A climate activist lays on an inflatable world globe in front of the Swiss House of Parliament at the start of a week of demonstrations called "Rise up for change" on September 21, in Bern. Fabrice Coffrini / AFP
A climate activist lays on an inflatable world globe in front of the Swiss House of Parliament at the start of a week of demonstrations called "Rise up for change" on September 21, in Bern. Fabrice Coffrini / AFP
A climate activist lays on an inflatable world globe in front of the Swiss House of Parliament at the start of a week of demonstrations called "Rise up for change" on September 21, in Bern. Fabrice Co
This is officially Climate Week and it's brought to the world by the United Nations and New York City, on the sidelines of the ongoing, virtual 75th UN General Assembly. Unofficially, climate week now runs throughout the year in some form or other, somewhere – an extreme weather event, a call to action, or a heated argument about whether global warming is a fact.
But this Climate Week is arguably different. A firestorm is sweeping the usual debates about climate change, as the US presidential campaign, America in general and the world as a whole is confronted with new visions of apocalypse – on the TV news and on the internet. America’s west coast is burning.
So is Siberia, as far north as the Arctic Circle. And so are Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. In July, forest fires caused an Indonesian province on Borneo island to declare a state of emergency. Earlier this year, enormous tracts of the Australian continent were ablaze.
Each seems like the local chapter of an increasingly familiar global story, one in which large parts of the world are on fire. And in 2020, which is expected to be among the five warmest years on record, each raging fire appears to show that the planet is getting hotter, drier and more inhospitable.
Consider California’s customary fire season. It has become the state’s most destructive in modern memory and it is still only halfway done. Six of the state’s 10 largest wildfires have happened since 2018 and five were just this year. Millions of acres have burned, with the fires spreading into neighbouring Oregon and Washington, wreaking destruction on businesses and homes and leaving landscapes akin to Hawaii’s famous black sand beaches, except that these are charred and smoking. Even though the world’s most polluted cities are typically in Asia, in the past week, Portland, Oregon had significantly worse air quality than any other city in the world.
Smoke over neighbourhoods in Monrovia, California, September 13. California wildfires that have already incinerated a record 2.3 million acres this year and are expected to continue till December. David McNew/Getty Images/AFP
David McNew/Getty Images/AFP
The fires pumped an estimated 110 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the smoke blew all the way from the west to cities on America’s east coast, creating hazy conditions and weirdly orange skies in Washington, DC and New York. According to satellite data from the European Union’s Copernicus atmospheric monitoring services, the smoke travelled as far as northern Europe. Meanwhile, the towering fires forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people. With the Red Cross on the ground and struggling to find shelter for more displaced people than there were hotel rooms, the volunteers were often heard using a word that might seem odd in the richest country in the world. “Refugees”, they called the Americans displaced by the historic blaze.
Refugees is the right word but it has entered public consciousness way too late. Back in 2015, then US secretary of state John Kerry was warning a foreign ministers’ conference in Alaska to prepare for “climate refugees”.
It will keep getting worse, as long as we keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere
That was the year an estimated two million people fleeing the Syrian civil war would pour into Europe. But that migration, according to a 2015 paper in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, an American journal, was initially from the hinterland into Syrian cities.
Syrians in rural areas were desperate after “the worst three-year drought in the instrumental record”, the researchers wrote, identifying “a long-term drying trend” as well as a “warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean (caused by the increase in greenhouse gases)”.
Decades of state-decreed, water-intensive agricultural practices had led to the unsustainable depletion of groundwater and the drying of the Khabur river in north-eastern Syria. Crops failed and the farmers moved to the cities.
As with all migration, this triggered tensions and eventually, massive unrest. So, when Mr Kerry declared that “we as leaders of countries will begin to witness what we call climate refugees”, he was using the wrong tense. The world was already witnessing climate refugees. The phenomenon was not in the future.
In any case, Mr Kerry was five years late in drawing attention to the issue of climate refugees. In 2010, Frank Bierman, an environmental policy professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, led controversial research that warned there may be as many as 200 million climate refugees by 2050. He recommended the creation of an international resettlement fund. An ambitious but poorly funded nest egg of sorts was subsequently set up by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But it was only in 2018 that the UN negotiated a global migration treaty that became the first to recognise climate as a cause of future displacement. The US refused to join 164 other countries in signing it.
The myopia of America, led by US President Donald Trump, is both outrageous and tragic as its burning west coast is creating climate refugees, albeit those seeking haven within their country’s borders.
Last year was the first time in a decade that more people left California for other US states than arrived. And however high the walls that America builds to keep foreign climate refugees out, there will continue to be an inexorable flow from water-stressed, hungry parts of central America towards the vast, rich country next door.
New projections for global climate-induced migration range from 50 million to 300 million in the next few decades. It is telling that Philip Duffy, head of the Woodwell Climate Research Centre in Massachusetts, recently rejected the idea that raging fires, melting Arctic sea ice, simultaneous hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and the hottest summer in the northern hemisphere could be described as “the new normal”. It is not, he said, because “it will keep getting worse, as long as we keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere”.
A giant inflatable model of the Earth during European Sustainable Development Week, as well on World Clean Up day, at the garden of Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, Czech Republic, September 19. Martin Divisek / EPA
So climate week seems doomed to stretch into decades. Sometimes, it is novelists who tell the future. Margaret Atwood ended her acclaimed ‘MaddAddam’ trilogy about a dystopian post-pandemic world on fire as follows: “The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves.”
Fiction is becoming fact before our eyes.
Rashmee Roshan Lall is a columnist for The National
Groom and Two Brides
Director: Elie Semaan
Starring: Abdullah Boushehri, Laila Abdallah, Lulwa Almulla
Tonight's Chat is a series of online conversations on The National. The series features a diverse range of celebrities, politicians and business leaders from around the Arab world.
Tonight’s Chat host Ricardo Karam is a renowned author and broadcaster with a decades-long career in TV. He has previously interviewed Bill Gates, Carlos Ghosn, Andre Agassi and the late Zaha Hadid, among others. Karam is also the founder of Takreem.
Intellectually curious and thought-provoking, Tonight’s Chat moves the conversation forward.
The Nobel Prize was created by wealthy Swedish chemist and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel.
In his will he dictated that the bulk of his estate should be used to fund "prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".
Nobel is best known as the inventor of dynamite, but also wrote poetry and drama and could speak Russian, French, English and German by the age of 17. The five original prize categories reflect the interests closest to his heart.
Nobel died in 1896 but it took until 1901, following a legal battle over his will, before the first prizes were awarded.
Have an up-to-date, professional LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, set one up today. Avoid poor-quality profile pictures with distracting backgrounds. Include a professional summary and begin to grow your network.
Keep track of the job trends in your sector through the news. Apply for job alerts at your dream organisations and the types of jobs you want – LinkedIn uses AI to share similar relevant jobs based on your selections.
Double check that you’ve highlighted relevant skills on your resume and LinkedIn profile.
For most entry-level jobs, your resume will first be filtered by an applicant tracking system for keywords. Look closely at the description of the job you are applying for and mirror the language as much as possible (while being honest and accurate about your skills and experience).
Keep your CV professional and in a simple format – make sure you tailor your cover letter and application to the company and role.
Go online and look for details on job specifications for your target position. Make a list of skills required and set yourself some learning goals to tick off all the necessary skills one by one.
Don’t be afraid to reach outside your immediate friends and family to other acquaintances and let them know you are looking for new opportunities.
Make sure you’ve set your LinkedIn profile to signal that you are “open to opportunities”. Also be sure to use LinkedIn to search for people who are still actively hiring by searching for those that have the headline “I’m hiring” or “We’re hiring” in their profile.
Prepare for online interviews using mock interview tools. Even before landing interviews, it can be useful to start practising.
Be professional and patient. Always be professional with whoever you are interacting with throughout your search process, this will be remembered. You need to be patient, dedicated and not give up on your search. Candidates need to make sure they are following up appropriately for roles they have applied.
Arda Atalay, head of Mena private sector at LinkedIn Talent Solutions, Rudy Bier, managing partner of Kinetic Business Solutions and Ben Kinerman Daltrey, co-founder of KinFitz
Yahya Al Ghassani's bio
Date of birth: April 18, 1998
Playing position: Winger
Clubs: 2015-2017 – Al Ahli Dubai; March-June 2018 – Paris FC; August – Al Wahda
Robo-advisers use an online sign-up process to gauge an investor’s risk tolerance by feeding information such as their age, income, saving goals and investment history into an algorithm, which then assigns them an investment portfolio, ranging from more conservative to higher risk ones.
These portfolios are made up of exchange traded funds (ETFs) with exposure to indices such as US and global equities, fixed-income products like bonds, though exposure to real estate, commodity ETFs or gold is also possible.
Investing in ETFs allows robo-advisers to offer fees far lower than traditional investments, such as actively managed mutual funds bought through a bank or broker. Investors can buy ETFs directly via a brokerage, but with robo-advisers they benefit from investment portfolios matched to their risk tolerance as well as being user friendly.
Many robo-advisers charge what are called wrap fees, meaning there are no additional fees such as subscription or withdrawal fees, success fees or fees for rebalancing.
