This month, facing the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, international magazines were full of significant environmental articles. I got baffled in eliminating them to find out the most vital 3-issues to make my cover page. Well, that I could make it. Hopefully, it will be worth reading.
On Oct 5, 2021, nature.com printed, two Climate modelers and one theorist of complex systems share Nobel in physics for their work on complex systems- including modeling earth's climate and global warming. They have modeled it solidly based on physical theory and solid physics by which Global warming is resting on solid science. That is the message. We can predict what is happening with the climate in the future if we know how to code the chaotic weather.
On Oct 8, 2021, reuters.com published- the UN Human Rights Council has recognized access to a clean and healthy environment as a fundamental right. The text, proposed by Costa Rica, the Maldives, Morocco, Slovenia, and Switzerland, was passed with 43 votes in favor and 4-abstentions from Russia, India, China, and Japan, prompting a rare burst of applause in the Geneva forum.
The World Health Organization estimates that some 13.7 million deaths a year, or around 24.3% of the global total, are due to environmental risks such as air pollution and chemical exposure.
Costa Rica's ambassador, Catalina Devandas Aguilar, said the decision would send a powerful message to communities struggling with climate hardship that they are not alone.
On Sep 25, 2021, The Economist- across the world, an energy shortage drags on. Crude oil is up by a fifth, coal has jumped by half, and liquefied natural gas rose by four-fifths. Most analysts think the energy crunch will not resolve until after winter. And if that is particularly cold, prices could soar higher still.
The energy shortage has many factors. Analysts cannot help but describe it as a perfect storm. Its causes include supply disruptions, such as fires at natural gas plants in Russia and outages because of covid-delayed maintenance. At the same time, energy demand has increased over the past year thanks to a rapid economic recovery, an uncommonly warm summer in Asia, and an unusually cool winter in Europe. In some places, regulation aimed at slowing global warming has compounded the problem.
The shortage also highlights how ill-prepared the world is for the energy transition. In northern Europe, unusually calm conditions in September meant a decline in wind generation, which provides about a fifth of power used in Germany and Britain. More investment in power storage, such as utility-scale batteries, would have eased such intermittency problems. The energy transition is likely to lead to volatile power prices and, if we manage it poorly, that could make environmentalism unpopular.
The timing of the shortfall is unfortunate. COP26, the UN's climate conference, kicks off at the end of October. The summit is particularly significant because it is the deadline for countries to announce their updated climate plans. The hope is that these plans are more ambitious than those declared after the Paris agreement in 2015 and that the sum of the emissions cuts helps to slow global warming. Some analysts fear that the energy shortage will cast a shadow over negotiations. It may, for instance, discourage countries, such as China and India, from making substantial commitments to reduce their future coal consumption.
