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What I already know about climate change

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What I already know about climate change

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I know that climate change is when there's a shift in temperature and weather patterns. I also know that climate change relates to global warming, a continuing negative factor in today's environment. I think that climate change has been greatly affected by the increase of people and urbanization. I'm interested to see how much of an impact climate change has on the world. I'm also interested in learning the different ways people can contribute to help climate change. I think it's important topic and people need to know about it because it can cause major environmental and global warming problems.

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This article explains how climate change has caused a increase in global hunger. Climate change is causing higher temperatures, severe droughts and floods, and changes in seasonality, affecting rain patterns and growing seasons.
This is causing more societal crisis around the world and leaving people without enough to eat. This source is useful and its a reference to the effects of climate change on the world. The information in the source is accurate and reliable. Even though the source does contain controversial topics, it remains objective. According to the the media bias chart, AXIOS is a news source in the middle, so it does not contain any biases. Using charts and statistics, to prove the effect climate change has on global hunger, helps convey the reader to care more about their claim.

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The number of undernourished people around the globe increased to nearly 821 million in 2017, the third straight year of growth and the highest figure since 2009, according to a new report from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Why it matters: Along with conflict and instability, this rise in global hunger is driven increasingly by climate change and related extreme weather events, putting some of the world's most vulnerable citizens at even greater risk.

Food insecurity was found to be significantly worse in countries where people are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood, especially when they don't have systems in place to counter the effects of climate shocks.

"It is shocking that, after a prolonged decline, this is the third consecutive year of rising hunger. The inescapable fact is that climate change is now leaving people around the world without enough to eat," Robin Willoughby, head of food and climate policy at Oxfam GB, told The Guardian.

The big picture: Climate change has the potential to erode the gains made toward fighting global hunger over the past decade - which were largely due to political stability, economic growth and greater social protections in the developing world - as extreme weather kicks off more and more societal crises around the world. Some specific weather trends are triggering the worst climate shocks on food stores:

Higher temperatures - and spikes in temperature anomalies - can affect crop yields.

Severe droughts and floods linked to climate change have both seen an uptick in recent years - most notably, flood-related disasters spiked 65% in the last quarter-century.

Changes in seasonality, especially in the developing world, throw off rainfall patterns and growing seasons.

Of the 51 countries that faced food crises in 2017, 34 had climate shocks, per the UN report. The food security threat deepened in the 14 countries that simultaneously faced conflict and regional instability in addition to climate shocks.

Yemen, where 22 million out of 27 million citizens are in need of humanitarian assistance, perhaps best represents this horror. Already one of the world's poorest countries, Yemen faces the combination of an ongoing civil war and serious famine that led UN Ambassador Nikki Haley to remark "no one should ever have to live the way the people of Yemen are living."

The bottom line: Without significant action to address climate change, some of the world's most vulnerable citizens may face increasing risk from global hunger, which was on a marked downward trend just 5 years ago - and the UN had hoped to eliminate fully by 2030.
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How climate change is driving global hunger

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The number of undernourished people around the globe increased to nearly 821 million in 2017, the third straight year of growth and the highest figure since 2009, according to a new report from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

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This source provides an analysis on the problems climate change is causing on the U.S. electric grid. This source describes how the electric grid can not meet the current demand because of the impact climate change has on the future; with more people and more electric cars. It has led to the U.S. planning to pass an infrastructure package to funding the energy grid. According to the media bias chart, AXIOS is a news source in the middle, so it does not contain any biases. Using factual evidence and statistics to show the reader the effect global warming has on the electrical grid and how it is projected to worsen.

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The power grid in the U.S. is aging and already struggling to meet current demand. It faces a future with more people - people who drive more electric cars and heat homes with more electric furnaces.

Alice Hill says that's not even the biggest problem the country's electricity infrastructure faces.

"Everything that we've built, including the electric grid, assumed a stable climate," she says. "It looked to the extremes of the past - how high the seas got, how high the winds got, the heat."

Hill is an energy and environment expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. She served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration, where she led the effort to develop climate resilience. She says past weather extremes can no longer safely guide future electricity planning.

"It's a little like we're building the plane as we're flying because the climate is changing right now, and it's picking up speed as it changes," Hill says.

The newly passed infrastructure package dedicates billions of dollars to updating the energy grid. Hill says utility companies and public planners around the country are already having to adapt. She points to the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

"They thought the maximum would be 12 feet," she says. "That storm surge came in close to 14 feet. It overcame the barriers at the tip of Manhattan, and then the electric grid - a substation blew out. The city that never sleeps [was] plunged into darkness."

Hill noted that Con Edison, the utility company providing New York City with energy, responded with upgrades to its grid: It buried power lines, introduced artificial intelligence, upgraded software to detect failures. But upgrading the way humans assess risk, she says, is harder.

"What happens is that some people tend to think, well, that last storm that we just had, that'll be the worst, right?" Hill says. "No, there is a worse storm ahead. And then, probably, that will be exceeded."

In 2021, the U.S. saw electricity outages for millions of people as a result of historic winter storms in Texas, a heatwave in the Pacific Northwest and Hurricane Ida along the Gulf Coast. Climate change will only make extreme weather more likely and more intense.

And that has forced utility companies and other entities to grapple with the question: How can we prepare for something we've never experienced before?

A modern power station in Maryland is built for the future

In the town of Edgemere, Md., the Fitzell substation of Baltimore Gas and Electric delivers electricity to homes and businesses. The facility is only a year or so old, and Laura Wright, the director of transmission and substation engineering, says it's been built with the future in mind.

She says the four transformers on site are plenty for now. And to counter the anticipated demand of population growth and a future reliance on electric cars, she says the substation has been designed for an easy upgrade.

"They're not projecting to need that additional capacity for a while, but we designed this station to be able to take that transformer out and put in a larger one," Wright says.

Slopes were designed to insulate the substation from sea level rise. And should the substation experience something like a catastrophic flooding event or deadly tornado, there's a plan for that too.

"If we were to have a failure of a transformer," Wright says, "we can bring one of those mobile transformers into the substation, park it in the substation, connect it up in place of that transformer. And we can do that in two to three days."

The Fitzell substation is a new, modern complex. Older sites can be knocked down for weeks.

What the infrastructure legislation actually does

That raises the question: Can the amount of money dedicated to the power grid in the new infrastructure legislation actually make meaningful changes to the energy system across the country?

"The infrastructure bill, unfortunately, only scratches the surface," says Daniel Cohan, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.

Though the White House says $65 billion of the infrastructure legislation is dedicated to power infrastructure, a World Resources Institute analysis noted that only $27 billion would go to the electric grid - a figure that Cohan also used.

"If you drill down into how much is there for the power grid, it's only about $27 billion or so, and mainly for research and demonstration projects and some ways to get started," he says.

Cohan, who is also author of the forthcoming book Confronting Climate Gridlock, says federal taxpayer dollars can be significant but that most of the needed investment will eventually come from the private sector - from utility companies and other businesses spending "many hundreds of billions of dollars per decade." He also says the infrastructure package "misses some opportunities" to initiate that private-sector action through mandates.

"It's better than nothing, but, you know, with such momentous challenges that we face, this isn't really up to the magnitude of that challenge," Cohan says.

Cohan argues that thinking big, and not incrementally, can pay off. He believes a complete transition from fossil fuels to clean energy by 2035 is realistic and attainable - a goal the Biden administration holds - and could lead to more than just environmental benefit.

"It also can lead to more affordable electricity, more reliable electricity, a power supply that bounces back more quickly when these extreme events come through," he says. "So we're not just doing it to be green or to protect our air and climate, but we can actually have a much better, more reliable energy supply in the future."

This story is part of an All Things Considered series looking at the state of American infrastructure and the federal legislation addressing it. Ayen Bior and Courtney Dorning produced and edited this story for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon helped to adapt it to the web.

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The biggest problem facing the U.S. electric grid isn't demand. It's climate change

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The power grid in the U.S. is aging and already struggling to meet current demand. It faces a future with more people - people who drive more electric cars and heat homes with more electric furnaces. Alice Hill says that's not even the biggest problem the country's electricity infrastructure faces.

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This article explains how nations across the world have noticed the economic problems climate change has caused. The article also explained how the nations decided to cut down on carbon emissions. According to the media bias chart, AXIOS is a news source in the middle, so it does not contain any biases. Using factual evidence and statistics, it shows the reader the effect global warming has on the economy and how it is projected to worsen.

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If one thing became clear at the COP26 gathering of world leaders this month, it's that tackling climate change is going to be expensive.

Making the leap to decarbonized energy is pricey. So is adapting to a warming planet that unleashes more wildfires, storms, and heat waves. Meanwhile, many communities already bearing the brunt of climate disasters are among those least equipped to foot the bill.

Why We Wrote This

All of this means that "climate finance," the money needed to both fight climate change and try to adjust to it, is increasingly taking the spotlight. Under that glare, it is revealing the underlying global inequities that make collective climate action so challenging.

At the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, delegates grappled with the responsibility of - and broken promises by - wealthy nations to fund climate action around the globe. But attention also turned to private financiers, including a new alliance of more than 450 insurers, banks, and asset managers with around $130 trillion in capital. All are committed to canceling out all the carbon emissions in their portfolios by midcentury, after first making major reductions in emissions by 2030.

But lower- and middle-income countries remain skeptical that private finance will solve their crises. They are urging a reevaluation of how the world will pay to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

If one thing became clear at the COP26 gathering of world leaders this month, it's that tackling climate change is going to be expensive.

Making the leap to decarbonized energy is pricey. So, too, is adapting to a warming planet that unleashes more deadly wildfires, storms, and heat waves. Meanwhile, many of the communities already bearing the brunt of climate disasters are among those least equipped to foot the bill.

All of this means that "climate finance," the money needed to both fight climate change and try to adjust to it, is increasingly taking the spotlight. And under that glare, it is revealing the underlying global inequities that make collective climate action so challenging.

Why We Wrote This

At the United Nations climate change conference here, delegates from Africa, Asia, and Latin America chided wealthy countries for not fulfilling a promise to drum up $100 billion a year for climate-related projects. Developed countries had agreed to that payment plan at another U.N. summit in 2009, an acknowledgment that they were disproportionately responsible for the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. By 2019, they were still $20 billion behind. At the conference this year, delegates from developing countries said this parsimony had undermined their trust in the U.N. process.

Here's the thing: Even $100 billion isn't a big number when it comes to climate change. Not when you add up what it would take to climate-proof the world in the next few decades while also cutting emissions as fast as possible.

"The $100 billion, quite frankly, pales in comparison to the actual needs," says Iskander Erzini Vernoit, a policy adviser at E3G, an environmental think tank in London. "And I think COP26 has been useful for establishing that recognition."

Trillions, not billions

Indeed, the summit made clear that transforming how the world is powered, built, and managed - from building offshore wind farms and smart grids to installing storm barriers and preserving mangrove forests - will require trillions, not billions, of dollars in new investments. By 2030, the energy sector alone would likely need $4 trillion annually to put carbon emissions on track to reach net-zero by midcentury, according to the International Energy Agency.

Government spending by itself won't pay for this transition. So attention in Glasgow turned to private financiers, including a new alliance of more than 450 insurers, banks, and asset managers with around $130 trillion in capital. All are committed to canceling out the carbon emissions in their portfolios by midcentury, after first making major reductions by 2030.

The details are fuzzy about how, exactly, the financial institutions will measure this "net-zero" approach to assets, or how quickly they will move away from fossil fuels. But the alliance, and other commitments within the financial sector, are a step in the right direction, says Yannick Glemarec, executive director of the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund (GCF), which was set up to provide money for developing countries.

"If we want to finance climate [action] at scale to avert catastrophic climate change, all the pieces have to come together," he says.

The GCF has committed $10 billion in grants and loans since 2015, when countries signed agreements at the last big international climate summit, held in Paris.

But he is hopeful that the fund can start to ramp up programs now that the United States and other donors have pledged more funding. He sees the fund's role as helping to mobilize private capital - those needed trillions of dollars - by investing in projects that private financiers might deem too unpredictable, such as a solar energy plant in an emerging African market. The goal is to get those projects off the ground and show that they are commercially viable, which, he says, can prompt private investment.

"Once you have a commercial track record you're not speaking about uncertainty. You're speaking about risk. Bankers cannot deal with uncertainty. They can deal with, and price, risk," he says.

But who pays for adaptation?

The catch for developing countries, though, is that while investors may be keen on green technology, which both cuts emissions and makes profits, it's harder to raise private capital for what's called adaptation. Those are the storm barriers and fortified buildings and drought-resistant crops and other efforts communities will increasingly need as the planet warms. Lower income countries, many of which are facing the most extreme risks from climate change, may struggle to finance these crucial investments.

And that, delegates at COP26 pointed out, could exacerbate global inequities, even as diplomats talk about increased worldwide financing.

"We need to ensure the developing world isn't left behind by their unequal access to global capital," says Mr. Vernoit, who previously served as a U.N. climate negotiator for Morocco.

In the corridors of Glasgow, negotiators from low- and middle-income countries seemed skeptical that private capital could pick up the slack left by rich donors that had missed their aid targets.

"Adaptation is public goods, and the private sector is not very interested," says Mizan Khan, a delegate from Bangladesh.

But neither, worry many lower income countries, are wealthy nations.

In his speech in Glasgow, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said developed countries should provide $1 trillion in climate finance "at the earliest" and said their commitments should be tracked, just as scientists track carbon emissions. "The proper justice would be that the countries which do not live up to their promises made on climate finance, pressure should be put on them," he said.

The COP26 agreement, signed last Saturday, urged a doubling of public financing for climate adaptation by 2025, compared to the $20 billion provided in 2019 - itself a fraction of the pledged climate aid. But wealthy countries resisted additional commitments to compensate lower-income countries for climate-related losses.

Developing countries already face wrenching choices about how to decarbonize, such as whether to take money from health or education and put it to clean energy, says Harjeet Singh, a Delhi-based senior adviser to Climate Action Network International, a campaign group. The backtracking by donors creates a political dilemma on top of this - and threatens collective climate action overall.

"If they don't get enough confidence about where the money will come from, why would they change a paradigm?" he asks.

"We don't know how to access the trillions"

Professor Khan and other delegates complained that money from GCF and other multilateral lenders took too long to arrive, was often in the form of loans and not grants, and rarely went to front-line communities impacted by climate change. (Mr. Glemarec said GCF had sped up its review process to take a year, down from more than two previously.)

Diego Pacheco Balanza, Bolivia's chief negotiator, said Bolivia has been trying to conserve its carbon-rich forests and improve their management, working with Indigenous groups, but that it couldn't get GCF to fund its programs. "Forests are under a lot of pressure. ... We need to have good incentives in order to avoid the degradation of the forests," he says.

As for private capital, "we don't know how to access the trillions of dollars that are outside" formal aid channels, Mr. Pacheco says.

In reality, if financial institutions do redirect trillions of dollars into net-zero assets, only a fraction would be allocated to investments in developing countries, given the perceived risk. But that fraction matters when it comes to climate financing, since the global pool of savings is so large.

Mr. Glemarec reckons that building climate-resilient infrastructure in the global south can be an investment opportunity, provided GCF or other government-backed lenders go first. He's also set up a $500 million private equity fund for coral reef protection, sustainable tourism, and fishing in 16 countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. GCF has committed $125 million.

"We are the first to lose our money if it goes wrong. But if it goes right, this $500 million of equity might finance anywhere between $2.5 to $5 trillion of actual investment," he says. If so, he adds, "we will have demonstrated that investing in the protection of a coral reef is a legitimate investment for a pension fund or a bank."

Still, he agrees that some climate adaptation projects in low-income and indebted countries simply won't make the grade. "Some of these needs will have to be financed with public money because there is no business model," he says.

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Climate change is expensive. How should the world pay to fight it?

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If one thing became clear at the COP26 gathering of world leaders this month, it's that tackling climate change is going to be expensive. Making the leap to decarbonized energy is pricey. So is adapting to a warming planet that unleashes more wildfires, storms, and heat waves.

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After researching about climate change, I understand how important climate change is and the danger it can cause. If people don't start to realize the effects that climate change may cause, it could lead to global hunger, global warming, and economic problems. A solution was provided in source 3, getting nations to reduce the amount of carbon emissions. I think a solution could be if people started to eat more vegetables and saving energy at home. This solution will help protect the future of the earth, helping limit climate change.