Bezos commits $10 bn to fight warming
Antarctic high temp records will take months to verify
NEW YORK, Feb 18, (AP): Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Monday that he plans to spend $10 billion of his own fortune to help fight climate change.
Bezos, the world’s richest person, said in an Instagram post that he’ll start giving grants this summer to scientists, activists and nonprofits working to protect Earth.
“I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change,” Bezos said in the post.
Amazon, the company Bezos runs, has an enormous carbon footprint. Last year, Amazon officials said the company would work to have 100% of its energy use come from solar panels and other renewable energy by 2030.
The online retailer relies on fossil fuels to power planes, trucks and vans in order to ship billions of items all around the world. Amazon workers in its Seattle headquarters have been vocal in criticizing some of the company’s practices, pushing it to do more to combat climate change.
Bezos said in the post Monday that he will call his new initiative the Bezos Earth Fund. An Amazon spokesman confirmed that Bezos will be using his own money for the fund.
Despite being among the richest people in the world, Bezos only recently became active in donating money to causes as other billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have done. In 2018, Bezos started another fund, committing $2 billion of his own money to open preschools in low-income neighborhoods and give money to nonprofits that help homeless families.
Bezos, who founded Amazon 25 years ago, has a stake in the company that is worth more than $100 billion.
Meanwhile, France’s leader called the battle against climate change and environmental destruction “the fight of the century” after visiting a melting glacier in the French Alps.
But President Emmanuel Macron’s tour of the Mer de Glace glacier and an ice cave carved into it near the mountain town of Chamonix was condemned as an electoral stunt by environmental campaigners. Critics accused Macron of using the icy photo-op to burnish his government’s green credentials ahead of France’s municipal elections next month.
Clad in winter gear of red, white and blue, Macron listened attentively Thursday to explanations about how France’s biggest glacier has lost much of its splendor, retreating up its valley and shedding so much of its thickness that the stairs leading down to it have had to be extended.
Macron said seeing the glacier’s retreat brought home the “fear that it disappears” and a feeling of “our own vulnerability, the fragility of the landscape which, until only a few decades ago, we thought was unchangeable.”
“I deeply believe that this fight, which is a long-term fight, can also have concrete, tangible, visible results. It will be the fight of the century, of our capacity to invent new ways to live and do, sustainably,” he said.
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BERLIN: Record high temperatures reportedly measured in Antarctica will take months to verify, the UN weather agency said Sunday.
A spokesman for the World Meteorological Organization said the measurements made by researchers from Argentina and Brazil earlier this month have to undergo a formal process to ensure that they meet international standards.
“A formal decision on whether or not this is a record is likely to be several months away,” said Jonathan Fowler, the WMO spokesman.
Scientists at an Argentine research base measured a temperature of 18.3ºC (nearly 65ºF), Feb 6, on a peninsula that juts out from Antarctica toward the southern tip of South America. Last week, researchers from Brazil claimed to have measured temperatures above 20ºC on an island off the peninsula.
Fowler said both measurements would need to be transmitted to Prof Randall Cerveny, a researcher at Arizona State University who examines reported temperature records for WMO.
Cerveny then shares the data with a wider group of scientists who “will carefully evaluate the available evidence (including comparisons to surrounding stations) and debate the merits and problems of the observation,” said Fowler.
The evaluation normally takes six to nine months, after which Cerveny would “formally either accept or reject the potential extreme,” giving official WMO approval to the new record, he said.
Climate change is causing the Arctic and the Antarctic to warm faster than other parts of the planet.