The Bridge The AISB Alumni Community Magazine ISSUE #2 ӏ The Big Green Issue ӏ 2020
Microbes and their practical applications for sustainability Michael Gilles
On figuring life out Linn Ternsjö
Cherry-picking Budapest Climate Data
Your Bridge to the World and Beyond...
Robert Connell
ON FIGURING LIFE OUT by Linn Ternsjö ('12)
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t has been almost eight years since I graduated from AISB. A lot has changed since then. For one I’ve moved back to my home country Sweden, and I just started my PhD in Economic History with a focus on sustainable development. On the other hand, a lot is very much the same. I still love to engage in global issues. The only difference is that instead of speaking at assemblies and encouraging the school to offset its carbon footprint and to sell exclusively Fairtrade coffee, I’m researching similar issues defined by the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). How, for example, can we accelerate transformations of existing production and consumption systems (SDG 12)? And what are the historical parallels?
I still love to be active. I was far from the best at swimming or cross country running at AISB, but the sense of community and belonging was always incredible. Wherever I’ve been since then I’ve always made an effort to be part of a sports group, and I’ve had some of the best conversations on a hiking trail. Above all, I still love to learn new things and to be in international contexts. Otherwise I wouldn’t have moved as much as I have since graduating high school. My years at AISB have been very formative of who I am today. I went there between 5th and 12th grade after all, and my mum still teaches at the school. Before moving to Budapest I attended a Victorian primary school in the English countryside. Apart from hearing an array of different English accents on my first day at AISB, I remember being amazed at how I was suddenly able to wear (almost) whatever I wanted and
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that I was encouraged to speak up and express my opinions. Long gone were the itchy school uniforms and worn classrooms with a teacher lecturing in front of thirty children.
Over the years I made amazing friends, not least thanks to all the community service activities I enjoyed being part of. One of the bigger things I started together with Evelyn Cools and the support of Mr Burns, was the “Senegal Project”. We came in contact with a school for young children living in poverty and after visiting it ourselves, we initiated a fundraiser and sponsorship program for three students. With the help of Madame Fabiny, we raised awareness across AISB by linking the project to World Language Week. As far as I’m aware, the project is still ongoing. Since then, my commitment to global issues has taken slightly different forms. I studied Economics and Development at SOAS, University of London, before taking a year out to intern at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Embassy in Rwanda. I remember being insecure about my Swedish, having grown up abroad, but at the same time I had dreamt of doing this for a while. In hindsight I’m happy I was brave enough to take on such a new challenge with no guarantees. It gave me confidence and perspective going back to my studies.
My years at AISB have been very formative of who I am today.
More recently I’ve thought about how I can best make a difference, and it’s what has led me to my current role. I’ve only just started my PhD in Economic History at Lund University School of Economics and Management and also the Agenda 2030 Graduate School. I’m not studying this subject because I’m interested in how countries can grow as fast as possible based on past experiences, but rather because I’m interested in understanding societies and how we can address pressing challenges such as inequality, poverty, and accelerating climate change. I genuinely hope it will enable me to make a bigger impact later on, be it in research, government policy or elsewhere.
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n 2016 I started my Master in International Development and Management and the year after, I moved to Ethiopia to intern for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). I ended up staying eight months, and I left the comfortable bubble of the United Nations toward the end to conduct field research on women’s employment in the garment industry. I was interested in finding out the experiences of women factory workers, which led to countless hours of catching minibuses around Addis Ababa and interviewing incredibly resilient women whose opinions had sometimes never previously been asked for.
At the beginning of 2019 I left my job as a Sustainability Consultant for EY to oversee the second phase of a project called the Green Assets Wallet, the first blockchain platform for validating green bonds
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I even had the chance to speak on a panel in Kazakhstan, about our platform and its potential to step up investments needed to deliver on the Paris Climate Agreement and the SDGs. A few months later I found myself organizing a workshop in Kenya with the Nairobi Securities Exchange and International Financial Centre Authority. On all these occasions, I’ve felt just as nervous, but at the same time it’s been very fulfilling to work on something that I believe is making a difference.
and reporting on green impact. Having previously worked for some very large organizations, it was fascinating to work in a small startup environment in the nexus between fintech and sustainability.
Having said this, the above can sometimes feel like a lot of pressure when you’re just trying to figure out life and what step to take next. Personally I think that being a kind person and helping who you can, when you can is very powerful. That also makes a big difference! For those of you who are still at AISB, I encourage you to take advantage of everything that the school has to offer. Find a cause that you feel compelled to do and have the courage to sometimes try something out of your comfort zone.
I believe everyone has the ability to do good in their own way. You can get involved in your local community, donate to organizations that are working on important global issues, or you can carve out a career for yourself that has a positive impact on the world.
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CHERRY-PICKING BUDAPEST CLIMATE DATA
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Global Temperature Anomaly (°C) between 1988 and 2018
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by Robert Connell ('15)
The hottest temperature of July decreased despite another decade of emissions flowing into the atmosphere. So is all the excitement and concern in the news about the ancient forests of Amazon and Australia a waste of your time and cognitive capital? Is Greta just opportunistic? Is climate change just a hoax concocted by liberal elitists trying to further fill their coffers? Well, no.
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Is climate change just a hoax concocted by liberal elitists trying to further fill their coffers?
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Choosing two dates and simply comparing them doesn’t show the full picture. The temperature is influenced by individual weather events, which (in the defence of weather reporters) are unpredictable, as countless factors drive weather changes in individual days, weeks and even months.
Instead, the accepted definition in the science community of climate change is a changing temperature trend over a minimum of a 30 year period. And although it is only 10 years since 2009, using appropriate, scientifically sound considerations, evidence shows that between 2009 and 2019 the average annual temperature in Budapest and the surrounding area has increased by 0.5°C. This brings Budapest to a total increase in temperatures of 1.8°C compared to the average temperature (called a baseline) between 1951 and 1980. Looking into the future, depending on how effectively we remove atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions, we can see Budapest facing temperature increases between 2.1°C and 5.9°C by 2100. What I tried to anecdotally illustrate above is one way in which sceptics attempt to cast doubt on climate change through specific selection of data that favours their view. This process is called cherry-picking and gained popularity in the late 00’s when data on global temperatures was selectively chosen to suggest that ‘global warming has stopped’.
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ast summer was my 10 year anniversary of arriving in Budapest for the first time. When I first set foot in Budapest, in July of 2009 at Keleti Pályaudvar, the first thing that struck me as I got off the train was the heat. It was well into the summer evening, it was dark, and yet the heat of the day still lingered. Looking back now, temperature data shows that the highest temperature in the month I arrived was 35°C. And yet last summer, a decade later in 2019, the highest temperature recorded in July was only 33°C.
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The period selected by sceptics, 14 years between 1998 and 2012 (see Figure 1), indicated that global temperatures had stagnated – casting doubt on the science of climate change. What had actually happened was a particularly strong warming event in the Pacific Ocean called El Niño, in 1998, which raised global temperatures significantly and made the following 13 years appear as if the globe were no longer warming.
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There are numerous climate myths that circulate information sources online and in other forms of mass media. Think twice the next time you come across an article that states higher CO2 concentrations are good for plant growth. The greenhouse effect results in a net loss of crop yield when compared to the benefits of abundant CO2 to aid crop growth.
Global Temperature Anomaly (°C) between 1998 - 2012
FIGURE 2
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However, as was mentioned earlier, the amount of years sampled was not large enough to show the gradual upward temperature trend of our changing climate. If the years are extended from 1998 to 2018 (the accepted 30 year benchmark; see Figure 2), the upward trend becomes more apparent. Prominent climate scientists criticised climate contrarians “whose sort of cherrypicking […] would even put the very best fruit farmer to shame”.
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In our age of easily accessible information, it is important to act as one’s own sceptic about online material; to question whether everything one reads is grounded in fact or whether the publisher has a vested interest in misleading public perceptions.
The sun is not actually getting hotter; it teeters in cycles of about 11 years, based on sunspot count and the changes in its radiation that are nearly imperceptible. And no, China is not solely responsible for climate change, as Europe, the US and other developed countries have built their wealth through exploitation of the environment since the industrial revolution, when there was no regulation on emissions. They are largely the reason why our atmospheric concentrations are as high as they are now. But there are solutions. Solutions that are even profitable, that optimise business operations, that create jobs, that raise national GDP’s, and that yield other economic benefits if policy tools and technology are carefully implemented. If we look through a lens of economics, it becomes clear that one can be agnostic in his belief about climate change and still recognise that the colour of money is now officially green.
Another (and sadly still all too common) misconception of climate change dispersed by sceptics is that we appear to be in a natural cycle of warming on Earth. Although it is true that our planet periodically cools and warms, it occurs on a timescale of tens or hundreds of millennia – not in a period of about 150 years, as we are seeing today. There have been periods on Earth when it was much hotter and much colder, but in all of those cases, slow geological transition allowed species to adapt to their subtly changing environments. The current warming is abrupt and a result of anthropogenic (human) activities.
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