Tag Archives: Climate Change

Migration, climate top World Economic Forum’s report on global risks

LONDON (Reuters) – We live in an increasingly dangerous world, with political, economic and environmental threats piling up, according to experts polled by the World Economic Forum.

Ahead of its annual meeting in Davos next week, the group’s 2016 Global Risks report on Thursday ranked the migrant crisis as the biggest single risk in terms of likelihood, while climate change was seen as having the greatest potential impact.

Around 60 million people have been displaced by conflicts from Syria to South Sudan, pushing refugee flows to record levels that are some 50 percent higher than during World War II.

Coupled with attacks such as those on Paris last year and geopolitical fault lines stretching from the Middle East to the South China Sea, the world is today arguably less politically stable than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Economic fears, particularly for Chinese growth, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events are further red flags, resulting in a greater breadth of risks than at any time in the survey’s 11-year history.

“Almost every risk is now up over the last couple of years and it paints an overall environment of unrest,” said John Drzik, head of global risk at insurance broker Marsh, who helped compile the report.

“Economic risks have come back reasonably strongly, with China, energy prices and asset bubbles all seen as significant problems in many countries.”

Last year, the threat of conflict between states topped the list of risks for the first time, after previous editions mostly highlighted economic threats.

British finance minister George Osborne, one of those heading to the Alpine ski resort set the mood last week, warning that 2016 opened “with a dangerous cocktail of new threats”.

The Jan. 20-23 Davos meeting will bring together players from geopolitical hot spots such as the foreign ministers of arch-rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as the biggest ever U.S. delegation, including Vice President Joe Biden.

North Korea’s invitation, however, has been revoked, after it conducted a nuclear test, defying a United Nations ban.

CYBER RISK A WILD CARD

The immediate problems of Middle East tensions, China’s turbulent markets and a tumbling oil price are likely to dominate corridor conversations at Davos.

But long-term concerns identified in the report center more on physical and societal trends, especially the impact of climate change and the danger of attendant water and food shortages.

While last month’s climate deal in Paris may act as a signal to investors to spend trillions of dollars to replace coal-fired power with solar panels and windmills, it is only a first step.

For businesses, the transition from fossil fuels remains uncertain, especially as political instability increases the risk of disrupted and canceled projects.

One wild card is cyber attack, which business leaders in several developed countries, including the United States, Japan and Germany, rank as a major risk to operations, although it does not make the top threat list overall.

The report analyzed 29 global risks for both likelihood and impact over a 10-year horizon by surveying nearly 750 experts and decision makers.

(Editing by Alexander Smith)

Nations Approve Landmark Climate Change Deal

A group of 195 nations has reached an unprecedented agreement on global climate change.

Delegates from the nations had spent the past two weeks at the COP21 conference in Paris, working to finalize details on a pact aimed at scaling back global greenhouse gas emissions.

On Saturday, they announced they had come to a consensus.

The conference was aimed at preventing average global temperatures from reaching 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above their counterparts during the Industrial Revolution, when greenhouse gas emissions surged. Scientists have publicly warned that eclipsing that long-feared threshold could yield catastrophic results, including massive flooding and droughts.

The nations agreed they would try to do even better and set a goal of keeping temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which provides more of a buffer.

“We have entered a new era of global cooperation on one of the most complex issues ever to confront humanity,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said in a statement. “For the first time, every country in the world has pledged to curb emissions, strengthen resilience and join in common cause to take common climate action. This is a resounding success for multilateralism.”

There’s still some work to be done before the agreement takes effect. It must be individually ratified by 55 countries that produce at least 55 percent of global carbon emissions. And there’s also work to be done before the world feels the effects of the Paris Agreement, as each nation must develop plans to cap its individual emissions as soon as possible and keep reducing them.

U.N. officials said in a news release that 188 countries have already submitted so-called climate action plans toward the Paris Agreement. Now, the countries will be required to submit new plans every five years. Those plans are required to become gradually more proactive over time, with nations working to further reduce emissions to keep temperatures below the feared levels.

But the agreement wasn’t universally hailed. Some climate change activists wanted to see a quicker transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy like wind and solar power.

“Every government seems now to recognize that the fossil fuel era must end and soon. But the power of the fossil fuel industry is reflected in the text, which drags out the transition so far that endless climate damage will be done,” Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said in a statement. “Since pace is the crucial question now, activists must redouble our efforts to weaken that industry. This didn’t save the planet but it may have saved the chance of saving the planet.”

Threat Posed to Food Supplies in Future According to World Bank

As many as 100 million people could slide into extreme poverty because of rising temperatures, which are caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the World Bank report said. The bank’s most recent estimate puts the number of people living in extreme poverty this year at 702 million, or 9.6% of the world’s population.

The report “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty”  shows that climate change is an acute threat to poorer people across the world, with the power to push more than 100 million people back into poverty over the next fifteen years.   It also reports that the poorest regions of the world such as the Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia will be hardest hit and could push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 by disrupting agriculture and fueling the spread of malaria and other diseases.

Despite pledges to rein in emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases, climate change isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. Carbon emissions are expected to rise for many years as China, India and other developing countries expand the use of fossil fuels to power their economies.

The report points a way out by stressing that the world needs to take targeting action to help people cope with climate shocks, issue warning systems and flood protection and introduce heat-resistant crops.  

This year, a series of high-profile meetings took place, creating a sense of gathering cooperation around the battle against global warming. A vital step was the adoption of the global goals, which set a 2030 deadline for the eradication of poverty in all its forms and sought to galvanise action to combat climate change and its impacts at the UN general assembly in September.

New Study Finds that Persian Gulf Could Become Uninhabitable Due to Extreme Climate Change

By the end of the century, major cities along the Persian Gulf could be too hot for human survival.

On Monday a scientific study published in the journal Nature Climate Change warned that climate change could make the summer days in the Persian Gulf area too hot for “human habitability.” It would be so hot that even the healthiest of people would only be able to be outdoors for just a few hours. Cities such as Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Mecca are at risk if global warming continues at its current rate, according to the Washington Post.

“The threats to human health may be much more severe than previously thought, and may occur in the current century,” Christoph Schaer, a physicist and climate modeler at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, Switzerland, said in a commentary on the study’s conclusions.

The Washington Post reports that the authors of the study are a pair of scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Loyola Marymount University. Using high-resolution climate models of the Persian Gulf, they were able to view several different scenarios that could affect the area due to climate change over the coming decades. They focused on “wet-bulb temperature,” a key heat measurement that includes evaporation rates and humidity, averaged over several hours to determine when the Persian Gulf would be uninhabitable to humans. They determined that the high temperatures would be so high that the human body would not be able to sweat to ward off the heat.

The scientists predicted that low-lying regions of the Persian Gulf could see temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit while other cities including Kuwait City and Al Ain would see temperatures above 140 degrees Fahrenheit. In the summer months, they predict the temperatures rising to as high as 165-170 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Washington Post and Fox News.

And while some could stave off the heat with air conditioning, the impoverished areas in the Persian Gulf would see disastrous results.

“People who have resources could use air conditioning and avoid the outdoors during heat waves but, in some corners of that region, there are communities and people who don’t have resources to do that,” Elfatih Eltahir, a co-author of the study, told Fox News. “We pointed to some corners of Yemen along the Red Sea that are not as well off as other parts of the Gulf Region.”

Study Shows Rising Sea-Levels Will Bring Drastic Flooding to the U.S.

In the latest study, a team of scientists discovered that millions of Americans may already live on land that is destined to be reclaimed by the sea.

While some locations are only at risk of flooding, others are doomed to flood in the distant future. However, the process could speed up due to the rise of carbon dioxide emissions and the destabilization of West Antarctica’s ice sheet.

“Future emissions will determine which areas we can continue to occupy or may have to abandon,” note the report’s researchers, led by Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central in Princeton, N.J. The research appeared Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was co-authored by Scott Kulp of Climate Central and Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The research states: “Carbon choices determine US cities committed to futures below sea level.” For every one degree Celsius of warming, the scientists estimate that the sea-level will rise about 2.3 meters over the next 2,000 years. However, there is a possibility that it could happen sooner.

Using the link between climate warming and eventual ice melt, the researchers estimate that with current carbon emissions, the world is already destined to see the sea-level rise 1.6 meters – more than five feet. That isn’t taking into consideration the increase of carbon emissions that will exist in the future, which could make the sea-level rise by more than seven feet.

If no action is taken on climate change, the locations of over 26 million Americans could be flooded with more than 1,500 U.S. cities and municipalities overrun with water.

“If we don’t cut emissions,” Strauss said, “we’re talking about losing American land [that’s] home to more people than live in any state, except for California and Texas. Home to more people than the state of Florida and New York.”

The authors of the study also directly acknowledge gaps in the research. This includes cities that have taken steps to deal with extreme flooding scenarios like New Orleans’ 26-foot-high sea wall. Louisiana is also contemplating diversions of the Mississippi River that would not only create new wetlands, but keep pace with the rising seas. This means that as the sea-levels slowly rise, cities might be able to adapt.

Arctic Ice Melting At Record Rate

Scientists at the Norwegian Polar Institute are reporting that the record-breaking ice melt this summer is part of an accelerating trend that could have significant long-term consequences on climate and ocean conditions.

The researchers are saying that the sea ice is becoming significantly thinner and more vulnerable than in any previous year since monitoring began 30 years ago. The peak for ice melting has yet to pass as mid-September has been the traditional peak time. However, temperatures in the region remain above freezing. Continue reading →