UNGA and climate action

Sep 18, 2022

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has promised to address the challenges of climate change during his speech to world leaders at the UN General Assembly next week

Fighting food insecurity crisis

Sep 18, 2022

Over half a million children could die from #famine in #Somalia, if more is not done to get them food. The UN’s World Food Program is working tirelessly to provide aid to entire regions of people displaced by #drought and conflict

“COP26 Is a Failure”: Greta Thunberg Condemns U.N. Climate Summit as a “Greenwash Festival”

Democracy Now! -Nov 8, 2021

Eighteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg called COP26 a “failure” when she addressed the Fridays for Future rally in Glasgow, which drew around 25,000 demonstrators. Her address comes after Thunberg dismissed climate leaders a month prior to the U.N. climate summit for political inaction. “The COP has turned into a PR event where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains the governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action,” said Thunberg on Friday. “This is not a conference. This is now a Global North greenwash festival.”

COP26 had big ambitions – here’s why it fell short

CNBC International Nov 18, 2021

COP26 was billed as the last best chance to save the planet. So what happened inside the conference centre and will it really solve our climate emergency? CNBC’s Tom Chitty explains.

COP26: success or failure?

Simon Clark -Nov 21, 2021

Can the climate crisis be solved with existing power structures or not? Were the pledges at COP26 enough to avoid disaster?

Not the COP26 video you probably expected me to make! I wanted to provide some meta context to the various hot takes that I’ve read on the Glasgow conference, and question why some people view it as progress and others don’t. Ultimately I think it comes down to this: how do we talk about progress in the climate crisis? Where should we stand on the scale of optimism and pessimism?
REFERENCES
(1) https://www.carbonbrief.org/
(2) https://unfccc.int/process/bodies/sup…
(3) https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-…
(4) https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/do…

COP26 has ‘failed‘, says climate scientist Prof Saleemul Huq

Channel 4 News – Nov 13, 2021

We are joined by climate scientist Prof Saleemul Huq, at his 26th Cop conference as adviser to the group of Least Developed Countries, the 46 countries who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

How Wealth Inequality Fuels the Climate Emergency: George Monbiot, Scientist Kevin Anderson on COP26

Democracy Now! – Nov 11, 2021

The United States and China made a surprise announcement on Wednesday at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow on a joint pledge to reduce methane emissions and slow deforestation. The United States is the largest historical emitter of carbon emissions, while China has been the largest emitter in recent years. As negotiations continue, we speak with British journalist George Monbiot and British climate scientist Kevin Anderson about how world leaders and even some climate scientists are downplaying the climate emergency. “Everything we’ve been hearing here and at the previous 25 summits is basically distraction,” says Monbiot, adding that global leaders could “fix” the worst impacts of the climate crisis “in no time at all if they wanted to.” Both guests highlight the role of extreme wealth in fueling the climate crisis, with Anderson noting it’s unfair to penalize nations like China, whose rising emissions correlate to the production of goods transported to wealthier countries. “Equity has to be a key part of our responses,” says Anderson.

Who were the Neanderthals? | DW Documentary

DW Documentary – Jan 23, 2021

Long before Homo sapiens populated the earth, the Neanderthals lived in Eurasia.
Now, paleoanthropologists in England and France are using new archeological methods to shed light on some previously unexplained Neanderthal mysteries.

In an age clouded by the mists of time, the first early humans colonized the Eurasian continent. They settled on land that had only recently been covered by glaciers. This species, called Neanderthals, died out about 30,000 years ago — but at one time, they formed the largest group in an area that stretched from northern France to the Belgian coast and from the Channel Islands to southern England.

During the last Ice Age, the North Sea was frozen over — and the English Channel was a small river that could easily be crossed on foot. The Neanderthals lived in close harmony with their perpetually changing environment. They had everything they needed to survive: the meat of prey animals, edible wild plants, water and wood for cooking and heating. How did these early humans develop over almost 300,000 years? What were their lives like before they became extinct?

Our documentary is based on the latest research. We investigate various populations of Neanderthals, and visit archaeological sites in northern France, southern England, and on the island of Jersey.

Renowned researchers such as the British paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer and his French colleague Ludovic Slimak describe how the Neanderthals lived, and discuss their cognitive abilities. Was this species capable of structured thinking? Did they have cultures, languages, and societies? How intelligent were they, and what sort of adaptive strategies kept them alive for 300,000 years? How similar were they to modern-day humans?

Major Garrett and David Becker on “The Big Truth”

Face the Nation – Sep 18, 2022

CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett and CBS News election law contributor David Becker discuss their new book, “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of ‘The Big Lie.'”

Expert warns of “violent threat” to U.S. democracy

Face the Nation – Sep 18, 2022

Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago and expert on political violence, says, “We have not just a political threat to our democracy, we have a violent threat to our democracy.”