of government climate action. Its visibility identifies benchmarks and sectors that should be activated to close these gaps in response to the growing popular demands for climate justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyses three uncertainty sources affecting the observation‐based gridded data sets: station density, interpolation methodology and spatial resolution. For this purpose, we consider precipitation in two countries, Poland and Spain, three resolutions (0.11, 0.22 and 0.44°), three interpolation methods, both areal‐ and point‐representative implementations, and three different densities of the underlying station network (high/medium/low density). As a result, for each resolution and interpolation approach, nine different grids have been obtained for each country and inter‐compared using a variance decomposition methodology. Results indicate larger differences among the data sets for Spain than for Poland, mainly due to the larger spatial variability and complex orography of the former region. The variance decomposition points out to station density as the most influential factor, independent of the season, the areal‐ or point‐representative implementation and the country considered, and slightly increasing with the spatial resolution. In contrast, the decomposition is stable when extreme precipitation indices are considered, in particular for the 50‐year return value. Finally, the uncertainty due to station sub‐sampling inside a particular grid box decreases with the number of stations used in the averaging/interpolation. In the case of spatially homogeneous grid boxes, the interpolation approach obtains similar results for all the parameters, excepting the wet day frequency, independently of the number of stations. When there is a more significant internal variability in the grid box, the interpolation is more sensitive to the number of stations, pointing out to a minimum stations' density for the target resolution (six to seven stations). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A high resolution (2km) 20-year simulation forced with a high resolution (9km) winds and air–sea fluxes covering the Gulf of Cadiz and the Alboran Sea is described. The across-strait mass flux becomes a critical issue and the strategy that was adopted towards a correct implementation of the exchange is reported. A net transport previously calculated is forced in the barotropic mode through the boundaries, and the model is left free to adjust the exchange (inflow/outflow) to the imposed mass flux. A thoroughly comparison of the model results with observations and other exchange estimates are provided and new values are proposed. The model reproduces the main modes of outflow variability with statistics almost identical to the observed ones ( Sv). For the inflow, the model values ( Sv) are compared with observations and new estimates are provided and analyzed. Despite the fact that the mixing processes inside the strait are under-resolved, the product water masses to the west (Mediterranean outflow) and to the east (Atlantic Water – inflow) are well represented in the model. The mean circulation features are described and compared with observations from a few long-term moorings, and analyzed in light of existing literature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Historical records document medieval immigration from North Africa to Iberia to create Islamic al-Andalus. Here, we present a low-coverage genome of an eleventh century CE man buried in an Islamic necropolis in Segorbe, near Valencia, Spain. Uniparental lineages indicate North African ancestry, but at the autosomal level he displays a mosaic of North African and European-like ancestries, distinct from any present-day population. Altogether, the genome-wide evidence, stable isotope results and the age of the burial indicate that his ancestry was ultimately a result of admixture between recently arrived Amazigh people (Berbers) and the population inhabiting the Peninsula prior to the Islamic conquest. We detect differences between our sample and a previously published group of contemporary individuals from Valencia, exemplifying how detailed, small-scale aDNA studies can illuminate fine-grained regional and temporal differences. His genome demonstrates how ancient DNA studies can capture portraits of past genetic variation that have been erased by later demographic shifts-in this case, most likely the seventeenth century CE expulsion of formerly Islamic communities as tolerance dissipated following the Reconquista by the Catholic kingdoms of the north., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia's ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry. We show that, in the Iron Age, Steppe ancestry had spread not only into Indo-European-speaking regions but also into non-Indo-European-speaking ones, and we reveal that present-day Basques are best described as a typical Iron Age population without the admixture events that later affected the rest of Iberia. Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.)