Deutsche Bank maps climate change risks for investments

Deutsche Bank has developed a tool to forecast where its investments across the globe may be impacted by natural disasters brought on by climate change.

"Factors such as sea level rise, droughts, flooding and
cyclones pose an immediate and measurable threat to
 investment portfolios," Deutsche Bank Asset Management said.

Although tools have existed in the insurance industry to model the impact of climate change, this is the first time this sort of data has been systematically applied to investments.

Deutsche Asset Management created the map with climate change intelligence firm Four Twenty Seven, covering more than one million individual locations in order to see how changes to climate will threaten its investment portfolios. The group currently has about €711 billion ($1.06 trillion) under management.

Economic modelling estimates that if carbon emissions aren't reduced throughout this century, per capita GDP will decrease by 23 percent from what it otherwise would be.

Read Cole Latimer’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Deutsche Bank maps climate change risks for investments.”

Pollution kills 9 million people each year, new study finds

Dirty air in India and China. Tainted water in sub-Saharan Africa. Toxic mining and smelter operations in South America. Pollution around the globe now contributes to an estimated 9 million deaths  annually — or roughly one in six — according to an in-depth new study published Thursday in the Lancet. If accurate, that means pollution kills three times more people each year than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, with most of those deaths  in poor and developing countries.

Traffic moves at dusk in New Delhi, home
 to some of the world’s most polluted air. 

“Going into this, my colleagues and I knew that pollution killed a lot of people. But we certainly did not have any idea of the total magnitude of the problem,” said Philip Landrigan, dean of global health at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-chair of the commission behind the report. “I think all of us were really surprised when we saw this.”

The two-year project, which relied on data from researchers in more than 130 countries documenting the causes of disease and premature deaths in recent decades, found that poor air quality was the most significant pollution-related killer. That includes both outdoor pollution tainted by mercury, arsenic and other harmful particulates, and household air dirtied by the burning of wood, dung and other organic materials. The result: An estimated 6.5 million deaths in 2015 from heart disease, strokes, lung cancer and other respiratory problems.

Read The Washington Post story by Brady Dennis - “Pollution kills 9 million people each year, new study finds.”

Seas aren’t just rising, scientists say — it’s worse than that. They’re speeding up

North Miami buildings are
seen near the ocean.

On a warming Earth, seas inevitably rise, as ice on land melts and makes its way to the ocean. And not only that — the ocean itself swells, because warm water expands. We already know this is happening — according to NASA, seas are currently rising at a rate of 3.5 millimeters per year, which converts to about 1.4 inches per decade.

However, scientists have long expected that the story should be even worse than this. Predictions suggest that seas should not only rise, but that the rise should accelerate, meaning that the annual rate of rise should itself increase over time. That’s because the great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, should lose more and more mass, and the heat in the ocean should also increase.

The problem, or even mystery, is that scientists haven’t seen an unambiguous acceleration of sea level rise in a data record that’s considered the best for observing the problem — the one that began with the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite, which launched in late 1992 and carried an instrument, called a radar altimeter, that gives a very precise measurement of sea level around the globe. (It has since been succeeded by other satellites providing similar measurements.)

Read The Washington Post story - “Seas aren’t just rising, scientists say — it’s worse than that. They’re speeding up.”

Human construct stands between us and mitigating human-induced climate change

A human construct is what stands in the way of moving toward mitigating human-induced climate change.

Humans, bit by bit, piece by piece have built an economy that now straddles the globe and while it was to be our servant, it is has become our master.

The options -
 climate change
 or the economy.

The economy has been elevated to God-like status and to suggest anything likely to unseat it, borders on blasphemy and bring with it accusations of ignorance, naivety and even stupidity brought on by a gross misunderstanding of what it is that gives the world society sustenance.

Such allegations arise from an addiction to the paradigm in which the world economy is embedded and with most governments in the world, whether they be liberal democracies, communistic, despotic regimes, religion-based facades of democracy or something of any other flavour, bowing before the might of money, to suggest something different is not only decried, but considered grossly irresponsible.

Humanity, or at least some of it, has been fortunate to escape from the daily trepidations of the hunter and gatherer life, something that has been achieved in building an economy which has, in many ways served us well, but at the same time has ignored the subtle beauties of life that cannot be measured in the simplistic brutal reality that is money.

Growth, a code word for exploitation, has seen man excavate the world’s ancient sunlight, and in the past two or three centuries use the fossil fuels we discovered with a rude rush of exuberance that saw all the available environmental sinks on the earth filled to over-capacity, disrupting the earth’s atmosphere to create a disarray with the world’s climate to subsequently bring-on weather patterns with which humans are unfamiliar.

That unfamiliarity is of such a dimension that the future of humanity, along with most other species with which it shares the planet, is questionable.

The time is already a few decades past and certain weather related difficulties cannot be avoided, but it is time to bury our concerns about the world economy and change our rhetoric to align it with ideals that are about equality, philanthropy, altruism, sharing, kindness and an understanding of the other to ensure that life on earth can endure.

The economy has served a few on earth well, disadvantaged more and if we are unable to rein it in and return it to again being a servant, as opposed to a master, then climate change will continue its march to a rather gloomy conclusion.

- Robert McLean