The warming El Nino weather phenomenon could return later this year as its cooling opposite La Nina fades away, the United Nations said Tuesday. 

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the recent, weak La Nina was expected to give way to neutral conditions, which could then swing into El Nino before the end of 2026. 

La Nina is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon that cools surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. It brings changes in winds, pressure and rainfall patterns. 

The WMO said there was a 60-percent chance of neutral conditions during the three-month window from March to May, with a 30-per-cent chance of La Nina conditions, and El Nino at a 10-per-cent probability. 

There is a 70-per-cent chance of neutral conditions during April-June. 

In May-July, the chance of neutral conditions drops back to 60 per cent, with the chances of El Nino at 40 per cent. 

“The WMO community will be carefully monitoring conditions in the coming months to inform decision-making,” said Celeste Saulo, who heads the UN’s weather and climate agency. 

“The most recent El Nino, in 2023-24, was one of the five strongest on record and it played a role in the record global temperatures we saw in 2024,” the WMO secretary-general said. 

El Nino contributed to making 2023 the second-hottest year on record and 2024 the all-time high.

Above-average temperatures 

The WMO underlined that naturally occurring climate events such as La Nina and El Nino take place against the backdrop of human-induced climate change, which is “increasing global temperatures in the long-term, exacerbating extreme weather and climate events, and impacting seasonal rainfall and temperature patterns”. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there is a 50- to 60-per-cent chance of El Nino developing during the July-September period and beyond. “Seasonal forecasts for El Nino and La Nina help us avert millions of dollars in economic losses and are essential planning tools for climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water management,” said Saulo.

 “They are also a key part of the climate intelligence provided by WMO to support humanitarian operations and disaster risk management, and thus save lives,” she said. — AFP

gnlm

THE UN estimated Tuesday that nations’ carbon-cutting pledges imply a far-from-sufficient 10-percent emissions cut by 2035, cautioning that it was unable to provide a robust global overview after most countries failed to submit their plans on time.
With just days to go before tense COP30 climate talks in Brazil, UN Climate Change provided an emissions calculation alongside its formal assessment of national 2035 pledges.
The extra calculation incorporated elements from major polluters such as China and the European Union, which have not submitted full official updated pledges.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week that slow action from nations meant it was “inevitable” that efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5C would fail in the short term, unleashing devastating impacts during a period of overshoot as countries worked to pull temperatures back down again by the end of the century.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the estimated 10-per-cent emissions cut suggested that “humanity is now clearly bending the emissions curve downwards for the first time, although still not nearly fast enough”. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said emissions must fall 60 per cent by 2035, from 2019 levels, for a good chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the more ambitious goal of the Paris climate deal.
“The science is equally clear that temperatures absolutely can and must be brought back down to 1.5C as quickly as possible after any temporary overshoot, by substantially stepping up the pace on all fronts,” Stiell said in a statement.
The two-week COP30 climate negotiations in the Amazon, which start on 10 November, are tasked with galvanizing momentum in the face of a hostile United States, geopolitical tensions, economic concerns and fears that the most ambitious climate targets are al-
ready slipping out of reach. — AFP

GNLM

HONG KONG/SHANGHAI, July 21 (Reuters) - China's Premier Li Qiang announced construction had begun on what will be the world's largest hydropower dam, located on the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau and estimated to cost around $170 billion, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The dam is China's most ambitious hydropower project since the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, with operations expected sometime in the 2030s.

Made up of five cascade hydropower stations, the dam will be located in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo. A section of the river falls a dramatic 2,000 metres (6,561 feet) within a short span of 50 km (31 miles), offering huge hydropower potential.

India and Bangladesh have already raised concerns about its possible impact on the millions of people who live downstream, while NGOs have warned of the risk to the environment, one of the richest and most diverse on the plateau.

Beijing has said the dam, with the capacity to produce 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, will help meet power demand in Tibet and the rest of China without having a major effect on downstream water supplies or the environment.

Wang Zhuo, partner of Shanghai Zhuozhu Investment Management, said the project offered investors both long-term investment opportunities and a theme for short-term speculation. "From an investment perspective, mature hydropower projects offer bond-like dividends," Wang said. But he cautioned that speculative buying into related stocks triggered by the announcement would inflate valuations.

DOWNSTREAM IMPACT

The Chinese premier described the dam as a "project of the century" and said special emphasis "must be placed on ecological conservation to prevent environmental damage," Xinhua said in its report on Saturday.  China has not given an estimate on the number of jobs the project is likely to create.

The Three Gorges Dam, which took almost two decades to complete, generated nearly a million jobs, state media reported, though at least a similar number of people were displaced by the massive project.

Authorities have not indicated how many people would be displaced by the Yarlung Zangbo project or how it would affect the local ecosystem.

NGOs including the International Campaign for Tibet say the dam will irreversibly harm the Tibetan Plateau and that millions of people downstream will face severe disruptions to their livelihoods.

The Yarlung Zangbo becomes the Brahmaputra River as it leaves Tibet and flows south into India's states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam and finally into Bangladesh.  China has already started hydropower generation on the upper reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo, which flows from the west to the east of Tibet.

Reporting by Farah Master in Hong Kong and Samuel Shen in Shanghai; Additional reporting by Ryan Woo in Beijing; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Kate Mayberry

Ref : Reuters

The dreadful sound of gunfire signals the tragic loss of parents for many children caught in armed conflicts. Both sides in these clashes are eager to secure victory, often without considering the lives and futures of innocent children. Their focus remains solely on defeating each other. In reality, everyone must recognize that children—innocent and uninvolved in the fighting — are the ones who truly lose their future. Ultimately, the fate of these children reflects the future of the states involved.
Actually, 2024 was a year marked by the outbreak of wars and armed conflicts across the world. These conflicts left millions of people homeless and led to a rise in crime and violence. Wars and armed conflicts, indeed, posed a serious threat to global peace and stability.

Those orphans suffering from the nightmares of armed conflicts are certain to face various challenges, including mental trauma, poverty, and lack of access to basic needs such as education and healthcare services. These children are often unable to enjoy their rights fully. While some are under the care of orphanages, others live with surviving family members. However, as their lives are filled with hardship, they frequently suffer from malnutrition, exposure to serious diseases, and other unexpected difficulties.

Although conflicts arise from various causes, the United Nations often misses opportunities to mediate and resolve them. Armed conflicts occur mostly in Asia and Africa, as well as in other regions of the world, and show little sign of ending. These conflicts contribute to shifting power dynamics and changing geopolitics globally.
Generally, wars and armed conflicts do not benefit any country. Prolonged armed conflicts lead to a growing number of orphans day by day, as many children lose their parents and family members in the violence. In addition, some children become orphans due to abandonment for various reasons. Without anyone to care for them, these children often end up facing the harsh and difficult life of war refugees. According to UNICEF estimates, there are approximately 2.2 billion children worldwide, around 150 million of whom are orphans due to armed conflicts and political crises. Among them, about 17.6 million have lost both parents.
Those orphans suffering from the nightmares of armed conflicts are certain to face various challenges, including mental trauma, poverty, and lack of access to basic needs such as education and healthcare services. These children are often unable to enjoy their rights fully. While some are under the care of orphanages, others live with surviving family members. However, as their lives are filled with hardship, they frequently suffer from malnutrition, exposure to serious diseases, and other unexpected difficulties.
Armed conflicts, wars, racial instability, and intense rivalries among countries often result in a generation of orphans. Losing parents due to armed conflicts is a profound tragedy. Therefore, everyone should show loving-kindness and compassion to these orphans, helping them regain their physical and mental strength — the greatest gift we can offer.

Ref: GNLM

Photo: MDPI

PREDICTIONS of imminent AI-driven mass unemployment are likely overblown, but employers will seek workers with different skills as the technology matures, a top executive at global recruiter ManpowerGroup told AFP at Paris’s Vivatech trade fair.
The world’s third-largest staffing firm by revenue ran a startup contest at Vivatech in which one of the contenders was building systems to hire out customizable autonomous AI “agents”, rather than humans.
Their service was reminiscent of a warning last month from Dario Amodei, head of American AI giant Anthropic, that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.
For ManpowerGroup, AI agents are “certainly not going to become our core business any time soon,” the company’s Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said.
“If history shows us one thing, it’s most of these forecasts are wrong.” An International Labour Organization (ILO) report published in May found that around “one in four workers across the world are in an occupation with some degree of exposure” to generative AI models’ capabilities.
“Few jobs are currently at high risk of full automation,” the ILO added. But the UN body also highlighted “rapid expansion of AI capabilities since our previous study” in 2023, including the emergence of “agentic” models more able to act autonomously or semi-autonomously and use software like web browsers and email.
Soft skills
Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that the introduction of efficiency-enhancing AI tools would put pressure on workers, managers and firms to make the most of the time they will save.
“If what happens is that AI helps knowledge workers save 30, 40, maybe 50 per cent of their time, but that time is then wasted on social media, that’s not an increase in net output,” he said.
Adoption of AI could give workers “more time to do creative work” -- or impose “greater standardization of their roles and reduced autonomy,” the ILO said.
There’s general agreement that interpersonal skills and an entrepreneurial attitude will become more important for knowledge workers as their daily tasks shift towards corralling AIs.
Employers identified ethical judgement, customer service, team management and strategic thinking as top skills AI could not replace in a ManpowerGroup survey of over 40,000 employers across 42 countries published this week.

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar

Renewable energy plays a key role in the journey to net zero carbon emissions, helping to reduce the demand for fossil fuels by providing cleaner sources of energy.

But as the world derives an increasing amount of its electricity from these renewable energy sources, there’s a growing need for technologies that can capture and store it.

Why does renewable energy need to be stored?

Renewable energy generation mainly relies on naturally-occurring factors – hydroelectric power is dependent on seasonal river flows, solar power on the amount of daylight, wind power on the consistency of the wind – meaning that the amounts being generated will be intermittent.

Similarly, the demand for energy isn’t constant either, as people generally tend to use different amounts of energy at different times of the day and the year.

How would storing renewable energy help to reach net zero?

Unlike fossil fuels, renewable energy creates clean power without producing greenhouse gases (GHGs) as a waste product. By storing and using renewable energy, the system as a whole can rely less on energy sourced from the more greenhouse-gas emitting fuels like coal, natural gas or oil.

What are other benefits of storing renewable energy?

A key benefit of being able to store this energy is that it helps to prevent renewable resources from going to waste.

There are times when the amount of electricity being generated by renewables can exceed the amount that’s needed at the time. When this happens, some renewable generators may need to curtail their outputs in order to help the system remain ‘balanced’ – i.e. when electricity supply meets demand – meaning that an opportunity to generate clean electricity has essentially gone to waste. 

What technologies are used for renewable energy storage?

Energy storage technologies work by converting renewable energy to and from another form of energy.

These are some of the different technologies used to store electrical energy that’s produced from renewable sources:
 

1. Pumped hydroelectricity energy storage

Pumped hydroelectric energy storage, or pumped hydro, stores energy in the form of gravitational potential energy of water. When demand is low, surplus electricity from the grid is used to pump water up into an elevated reservoir. When demand increases, the water is released to flow down through turbines to a lower reservoir, producing hydroelectric power for the grid as it does so. 

2. Electrochemical battery energy storage

Electrochemical batteries store energy by separating positive and negative charges in rechargeable cells. Different types of electrochemical battery storage technology include:

• Lithium-ion battery storage
  
  Government and developers are investing substantially in the creation of huge lithium-ion batteries to store energy for times when supply outstrips demand. Lithium battery technologies are diverse to address custom needs for flexibility, modularity, and size, as well as being relatively inexpensive. However these batteries do degrade over time and present unique fire management challenges.
  
  The world’s largest battery energy storage system so far is Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California. The first 300-megawatt lithium-ion battery – comprising 4,500 stacked battery racks – became operational at the facility in January 2021.
   
• Flow battery storage
  
  Flow batteries’ cells consist of two charged liquids separated by a membrane. Surplus electrical energy is used to ‘reduce’ the liquid charge state of one and ‘oxidise’ that of the other to efficiently store energy. The process is then reversed to recover electricity with low loss.
  
  This flowing reduction-oxidation operation – known as ‘redox flow’ – allows the batteries to store large amounts of energy for long durations and be cycled many times without degradation. However, they do have a relatively large project footprint. 

3. Thermal and Phase Transition energy storage

While not limited to renewable energy, storing excess energy as heat for the longer term is a huge opportunity for industry, where most of the process heat that’s used in food and drink, textiles or pharmaceuticals comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

Liquifying rock or superheating sand and water mixtures can be used to store thermal energy. Thermal energy storage technologies include:

• Liquid-to-air transition energy storage
  
  Surplus grid electricity is used to chill ambient air to the point that it liquifies. This ‘liquid air’ is then turned back into gas by exposing it to ambient air or using waste heat to harvest electricity from the system. The expanding gas can then be used to power turbines, creating electricity as needed.
   
• Thermal sand batteries
  
  Finnish researchers have developed and installed the world’s first fully working ‘sand battery’, which can store power for months at a time. Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind. The sand stores the heat at around 500°C, which can then warm homes in winter when energy is more expensive.
   

4. Mechanical energy storage

This type of energy storage converts the potential energy of highly compressed gases, elevated heavy masses or rapidly rotating kinetic equipment.

Different types of mechanical energy storage technology include:

• Compressed air energy storage
  
  Compressed air energy storage has been around since the 1870s as an option to deliver energy to cities and industries on demand. The process involves using surplus electricity to compress air, which can then be decompressed and passed through a turbine to generate electricity when needed.

   

• Gravity storage
  
  A ‘gravity battery’ works by using excess electrical energy from the grid to raise a mass, such as a block of concrete, generating gravitational potential energy. When electrical energy is required, the mass is lowered, converting this potential energy into power through an electric generator.
  
  Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is a type of gravity storage, since the water is released from a higher elevation to produce energy.
   
• Flywheel energy storage
  
  Flywheel energy storage devices turn surplus electrical energy into kinetic energy in the form of heavy high-velocity spinning wheels. To avoid energy losses, the wheels are kept in a frictionless vacuum by a magnetic field, allowing the spinning to be managed in a way that creates electricity when required.
  
   
• Pumped heat electrical storage
  
  Pumped heat storage uses surplus electricity to power a heat pump that transports heat from a ‘cold store’ to a ‘hot store’ - similar to how a refrigerator works. The heat pump can then be switched to recover the energy, taking it from the hot store and placing it in the cold store. This produces mechanical work, which is used to power a generator.
   

5. Hydrogen electrolysis

Hydrogen electrolysis produces hydrogen gas by passing surplus electrical current through a chemical solution. This hydrogen gas is then compressed to be stored in underground tanks. When needed, this process can be reversed to produce electricity from the stored hydrogen.

Hydrogen can be physically stored as either a gas or liquid and even adhered directly to solids. As a gas, hydrogen storage requires high-pressure tanks, while liquid hydrogen requires storage at cryogenic temperatures to prevent it boiling back into a gas. Hydrogen may also be stored on the surface of solid materials (known as adsorption), or within them (known as absorption).

Ref : National Grid

INSIDE a smart greenhouse in Chengdu, the capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, two robots, swiftly zipping through ridges between fields, were taking patrol training. With their high-definition cameras, these robots can snap real-time shots of crops’ growth and send images straight to the cloud.
“After integrating with the DeepSeek large model, our team trained the robots through tens of thousands of images to improve their pest identification accuracy, which has exceeded 80 per cent,” said Wu Yuanqing, the robots’ developer.
Once the accuracy is improved, these robots can help farmers increase their decision-making precision in planting and efficiency of agricultural production, Wu added.
The rise of AI-powered agriculture in China highlights the government’s continued efforts to modernize its agricultural sector to accelerate rural revitalization, which profoundly impacts the lives of over 460 million people in rural areas.
The Chinese government has introduced multiple policies to promote smart agriculture development for years. In this document for 2025, Chinese policymakers have, for the first time, identified the development of “new quality productive forces in agriculture” as a top priority.
The document underscores the need to increase support for smart agriculture and calls for expanding the use of technologies such as AI, big data and low-altitude systems in agricultural production.
Maoming, a well-known lychee-growing city in south China’s Guangdong Province, is a premium example of how age-old practices meet with cutting-edge technologies to create a smarter, more efficient, precision-driven local industry.
In February, the city completed deploying the DeepSeek model into its local AI assistant platform, integrating more than five million data points, including a lychee disease prevention database and detailed local meteorological records.
So far, 69 sets of 5G-powered Internet of Things sensors have been installed across 20 lychee-growing towns in Maoming, according to Xu Hong, an official with Maoming’s agricultural and rural affairs bureau. These facilities monitor everything from soil moisture to air temperature, generating real-time insights that allow farmers to anticipate and mitigate risks before adverse weather takes a toll.
Farmers in Maoming also dived into learning and applying AI technologies in lychee cultivation. Zhang Xianfeng, a local farmer, has recently turned to an AI-powered assistant for guidance as persistent wet and chilly weather threatened Zhang’s lychee. Within seconds, the system provided a tailored management plan for her.
“In the past, we relied entirely on experience to determine the flowering period of crops. Fertilizers were applied by instinct, and we often reacted too late to disease outbreaks,” Zhang said. “Now, solutions provided by AI help us tackle these challenges immediately and accurately.” — Xinhua

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar

Russia and Myanmar closely cooperate in the energy area and they are addressing expansion of this partnership, through projects in the sector of renewable energy among other things, Russian President Vladimir Putin said following talks with Prime Minister of Myanmar Min Aung Hlaing.

"Energy is a strategic area of bilateral cooperation. Russia reliably provides required energy resources to the republic. Last year more than 90% of oil was supplied to the market of Myanmar from Russia. We are developing possibilities to cooperate in the energy sector in other areas as well, including in the use of renewable resources of energy," Putin said.

The new joint statement confirms the key principles of the partnership between the two countries, the president stressed. "The issue is about further deepening of cooperation in the area of trade and investment. Last year trade turnover added around 40% and roughly amounted to $2 bln. We are ready to address expansion of mutually beneficial trade," he added.

Source: TASS

IN the marbled halls of a luxury hotel, leading experts are discussing a new approach to an age-old problem: how to make it rain in the UAE, the wealthy Gulf state that lies in one of the world’s biggest deserts.
Decades of work and millions of dollars have been ploughed into easing endless drought in the oil-rich UAE, whose mainly expatriate population is soaring undeterred by a dry, hostile climate and hairdryer summer heat.
Despite the United Arab Emirates’ best efforts, rainfall remains rare.
But at last month’s International Rain Enhancement Forum in Abu Dhabi officials held out a new hope: harnessing artificial intelligence to wring more moisture out of often cloudless skies.
Among the initiatives is an AI system to improve cloud seeding, the practice of using planes to fire salt or other chemicals into clouds to increase rain.
“It’s pretty much finished,” said Luca Delle Monache, deputy director of the Centre for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“We’re doing the final touches.” However, Delle Monache conceded that AI was not a “silver bullet” for the UAE, which like other countries has pursued cloud seeding for decades.
Cloud seeding works by increasing the size of droplets, which then fall as rain. It’s estimated to increase rainfall by 10-15 per cent, Delle Monache said.
But it only works with certain types of puffy, cumulus clouds, and can even suppress rainfall if not done properly.
“You’ve got to do it in the right place at the right time. That’s why we use artificial intelligence,” he added.
Prayers, applause The three-year project, funded with $1.5 million from the UAE’s rain enhancement programme, feeds satellite, radar and weather data into an algorithm that predicts where seedable clouds will form in the next six hours.
It promises to advance the current method where cloud-seeding flights are directed by experts studying satellite images. Hundreds of such flights occur annually in the UAE.

KEY POINTS:

• An AI system predicts seedable clouds, aiming to improve the precision of cloud-seeding flights.
• Experts caution that AI is not a perfect solution, as data limitations and the need for human judgment remain critical.
• Rain, a rare occurrence, even artificial rain, is considered a novelty, and when it does occur, it can cause significant flooding.
• The UAE’s substantial investment in rain enhancement reflects its commitment to overcoming water scarcity.

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar

AN ABANDONED lifeguard cabin, a rusty pier and mangled umbrellas are all that is left of Ein Gedi, once Israel’s flagship beach drawing international tourists to float in the world-famous waters of the Dead Sea.
Now, this lush desert oasis at the lowest point on Earth sits in ruins beside the shrinking sea, whose highly salty waters are rapidly retreating due to industrial use and climate change, which is accelerating their natural evaporation.
The beach has been closed to the public for five years, mainly due to the appearance of dangerous sinkholes, but also because the dramatic recession of the sea’s level has made it tricky to reach its therapeutic waters, known for extraordinary buoyancy that lets bathers float effortlessly.
The increasingly exposed shoreline and the sinkholes, caused by a flow of freshwater dissolving layers of salt beneath the Earth’s surface, are not new.
In fact, the Dead Sea, nestled where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian territory meet, has famously been dying for years. Now, with war raging in the Middle East, efforts to tackle this ever-worsening ecological disaster appear to have dissolved too.
“Regional cooperation is the key... to saving the Dead Sea,” said Nadav Tal, a hydrologist and water officer for the Israel office of Eco-Peace, a regional environmental nonprofit that has long advocated for finding a solution.
“Because we are living in a conflict area, there is an obstacle,” he said, describing how the sea has been declining more than one metre (three feet) per year since the 1960s.

‘Ecological disaster’ 

The evaporation of the salty waters in a time of rapid climate change and in a place where summer temperatures can reach upward of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) has been exacerbated by decades of water diversions from the sea’s main source -- the Jordan River -- as well as various tributaries that begin in Lebanon and Syria.
The water is also being pumped out by local factories extracting natural minerals -- potash, bromine, sodium chloride, magnesia, magnesium chloride and metal magnesium -- to sell to markets across the world.
“The consequences of this water diversion is what we see around us,” Tal told AFP, pointing to a nearby pier that was once submerged in water but now stands firmly on dry land.
“It is an ecological disaster,” he emphasised, adding that “the declining of the Dead Sea is a disaster for Israeli tourism”.
The only remaining Israeli resorts are on the man-made evaporation ponds south of the surviving Dead Sea itself. Recently, 22-year-old Yael and her friend Noa were looking for a place to dip their toes into the soothing waters.
Relaxing beside one of the water-filled sinkholes, Yael recalled how her parents once enjoyed going to a public beach near here. “It was like their beach on the Dead Sea, and nowadays you pass by there and it looks like, I don’t know... a shipwreck,” she told AFP.
“It’s hallucinatory, the destruction caused by this thing (the drying up of the sea), and it’s just such a special landscape.”

Call for joint effort

Although some efforts have been made to address the Dead Sea disaster, including past agreements signed by Israel and Jordan, the wars raging in Gaza and beyond have brought regional tensions to an all-time high, meaning tackling cross-border environmental issues is no longer a priority for governments in the region.
At Israel’s environment ministry, Ohad Carny has been working on the issue for years. He said the government was looking into several solutions, including building a desalination facility and forging a canal from either the north or the south to address the general water shortages in the region, including the Dead Sea.
“It doesn’t make economic or environmental sense to desalinate water and bring it directly to the Dead Sea, because then it’s a waste of drinking water and the region needs desperately more drinking water and more water for agriculture,” he said.
Carny said that while his focus was on the Israeli side, “we are hoping for collaborations”.- AFP

Source: The Global New Light of Myanmar