...Pakistan lacked the enrichment technology to separate the rare fissile isotope - U-235 - from its abundant naturally occurring source. ...that is, a letter found its way to Bhutto from Khan, then ...working in the Netherlands, who offered his services to the nuclear-weapons effort. According to at least one source, he donated millions of dollars to science and education causes, but faced little or no parliamentary scrutiny. ...Khan's defenestration proved a convenient distraction for the army, the government and the PAEC.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO CHINA Masood, Ehsan
Nature (London),
05/2019, Letnik:
569, Številka:
7754
Journal Article
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Across much of the world, China's government, companies and local business partners have been building motorways, designing high-speed rail, mining fossil-fuel reserves, switching on power plants, ...installing thousands of surveillance cameras and unveiling air and sea ports (see 'Making connections'). The conservation group WWF reports that the main BRI connections between Asia and Europe cross through 1,739 areas that have been identified as important for biodiversity conservation, affecting 265 threatened species, including 81 endangered species such as the saiga antelope (Saiga tatarka), tigers (Panthera tigris) and giant pandas (Aihiropoda melanoleuca). China's own conservation research organizations, such as the Dunhuang Academy, and environmental scientists including Ma Keping from CAS s Institute of Botany in Beijing, have been warning about the environmental impacts of its vast network of transcontinental routes for some years. Arthur Hanson, chief international adviser to the China environment cooperation council, says that one ambition is to be able to persuade China's leadership to make environmental- and social-impact assessments essential elements in BRI projects, along with ensuring that there is public participation in decisions and open access to data.
The Glasgow Climate Pact is a step forward, researchers say, but efforts to decarbonize are not enough to limit global temperature rises to 2 °C. Government ministers at the 26th United Nations ...Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) have reached a deal on further steps to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions after discussions overran by 24 hours. The final 11-page document, called the Glasgow Climate Pact, says that greenhouse-gas emissions must be reduced and carbon dioxide emissions must fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 for global warming to be maintained at 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. If those savings were reinvested in climate mitigation, it would more than double the projected annual emissions reductions in 2030, says James Edmonds, a co-author of the analysis, and a climate scientist at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland in College Park.
Researchers are turning to China for support and collaboration as their countries take centre stage in the Belt and Road Initiative. Researchers are turning to China for support and collaboration as ...their countries take centre stage in the Belt and Road Initiative.
The university has partnered with China to build a joint centre that will focus on the environment, climate change, terrestrial and marine hazards and the ocean economy, says Safdar Ali Shah, who ...heads the China team at Pakistan's university regulatory body, the Higher Education Commission. The study was commissioned by the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, which advises China's government and was launched after ecologists from CAS and from the environmental group WWF warned that many of the new or upgraded BRI transport routes will disrupt ecologically fragile regions from Asia to Europe. ...Pakistan's Ministry of Planning and Development has estimated that greenhouse-gas emissions will quadruple, to the equivalent of around 1,600 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, between 2015 and 2030. ...he says, a planned BRI-funded coal-fired power station in the desert region of central Pakistan will both add to greenhouse-gas emissions and worsen water shortages by depleting aquifers.
Decades of falling or flat public spending, unrestricted free trade, relatively light regulations on financial institutions and low taxes on businesses and top earners have not translated into ...acrossthe-board prosperity. In the 1990s, governments with significant oil and gas interests joined the powerful fossil-fuel industry lobby in seeking experts who could cast doubt on human influence on climate change. The consensus view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - backed as it was by a huge number of heavyweight researchers - was essential in preventing such dubious ideas from penetrating the mainstream (although it has not stopped Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate agreement).
The Haldane principle, born a century ago, has enabled government scientists to speak truth to power without fear of retribution -- cherish it, says Ehsan Masood.
(The other two focused on the rationale for different ministerial jobs and better financial accountability from government departments.) The memo's tone is much more direct than that of the final ...report, suggesting that its intended audience was probably Prime Minister David Lloyd George. The ideal of independence also informs the work of chief science advisers, whose offices might be attached to those ofheads of government or to departments from food to forestry, transport to trade. Since 2014, they have been part of the International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA), created to hone practice. INDEPENDENCE DAY When Haldane's report landed on the prime minister's desk, it had little impact: the end of the First World War was a busy time for statecraft. ...some scientists are so concerned by the ransacking of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by President Donald Trump's White House that they have reportedly set up a shadow EPA in preparation for the next administration, so that valuable knowledge isn't lost.
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