Young Indian activist named by UN chief to new advisory group on climate change

JUL 28, 2020 UNITED NATIONS: A climate activist from India has been named by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to his new advisory group comprising young leaders who will provide perspectives and solutions to tackle the worsening climate crisis, as the global body mobilizes action as part of the COVID-19 recovery efforts. Archana Soreng joins six other young climate leaders from around the world who have been named by Guterres to his new Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. Soreng is "experienced in advocacy and research, and she is working to document, preserve, and promote traditional knowledge and cultural practices of indigenous communities," the UN said in a statement on Monday. "Our ancestors have been protecting the forest and nature over the ages through their traditional knowledge and practices. Now it is on us to be the front runners in combating the climate crisis," said Soreng, who has studied regulatory governance from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Mumbai and is the former TISS Students Union President. The young activists, aged between 18 and 28 years, will advise the UN chief regularly on accelerating global action and ambition to tackle the worsening climate crisis. The announcement marks a new effort by the United Nations to bring more young leaders into decision-making and planning processes, as the UN works to mobilize climate action as part of the COVID-19 recovery efforts. "We are in a climate emergency. We do not have the luxury of time," Guterres said in a video announcing the establishment of the advisory group. "We need urgent action now - to recover better from COVID-19, to confront injustice and inequality and address climate disruption," he said. Guterres said young people are on the front lines of climate action, showing nations and leaders what bold leadership looks like. "That is why I am launching my Youth Advisory Group on climate change today - to provide perspectives, ideas and solutions that will help us scale up climate action," the UN chief said. The members of the Secretary-General's Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change represent the diverse voices of young people from all regions as well as small island states. They will offer perspectives and solutions on climate change, from science to community mobilization, from entrepreneurship to politics, and from industry to conservation, the UN said. The initial seven members of the group have been chosen to give frank and fearless advice to the Secretary-General, at a time of growing urgency to hold government and corporate leaders to account on climate action. The other selected members of the group are climate activist Nisreen Elsaim of Sudan, Fiji's Ernest Gibson, the co-coordinator for 350 Fiji, a regional youth-led climate change network, young economist Vladislav Kaim of Moldova who is committed to ensuring green and decent jobs for youth. Sophia Kianni of the United States who has helped organise nationwide strikes and is the founder of international nonprofit Climate Cardinals, founder and coordinator of Generation Climate Europe and spokesperson for Youth and Environment Europe, Nathan Metenier of France and lawyer and human rights defender Paloma Costa of Brazil. The establishment of the group builds on last year''s successful Youth Climate Summit - the first time a Secretary-General has convened a summit for young people entirely devoted to climate action. The summit brought over 1,000 young climate champions together from more than 140 countries to share their solutions on the global stage and deliver a clear message to world leaders: we must act now to confront the climate crisis. The initiative is also aligned with the Secretary-General''s vision for the UN Youth Strategy, launched in September 2018. Copyright © Jammu Links News, Source: Jammu Links News

Read More........→August 05, 2020

Nuclear energy too expensive, too slow to battle climate change: report

Nuclear power as a renewable power option is more expensive and slower to implement than alternatives and therefore is not effective in the effort to battle the climate emergency, rather it is counterproductive, as the funds are then not available for more effective options, says a report on the status and trends of the international nuclear industry.

While the number of operating nuclear reactors has increased globally over the past year by four to 417 as of mid-2019, it remains significantly below historic peak of 438 in 2002, according to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019 (WNISR2019), which is being released at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. Nuclear construction has been shrinking over the past five years with 46 units underway as of mid-2019, compared to 68 reactors in 2013 and 234 in 1979. The number of annual construction starts has fallen from 15 in the pre-Fukushima year (2010) to five in 2018 and, so far, one in 2019. The historic peak was in 1976 with 44 construction starts, more than the total in the past seven years. WNISR project coordinator and publisher Mycle Schneider stated: “There can be no doubt: the renewal rate of nuclear power plants is too slow to guarantee the survival of the technology. The world is experiencing an undeclared ‘organic’ nuclear phaseout.” Consequently, as of mid-2019, for the first time the average age of the world nuclear reactor fleet exceeds 30 years. However, renewables continue to outpace nuclear power in virtually all categories. A record 165 gigawatts (GW) of renewables were added to the world’s power grids in 2018; the nuclear operating capacity increased by 9 GW. Globally, wind power output grew by 29 per cent in 2018, solar by 13 per cent, nuclear by 2.4 per cent. Compared to a decade ago, nonhydro renewables generated over 1,900 TWh more power, exceeding coal and natural gas, while nuclear produced less. What does all this mean for the potential role of nuclear power to combat climate change? WNISR2019 provides a new focus chapter on the question. Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, Professor at the Central European University and Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III, notes in her Foreword to WNISR2019 that several IPCC scenarios that reach the 1.5°C temperature target rely heavily on nuclear power and that “these scenarios raise the question whether the nuclear industry will actually be able to deliver the magnitude of new power that is required in these scenarios in a cost-effective and timely manner. This report is perhaps the most relevant publication to answer this pertinent question.” Over the past decade, levelised cost estimates for utility-scale solar dropped by 88 per cent, wind by 69 per cent, while nuclear increased by 23 per cent. New solar plants can compete with existing coal fired plants in India, wind turbines alone generate more electricity than nuclear reactors in India and China. But new nuclear plants are also much slower to build than all other options, eg, the nine reactors started up in 2018 took an average of 10.9 years to be completed. In other words, nuclear power is an option that is more expensive and slower to implement than alternatives and therefore is not effective in the effort to battle the climate emergency, rather it is counterproductive, as the funds are then not available for more effective options. The rather surprising outcome of the analyses is that even the extended operation of existing reactors is not climate effective as operating costs exceed the costs of competing energy efficiency and new renewable energy options and therefore durably block their implementation. “You can spend a dollar, a euro, a forint or a ruble only once: the climate emergency requires that investment decisions must favor the cheapest and fastest response strategies. The nuclear power option has consistently turned out the most expensive and the slowest,” Mycle Schneider concludes. The WNISR2019 assesses in 323 pages the status and trends of the international nuclear industry and analyses the potential role of nuclear power as an option to combat climate change. Eight interdisciplinary experts from six countries, including four university professors and the Rocky Mountain Institute’s co-founder and chairman emeritus, have contributed to the report.Source: https://www.domain-b.com

Read More........→June 29, 2020

World's second largest rainforest at risk from lifting of logging moratorium

New licences could soon be issued to logging companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), threatening to accelerate the rate of deforestation in the region.

A tropical rainforest more than twice the size of France is at risk of being cut down, following news from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that the government is planning to re-open its forest to new logging companies. This comes at a time when the governments of Norway, France, Germany, the UK, and the European Union are assessing whether to support a billion-dollar plan proposed by the DRC government to protect the country's 1.55 million square kilometres of forests.

A coalition of environmental and anti-corruption organisations is calling on the DRC to maintain its moratorium on the allocation of new logging licenses, which has been in place since 2002.

"The large-scale logging of DRC's rainforest was and is a disaster," said Irène Betoko of Greenpeace Africa. "It not only harms the country's environment, but also fuels corruption and creates social and economic havoc. We call upon the DRC government to keep the present logging moratorium in place."

Lars Løvold of the Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN): "At a time when the global community is working together to protect the world's last rainforests, a vital defence against climate change, the DRC government seems to be undermining the commitment to reducing emissions that it presented in Paris."

DRC Environment Minister, Robert Bogeza, outlining his priorities for 2016, stated that measures are being taken to lift the moratorium on the allocation of new logging licenses, citing the financial benefits this could bring: "The moratorium on granting new forestry concessions, decreed in 2002 by Ministerial Decree and reaffirmed in 2005 by Presidential Decree, has caused a huge shortfall in revenues for our country. Measures are underway for the Government to lift it."

However, Joesph Bobia of Réseau Ressources Naturelles (RRN) said: "The argument that logging can significantly contribute to government revenues is completely unfounded. Around a tenth of the DRC's rainforest is already being logged. And yet, in 2014 the country obtained a pitiful USD$8 million in fiscal revenues from the sector – the equivalent of about 12 cents for every Congolese person."

Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation UK said: "The expansion of industrial logging in the Congo's rainforests is likely to have serious long-term negative impacts on the millions of people living in and depending on those forests. We urge the government of DRC to instead promote community-based forest protection and alternatives to logging that will help the country's population prosper."

Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) is an international effort under the UN climate treaties to combat carbon emissions by protecting the world's forests. The DRC's national strategy for REDD has been under negotiation for six years and will be submitted to international donor governments for approval this year.

The moratorium on the allocation of new logging titles was issued by Ministerial decree in 2002, in an attempt to regain control of the country's timber industry, which was riddled with illegal logging and corruption. The DRC accounts for a tenth of the world's remaining tropical rainforests. Many species, such as the bonobo and okapi, are only found in these ecosystems. Some 40 million people in the country rely on these forests for their livelihoods.

A civil society briefing is available to download here. Source: http://www.futuretimeline.net/

Read More........→November 14, 2016

Long-Term Global Warming Not Driven Naturally

Credit: NASA 

By examining how Earth cools itself back down after a period of natural warming, a study by scientists at Duke University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirms that global temperature does not rise or fall chaotically in the long run. Unless pushed by outside forces, temperature should remain stable. The new study debunks argument that warming is driven by natural factors. The new evidence may finally help put the chill on skeptics' belief that long-term global warming occurs in an unpredictable manner, independently of external drivers such as human impacts. "This underscores that large, sustained changes in global temperature like those observed over the last century require drivers such as increased greenhouse gas concentrations," said lead author Patrick Brown, a PhD student at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. Natural climate cycles alone are insufficient to explain such changes, he said. The Earth's thin atmosphere as viewed from space. A new study from NASA and Duke finds natural cycles alone aren't sufficient to explain warming trends observed over the last century. Brown and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed research Feb. 1 in the Journal of Climate. Using global climate models and NASA satellite observations of Earth's energy budget from the last 15 years, the study finds that a warming Earth is able to restore its temperature equilibrium through complex and seemingly paradoxical changes in the atmosphere and the way radiative heat is transported. Scientists have long attributed this stabilization to a phenomenon known as the Planck Response, a large increase in infrared energy that Earth emits as it warms. Acting as a safety valve of sorts, this response creates a negative radiative feedback that allows more of the accumulating heat to be released into space through the top of the atmosphere. The new Duke-NASA research, however, shows it's not as simple as that. "Our analysis confirmed that the Planck Response plays a dominant role in restoring global temperature stability, but to our surprise we found that it tends to be overwhelmed locally by heat-trapping positive energy feedbacks related to changes in clouds, water vapor, and snow and ice," Brown said. "This initially suggested that the climate system might be able to create large, sustained changes in temperature all by itself." A more detailed investigation of the satellite observations and climate models helped the researchers finally reconcile what was happening globally versus locally. "While global temperature tends to be stable due to the Planck Response, there are other important, previously less appreciated, mechanisms at work too," said Wenhong Li, assistant professor of climate at Duke. These other mechanisms include a net release of energy over regions that are cooler during a natural, unforced warming event. And there can be a transport of energy from the tropical Pacific to continental and polar regions where the Planck Response overwhelms positive, heat-trapping local effects. "This emphasizes the importance of large-scale energy transport and atmospheric circulation changes in restoring Earth's global temperature equilibrium after a natural, unforced warming event," Li said. Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/

• Contacts and sources: Tim Lucas, Duke University
• Citation: "Unforced Surface Air Temperature Variability and Its Contrasting Relationship with the Atmospheric TOA Energy Flux at Local and Global Spatial Scales," Patrick T. Brown, Wenhong Li, Jonathan H. Jiang, Hui Su, Feb. 1, 2016, Journal of Climate; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0384.1
• Jonathan H. Jiang and Hui Su of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by the California Institute of Technology, co-authored the new study.
• Funding came from the National Science Foundation (#AGS-1147608) as well as the NASA ROSES13-NDOA and ROSES13-NEWS programs. 

Read More........→February 05, 2016

Volcanoes sparked 'Jurassic ice age'

Washington DC

Around 170 million years ago, our world faced an ice-age and now, the scientists are trying to explore the causes behind it. The international team of experts, including researchers from the Camborne School of Mines, has found evidence of a large and abrupt cooling of the Earth's temperature during the Jurassic Period, which lasted millions of years. The scientists found that the cooling coincided with a large-scale volcanic event, called the North Sea Dome, which restricted the flow of ocean water and the associated heat that it carried from the equator towards the North Pole region. The team suggest that it is this volcanic event, preventing the ocean flow, rather than a change in CO2 in the atmosphere (which causes today's climate change), that led to an extended Ice age in a period more synonymous with very warm conditions. Geology expert Stephen Hesselbo said that they tend to think of the Jurassic as a warm 'greenhouse' world where high temperatures were governed by high atmospheric carbon dioxide contents, adding that this study suggests that re-organization of oceanic current patterns may also have triggered large scale climate changes. Hesselbo further noted that though the occurrence of cold periods during greenhouse times have been known for a while, their origins have remained mysterious. This work suggests a mechanism at play that may also have been important for driving other climate change events in the Jurassic and at other times in Earth history. The research appears in Nature Communications. —ANI. Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com/

Read More........→December 13, 2015