Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates have lampooned the global talks, and senators last month threatened to withhold $3 billion that Obama pledged to help developing nations prepare for climate change unless he submits any U.N. climate agreement to the Senate for approval.
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With this, the world leaders in many nations will bear pledges to reduce their national carbon output through different measures at different rates since they are responsible to 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
French President Francois Hollande heard from 12 African leaders who described the Sahara Desert encroaching on farmland, forests disappearing from Congo to Madagascar and rising sea levels swallowing homes in West African river deltas.
Obama’s comments came weeks after the ISIS killed 130 people in a series of coordinated gun and bomb attacks in Paris in one of the deadliest attacks perpetrated by the extremist group.
Since China has been surrounded in hazardous, choking smog, and Beijing is in the “orange” pollution alert, which is the second-highest level of pollution, it is necessary for the country to take steps to help lessen the greenhouse gas emissions along with the US since it is one of the biggest developed countries in the world, Xinhua Net reports.
Sixty-three percent of Americans say the United States should participate in an worldwide agreement seeking to combat the effects of man-made climate change, according to a poll released as a global climate summit begins in Paris.
China will continue to advance global cooperation in such areas as clean energy, disaster prevention and reduction, ecological protection and climate-smart agriculture, and low-carbon and smart cities, he said.
Nye’s reasoning hinges on a water shortage in Syria, which researchers have blamed on climate change.
Actually, what’s dumb is the which-threat-is-greater argument.
The comments have provoked a sharp rebuke from many critics, particularly Republicans in the United States, who see it as a purely political effort to use fears over public safety to drive an unrelated climate agenda. In 2013, a panel of United Nations scientists said climate change could “indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks”. “Climate change poses the same threat right now”.
Back in Paris, a few speakers made little effort at a graceful segue.
“When a young student is forced to go study under a street lamp at night, it clearly demonstrates the electricity issue”, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said.
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Shifting tack, he continued: “Today we must focus on the security, not just of the nations of the world, but of the world itself”.
