School of Habitat Studies

Abstract: This paper pre­sents a crit­i­cal analy­sis of the Paris Agree­ment on Cli­mate Change, agreed upon by more than 180 coun­tries at the Twenty-First Con­fer­ence of Par­ties (COP 21) of the United Na­tions Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change (UN­FCCC). The ar­ti­cle traces the de­vel­op­ment of the major is­sues and points of dis­agree­ment in cli­mate ne­go­ti­a­tions from the Copen­hagen sum­mit of 2009 to COP 21 at Paris. The paper ar­gues that the out­comes of COP 21 fell con­spic­u­ously short of the world’s re­quire­ments in terms of cli­mate sci­ence and eq­uity among coun­tries. The paper ar­gues for car­bon bud­gets and, in that con­text, fur­ther ar­gues that the Paris Con­fer­ence has set goals that are at odds with the fea­si­bil­ity of such goals as in­di­cated in the Fifth As­sess­ment Re­port (AR5) of the In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change (IPCC). In gen­eral, the Paris Agree­ment per­pet­u­ates the low lev­els of cli­mate ac­tion thus far un­der­taken by the de­vel­oped na­tions while of­fer­ing lit­tle con­crete as­sis­tance to the less-de­vel­oped na­tions. The over­all re­sult of the agree­ment is likely to be, for the peo­ple of the less-de­vel­oped na­tions, greater dan­ger for those vul­ner­a­ble to the im­pact of cli­mate change and greater dif­fi­culty in guar­an­tee­ing the en­ergy basis of their fu­ture de­vel­op­ment.

http://www.ras.org.in/the_paris_agreement_on_climate_change

We review some recent results of D-branes on Calabi-Yau (CY) manifolds. We show the existence of structures (helices and quivers) which enable one to make statements about large families of D-branes in various phases of the Gauged Linear Sigma Model (GLSM) associated with the CY manifold. A comparison of the quivers of two phases leads to the prediction that certain D-brane configurations will decay as one moves across phases. We discuss how boundary fermions can be used to realize various D-brane configurations ...