Global News Archives - Pagina 26 di 65

Home » Global News

Climate Realities

ON Tuesday, world leaders will converge at United Nations headquarters in New York for a summit meeting on the climate that will set the stage for global negotiations next year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the threat of global climate change. The summit is titled “Catalyzing Action,” a decidedly hopeful characterization. I wish I were so hopeful. It is true that, in theory, we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change with an intensive global effort over the next several decades. But given real-world economic and, in particular, political realities, that seems unlikely.

U.N. climate summit is high-profile, but some of world’s most important leaders will skip it

This week, the United Nations will host a huge and well-publicized one-day summit on climate change. The public is likely to be watching it closely: It comes just days after thousands of people in New York and around the world took to the streets, demanding more political action to help fight global warming. The climate summit’s organizer, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, took part in the New York march, and for Tuesday’s event, he is promising to bring together a some of the most powerful people in the world with a common purpose. “I have invited leaders from government, business, finance and civil society to present their vision, make bold announcements and forge new partnerships that will support the transformative change the world needs,” he wrote in a blog post on the summit for the Huffington Post.

6 Ways Climate Change is Making Us Sick

Climate change and global health are intimately connected new research argues

Just a day after the People’s Climate March, one of the largest international environmental marches, a new analysis of 56 studies on climate change-related health problems shows that increasingly, global temperatures and severe weather events will continue to have a major impact on global health. In the U.S. alone, several cities are expected to experience many more frequent hot days by the year 2050, and New York City and Milwaukee for example, may have three times their current average of hot days that reach over 90 degrees. According to researchers from the University of Wisconsin, this is just one consequence of human-driven climate change. Currently, 97% of scientists studying climate agree that climate change is caused by humans. The new study, which is published inJAMA, lays out what these wide ranging effects on public health are.

Sun and Wind Alter Global Landscape

Of all the developed nations, few have pushed harder than Germany to find a solution to global warming. And towering symbols of that drive are appearing in the middle of the North Sea. They are wind turbines, standing as far as 60 miles from the mainland, stretching as high as 60-story buildings and costing up to $30 million apiece. On some of these giant machines, a single blade roughly equals the wingspan of the largest airliner in the sky, the Airbus A380. By year’s end, scores of new turbines will be sending low-emission electricity to German cities hundreds of miles to the south.

Whether It’s Green Growth, Green Economy, or Creative Economy

In recent years, a number of economic strategies have emerged that attempt to make climate change mitigation and adaptation complementary and mutually reinforcing with robust economic growth. In the case of my organization, the Global Green Growth Institute, we focus on the concept of green growth, which, to us, means we assist developing and emerging countries with policies and projects aimed at spurring job creation, reducing poverty, reducing environmental risk, and addressing the adverse impacts of climate change.

Natural gas in China – Shale game

China drastically reduces its ambitions to be a big shale-gas producer

IN 2012 China’s main planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, declared that the country would produce 60 billion-100 billion cubic metres of shale gas a year in 2020. It needed those forecasts to be accurate. They weren’t. Wu Xinxiong, the director of China’s National Energy Administration, recently predicted that only 30 billion cubic metres a year will come on stream by 2020. That would barely meet 1% of China’s energy needs now, let alone in 2020.