16/03/2021

Malala Yousafzai Says Educate Girls To Fight Climate Change

Reuters - Lin Taylor

Keeping girls in school can help solve the climate crisis, says Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai

ARCHIVE PICTURE: Pakistani Noble Peace Price winner Malala Yousafzai talks to the media Action Images, London, Britain - May 29, 2019 Reuters/Matthew Childs
LONDON - Keeping girls in school and taking young climate leaders seriously are keys to tackling climate change, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai said on Friday.

Speaking to a virtual panel, Malala, 23, said educating girls and young women, particularly in developing countries, would give them a chance to pursue green jobs and be part of solving the climate crisis in their communities.

"Girls' education, gender equality and climate change are not separate issues. Girl's education and gender equality can be used as solutions against climate change," Malala told an online event by British think-tank Chatham House.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some 130 million girls worldwide were already out of school, according to the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO, which said more than 11 million may not return to classes after the pandemic.

"When we educate girls ... they can become farmers, conservationists, solar technicians, they can fill other green jobs as well. Problem-solving skills can allow them to help their communities to adapt to climate change."

From sexual violence in displacement camps to extra farm work, women and girls shoulder a bigger burden from worsening extreme weather and other climate pressures pushing people to move for survival, global aid group CARE International says.

Scientists expect forced displacement to be one of the most common and damaging effects on vulnerable people if global warming is not limited to an internationally agreed aim of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Climate disasters have also been linked with early marriage, school drop-outs and teen pregnancies, says U.N. children's agency UNICEF.

Malala also called on world leaders to pay attention to youth climate activists, citing movements like "Mock COP" in November when young people launched a two-week event designed to mirror the format of the delayed U.N. climate talks.

"Listen to young people who are leading the climate movement. Young people are reminding our leaders that climate education and climate justice should be their priority."

Earlier this week, Malala expanded her partnership with Apple Inc to produce dramas, children's series, animation and documentaries that will air on the tech giant's streaming service.

Apple produced a documentary about Malala in 2015 and teamed up with her Malala Fund in 2018 to promote secondary education to girls across the globe.

In 2009 at age 12, Malala blogged under a pen name for the BBC about living under the rule of the Pakistani Taliban. In 2012 she survived being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for campaigning against its attempts to deny women education.

In 2014, she became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate at age 17. In 2018 she launched Assembly, a digital publication for girls and young women available on Apple News. She graduated from Oxford University in June.

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Global Warming’s Deadly Combination: Heat And Humidity

New York Times - Henry Fountain

A new study suggests that large swaths of the tropics will experience dangerous living and working conditions if global warming isn’t limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Credit...Hotli Simanjuntak/EPA, via Shutterstock

Here’s one more reason the world should aim to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement: It will help keep the tropics from becoming a deadly hothouse.

A study published Monday suggests that sharply cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to stay below that limit, which is equivalent to about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since 1900, will help the tropics avoid episodes of high heat and high humidity — known as extreme wet-bulb temperature, or TW — that go beyond the limits of human survival.

“An important problem of climate research is what a global warming target means for local extreme weather events,” said Yi Zhang, a graduate student in geosciences at Princeton University and the study’s lead author. “This work addresses such a problem for extreme TW.”

The study is in line with other recent research showing that high heat and humidity are potentially one of the deadliest consequences of global warming.

“We know that climate change is making extreme heat and humidity more common,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study. “And both of those things reduce our ability to live in a given climate.”

Dr. Kopp, who was an author of a study published last year that found that exposure to heat and humidity extremes was increasing worldwide, said a key contribution of the new work was in showing that, for the tropics, “it is easier to predict the combined effects of heat and humidity than just how hot it is.”

Ms. Zhang, along with two other Princeton researchers, Isaac Held and Stephan Fueglistaler, looked at how the combination of high heat and high humidity is controlled by dynamic processes in the atmosphere. They found that if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees, the wet-bulb temperature at the surface can approach but not exceed 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, in the tropics.

That region, a band roughly 3,000 miles from north to south that encircles Earth at the Equator, includes much of South and East Asia, Central America, Central Africa. It is home to more than 3 billion people.

Above a wet-bulb temperature of 35 Celsius, the body cannot cool down, as sweat on the skin can no longer evaporate. Prolonged exposure to such conditions can be fatal, even for healthy people. Lower but still high wet-bulb temperatures can affect health and productivity in other ways.

Ms. Zhang cautioned that the effect on health from her study was uncertain, since she and her colleagues looked only at how high wet-bulb temperatures would get, not how often the extremes would be reached or how long they would last. “Thorough knowledge on the health impact of intensity, frequency, and duration of high wet-bulb temperatures is needed,” she said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Geosciences.

The target of 1.5 degrees of warming was the lower of two established by the 2015 Paris Agreement among nations to fight climate change. But the world has already warmed by about 1 degree since 1900, and the ability to stay beneath the target is slowly slipping away as nations’ emissions reductions, both achieved and pledged, have fallen far short of what is needed.

A growing body of research has found that global warming so far is taking an increasing toll on human health indirectly through drought and crop failures, extreme storms and flooding, increased spread of certain insect-borne diseases and other effects.

But heat also has direct effects on the human body. Even relatively dry heat can be enough to kill people, as evidenced by the toll from heat waves in recent years. And the combination of heat and high humidity has already reached dangerous levels in parts of the world.

A study last year that looked at weather data found two sites in the tropics that have already had numerous occurrences of wet-bulb temperatures above 35 degrees, and many sites, including some along the southeastern coast of the United States, that have had TW readings from 31 to 33 degrees. But in most of the occurrences, the extreme conditions lasted only for an hour or two.

The effects of heat and humidity are worse for women, older people and those with chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, said Glen Kenny, a professor of physiology at the University of Ottawa who studies how the body copes with heat stress.

Work or exercise generates heat, and the body has to dissipate it. If the air temperature is higher than body temperature, the main source of cooling is through evaporation of sweat. But if the humidity reaches a point where sweat cannot evaporate, “essentially the body will gain heat,” said Dr. Kenny, who was not involved in the new study.

That stresses the cardiovascular system. “The strain that the heart is facing becomes progressively greater, especially if there’s successive days of heat exposure,” he said.

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(AU) NSW Tips $70m Into Hunter Hydrogen Hub As Coal Closures Loom

RenewEconomy - 


The NSW government will spend $70 million to support the development of a new hydrogen hub in the Hunter, as the government braces for an accelerating exist of the state’s coal generators, many of which are clustered within the region.

NSW energy minister Matt Kean said the state government would commit $70 million through the government’s recently announced $750 million Zero Industry and Innovation Program,

The development of a hydrogen hub in the Hunter region would allow access to existing ports and exports infrastructure, as well as access to sustainable supplies of water and electricity.

“This is a win-win for our state, by investing in hydrogen hubs we will  kick-start jobs and infrastructure opportunities in NSW while simultaneously contributing to our Net Zero by 2050 goal,” Kean said.

“The Hunter Hydrogen Hub will drive new low carbon jobs and help to set up the region for the future.”

Kean said that the state would be looking to tap into a substantial future market for green hydrogen, expected to be driven by a global shift to zero emissions manufacturing.

The purpose of the hubs, according to Kean, will be to cluster together a number of hydrogen producers and users into dedicated hubs, allowing infrastructure to be coordinated and shared, and for costs to be reduced.

“By 2050, green hydrogen has the potential to drive $350 billion in investment across Australia in current dollars and up to $26 billion per year in additional GDP, supporting the emergence of new decarbonised industries such as green steel and ammonia,” Kean said.

NSW parliamentary secretary for the Hunter, Taylor Martin, said the creation of a hydrogen hub in the Hunter region would also provide key opportunities in emerging green industries, helping to support a region traditionally dependent on fossil fuel industries.

“The Hunter is already an energy powerhouse and a hydrogen industry will mean  new jobs and investment in the region as well as creating new markets for export,” Martin said.

There has been growing speculation that a number of coal power stations are heading to early exits from the electricity market – a fear brought into reality by this week’s announcement from EnergyAustralia that it will close the Yallourn power station in Victoria four years earlier than initially expected.

The announcement of a Hunter region hydrogen hub follows similar commitments to establish a sustainable manufacturing hub in the Illawarra region.

The NSW commitment to establishing a hydrogen hub in the Hunter regions comes as both the federal and Queensland governments take steps to learn from industry about the future needs of the emerging hydrogen industry.

On Thursday, the Queensland government appointed its first Hydrogen Taskforce, led by the University of Queensland’s chair in sustainable energy futures, Professor Peta Ashworth, which brings together representatives from industry and key government leaders, to assess the needs of the hydrogen industry and provide the state government advice on supply chain gaps and opportunities.

“The Hydrogen Taskforce brings together industry, academic and public sector leaders with expertise in science, energy, international investment attraction and economic development, infrastructure planning, regulations, skills development and logistics, and Queensland is lucky to have Professor Peta Ashworth at the helm,” Queensland energy and hydrogen minister Mick de Brenni said.

On Friday, consultancy Arup announced that it had been selected by the federal government to undertake the first National Hydrogen Infrastructure Assessment, as has been recommended under the National Hydrogen Strategy adopted by federal and state energy ministers, and will likewise facilitate consultation with industry to identify gaps and emerging opportunities in the hydrogen supply chain in Australia.

“Australia has already been identified as having a competitive advantage in the race to develop a hydrogen economy but it will need significant and targeted supply chain investment to realise this advantage; Australia has to be smart with how it invests,” Arup’s hydrogen market lead for Australasia, Patrick Gorr, said.

“Our role is to help identify the best opportunities for investment.”

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