Taiwan and Germany can pursue more collaborations to promote decarbonization to mitigate the effects of climate change, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) founding director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber told an Academia Sinica symposium in Taipei yesterday.
Known as the “father of the 2-degree limit,” Schellnhuber delivered a keynote speech titled “The Climate Challenge and the Great Transformation.”
Academia Sinica President James Liao (廖俊智) opened the event by welcoming Schellnhuber’s return to Taiwan.
Photo: CNA
He last visited in 2015.
As Taiwan is a small island with limited energy resources, the nation faces more difficulties promoting energy transformation to achieve a carbon-neutral society by 2050, Liao said, but added that “everything is impossible until it is done.”
Schellnhuber said that “extreme weather is the new normal,” citing as examples the wildfires in the Amazon, heatwaves across Europe and rising average temperatures.
As anthropogenic carbon emissions continue to rise, how to prevent the world’s temperature from rising more than 2oC over preindustrial levels remains challenging, he said.
Germany is the first in the world to set a goal of phasing out nuclear and coal power by 2022 and 2038 respectively, and Taiwan can learn from Germany to avoid repeating the same mistakes, he told reporters on the sidelines of the forum.
Taiwan has extremely good potential in technological development, including electronics, digitalization and semiconductors, he said, adding that he expects the two countries to undertake more joint programs to mitigate climate change.
Asked what research areas deserve more attention, he said that two important trajectories are to promote decarbonization and to prepare for the impacts of extreme weather events, such as rising sea levels and stronger typhoons.
While oceans absorb nearly 93 percent of the Earth’s extra heat, human knowledge about oceans is inadequate, he said.
“The ocean is still our friend when it comes to global warming,” but if its capacity for absorbing carbon dioxide changes, people would be strenuously fighting on two fronts — the atmosphere and the ocean,” he said.
Noting that Taiwan is to launch three new ocean research vessels to replace three operational ones, Schellnhuber said Taiwan should be part of the global ocean observation system.
Schellnhuber and PIK head of the directors’ staff Daniel Klingenfeld on Tuesday also visited Minister of Science and Technology Chen Liang-gee (陳良基) and National Science and Technology for Disaster Reduction Director Hongey Chen (陳宏宇) in Taipei.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater