2015年4月30日 星期四
The 15-Minute Turbocharged Slim-Down Workout
The 15-Minute Turbocharged Slim-Down Workout
Move faster—and blast more calories—with this get-nimble, get-quick routine
BETH BISCHOFF
Hey, sport—agility drills aren't just for running backs and border collies. In fact, they're a crucial part of any workout plan. Being able to start, stop, and change direction quickly builds stamina and sculpts insane, look-at-me legs; it may even help improve your memory and focus.
The explosive moves you see here are designed to make that good stuff happen. Oh, and they'll send your fat burners into overdrive, says EXOS performance coach Joel Sanders, who created this routine. "More movement equals more calories burned, making these exercises ideal if you're crunched for time," Sanders explains. Even better: They're mentally stimulating—something you don't get with the typical squat or lunge.
Two or three times a week, perform these moves as a circuit. Starting with the first exercise, do as many reps as you can in 20 seconds, then rest for 20 seconds before proceeding to the next exercise. Rest for one to two minutes at the end of the set. Complete up to five total sets.
Take a peek at the complete workout in the pin-able graphic below, then move on down for the exercise how-tos.
MOVE 1Acceleration Wall Drill
BETH BISCHOFF
Place your hands on a wall, arms straight, and lean forward so your body forms a straight line from head to heels. Drive your left knee up (A); pause for one second, then return to start and immediately repeat with your right leg (B). Continue alternating as quickly as possible.
MOVE 2Split Jump
BETH BISCHOFF
Stand with your left foot two or three feet in front of your right. Bend your knees to lower your body until your left thigh is parallel to the floor (A). Jump up quickly (B), switching your legs midair so you land with your right foot in front; immediately lower into a split squat (C). Continue alternating.
MOVE 3Lateral Bound
BETH BISCHOFF
Standing on your right foot, bend your knee and sit your hips back as you swing your right arm behind you, keeping your chest lifted (A). Jump to the left, swinging your left arm behind you and landing softly on your left foot (B). Reverse the movement to return to start. Hold for three seconds, then switch legs and repeat.
MOVE 4Base Rotation
BETH BISCHOFF
Stand with feet just more than shoulder-width apart, knees bent and weight on your toes; rotate your shoulders and torso to the left (A). Keeping your shoulders facing in this direction, jump and rotate your lower body 180 degrees to the left (B), then jump to rotate back to start. Continue alternating quickly.
For more workouts and fitness tips, pick up the April 2015 issue ofWomen's Health, on newsstands now.
2015年4月29日 星期三
What should the AIIB’s priorities be?
Less than two years after reports first appeared in October 2013 about the formation of a new specialized development bank focused on Asia, China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has become a reality.
While its birth has given rise to international tensions, it has also offered hope to developing countries that need an enormous amount of infrastructure investment in coming years.
The tensions – the US has fiercely opposed China’s bank and lobbied its allies not to join it – have been well reported and discussed. Overlooked by these critics is that the region’s investment needs are far too great to be met by the West’s development banks alone. China’s willingness to shoulder more of the burden should be welcomed, and the decision of US allies like the UK and Germany to become founding members gives the AIIB a significant credibility boost that will make it more likely to succeed.
Top priority: financing infrastructure
A few years ago the Asian Development Bank Institute, where I have been an adviser, contributed to a report pointing out correctly that Asia will require at least US$8 trillion to invest in infrastructure from 2010 to 2020 for the region to continue economic development at a reasonable pace.
The kinds of infrastructure needed range from the high-tech such as telecommunications services and high-speed railroads to the most basic and essential. About 1.8 billion are not connected to basic sanitation services, 800 million lack electricity and 600 million do not have access to potable water, according to the report.
For those of us who have been involved in strategy debates over Asian development since the 1980s, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and now China itself are all existing examples of the extent to which infrastructure investment is instrumental in economic development.
In my many visits to East Asia – most recently China – I have seen how national and international linkages can be constructed through infrastructure investment. China itself exemplifies how investing in roads and education can make a dramatic impact on a country’s long-term growth and lifting millions of people out of poverty.
Financing such investment is, therefore, a top strategic priority. The International Monetary Fund, the Asia Development Bank and the World Bank have all played pivotal roles helping finance such investment in these now prosperous countries.
The availability of transport, electricity, schools and hospitals has a “tremendous impact on improving the quality of life,” while businesses need more reliable infrastructure to spur growth, which boosts incomes and reduces poverty, according to the ADB report.
The addition of the AIIB to the fold would bring many benefits especially to those parts of Asia in the Southeast and South Asian regions that lag behind in infrastructure investment. Indonesia has the greatest needs, with the ADB estimating $450 billion will be required through 2020, mostly on transport. China needs just a little less, primarily due to electricity troubles, while another seven countries require at least $100 billion a piece.
In addition, the problem of a global lack of demand for goods and services due to the slowing economy will be mitigated by the hundreds of billions of dollars in extra infrastructure spending in Asia. Thus there are both local and global benefits that can be reaped from appropriate infrastructure investment projects financed by the AIIB.
AIIB’s rapid growth
In pushing the AIIB against the wishes of the US, the Chinese capitalized on a growing impatience among many Asian policy makers over the unwillingness of global institutions like the IMF and World Bank to allow greater input into its operations.
Last April Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said China was ready to intensify consultations with those interested in joining the AIIB. By June China proposed doubling the registered capital of the bank from $50 billion to $100 billion and invited India to participate in its founding. Just four months later, a signing ceremony held in Beijing formally established the bank, with 21 initial signatories, including Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.
Since then the number of countries agreeing to sign on as founders has soared, such as Hong Kong in February, to 57.
But the AIIB’s credibility was particularly enhanced when in early March UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced that Britain had agreed to lend money to the Bank, becoming the first major Western country to do so in spite of US opposition. Soon on the heels of UK, three other European nations – Germany, France and Italy – followed suit.
Clearly, the concept of AIIB has become institutionally viable. It has also established the credibility of China’s economic diplomacy.
Competitive pluralism
Thoughtful economists should welcome this multilateral initiative led by China. In line with other southern initiatives such as the launch of the New Development Bank last July by the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the AIIB will ease emerging countries’ strategic financing problems for development. It will also lead to a healthy competitive pluralism in this area that the Asian Development Bank itself has defended in the past.
The time has come for the experts to offer serious analyses of specific projects and their costs and benefits for the region. Here in addition to growth and employment aspects, social and environmental issues can also be analyzed in a multilateral context.
The AIIB offers a great opportunity to craft new strategies and foster fresh frameworks for making serious investments in infrastructure in Asia. Indeed, this is the key challenge that development strategists must address as the AIIB takes shape and aims to make a meaningful contribution the region’s growth.
This article is published in collaboration with The Conversation. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.
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Author: Haider Khan is a Professor of Economics at University of Denver.
Image: A man rides an escalator near Shanghai Tower. REUTERS/Carlos Barria.
How much extreme weather is caused by climate change?
Extreme weather is part of the chaotic nature of weather and emerges through a complex interplay of many factors. Will the weather become more extreme as climate change progresses? Yes and no. It would be wrong to conclude that climate change has no effect on the frequency of such events based simply on the fact that weather extremes existed in the past. However, it is also clear that what is often referred to as ‘global weirding’, or the idea that all weather phenomena are becoming increasingly extreme, falls short. After all, it is not scientifically proven that all weather extremes, such as hail storms and tornadoes, are becoming more frequent.
Because extremes are rare by definition, a localised change in their frequency is statistically difficult to prove. But when all the measuring stations around the world are pooled, a clear picture emerges: there has been a global trend towards more frequent and intense hot extremes since the 1950s. In addition, significantly more stations have recorded increases than decreases in heavy precipitation.
Loaded dice
After Europe’s summer-long heatwave in 2003, scientists concluded that although hot periods of this type can occur without human influence, global warming has more than doubled the likelihood of these hot summers in Europe. In turn, these scientists attributed more than half of the probability of the hot summer in 2003 to warming caused by humans. Like someone cheating with loaded dice in order to roll more sixes, so did warming increase the odds of a heatwave that summer.
Instead of merely determining what fraction of risk of a single hot summer can be attributed to humans, we can also ask ourselves what proportion of all extreme heat and precipitation events occurring worldwide is due to global warming. We examine this question in a study recently published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change [1]. We show that more than half of the hot extremes worldwide and nearly a fifth of precipitation extremes can be attributed to global warming. Not one of these events is solely the direct result of warming, but warming increases their frequency. And the less common and more extreme the hot extreme or heavy rainfall event, the more this can be attributed to a man-made contribution.
Difference between 1.5˚C and 2˚C
With each increment of warming, the frequency of hot extremes and heavy precipitation events worldwide rises sharply. If temperatures rise globally by 2˚C, we expect twice as many extreme heat events worldwide than we would with a 1.5˚C increase. These global warming targets, which are discussed in climate negotiations and which differ little at first glance, therefore have a great influence on the frequency of extremes.
We use climate models to quantify the heat and precipitation extremes and we know that these also have their weaknesses; for example, when simulating persistent high pressure systems. Small-scale processes such as convection, that is for instance upward air transport during thunderstorms, are not resolved in these models. Rather, they are merely approximated. Nevertheless, observations of extremes available from the last several decades correspond well with the models.
On the other hand, comparable statements for other types of extreme events, such as hail storms or tornadoes, are much more difficult. Numerous studies on these events do not find a significant increase attributable to climate change. Generally it is statistically more difficult to exclude an external factor than to confirm it. Many small-scale extreme weather events, such as hail storms, also fall literally through the mesh size of the climate models and observational networks.
Basis for comprehensive risk assessment
A substantial proportion of all globally occurring hot extremes and heavy rainfall events can be attributed to warming primarily caused by humans. Since a heat or precipitation event does not have the same socio-economic impact everywhere in the world, it is necessary to combine our approach with regional information on exposure and vulnerability in order to carry out a comprehensive risk assessment. This type of risk assessment could serve as an important scientific basis for decisions on warming targets or even for global questions of liability.
This article is published in collaboration with ETH Zurich. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.
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Author: Erich Fischer is a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich.
Image: Sheikh Ghazi Rashad Hrimis touches dried earth in the parched region of Raqqa province in eastern Syria. REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri.
How can we prevent climate change leading to conflict?
Last week’s communiqué from the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Lübeckincluded a statement on climate change and security. In welcoming a report, A New Climate for Peace, to which my organisation International Alert contributed, the communiqué moves the issue forward and declares it to be worthy of high level political attention. Unfortunately, what is to be done is not so clear.
Climate change and insecurity
A New Climate for Peace, of which I am one of the co-authors, is a joint project of the Berlin-based think tank adelphi, International Alert, the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and the European Union Institute for Security Studies. The full report comes out in May.
The core message is that climate change is having a multi-faceted impact on many states, societies and communities. It exerts a pressure they cannot tolerate for long. Compound risks emerge as the impact of climate change interacts with other political, social and economic problems. Climate change makes it hard to build resilience in the state or even in local communities, while the fragility of the state makes it hard to adapt to the impact of climate change. To address this problem, a new approach is needed integrating sectors that are currently separate, energised by clear political leadership to develop international cooperation, based on dialogue about a shared challenge and shared goals.
This is not a rehash of positions in the tired old controversy about whether climate change causes armed conflict. With this report, presented to the German Foreign Minister, and with the G7 Foreign Ministers’ welcome for it the next day, it is possible to say that the debate has decisively moved on.
The issue, if we want some jargon, is human security and insecurity. A background of armed conflict or weak governance or political instability – or all in combination – in short, a situation of fragility is not conducive for building resilience against the negative impact of climate change. Likewise, the pressure of climate change makes the tasks of reconciliation, managing conflicts non-violently and building a peaceful state even harder than they are in the absence of that pressure.
Seven compound risks
The report – 150 pages long in final draft – pulls together the best recent research and adds the results of its own inquiries in vulnerable countries. It collates the evidence and focuses on seven compound risks:
- Local resource competition can lead, as pressure on natural resources increases, to instability and even violent conflict in the absence of effective dispute resolution.
- Livelihood insecurity is a likely result of climate change in some regions, which could push people to migrate or turn to illegal sources of income.
- Extreme weather events and disasters will exacerbate all the challenges of fragility and can increase people’s vulnerability and grievances, especially in conflict-affected situations.
- Volatility in the prices and availability of food, arising because climate variability disrupts food production, have well documented effects on the likelihood of protests, instability, and civil conflict.
- Transboundary water sharing is a source of either cooperation or tension, but as competition sharpens due to increasing demand and declining availability and quality of water, the balance of probability tilts towards increased tension and conflict.
- Sea-level rise and coastal degradation will threaten the viability of low-lying areas, with the potential for social disruption and displacement, while disagreements over maritime boundaries and ocean resources may increase.
- The unintended effects of climate policies are a further source of risk that will increase if climate adaptation and mitigation policies are more broadly implemented without due care and attention to consequences and negative spin-offs.
Responding to risk
The best and, long term, the sustainable way to diminish the threat posed by these climate-fragility risks is to slow down climate change by reducing carbon emissions. That’s the task for December’s climate summit in Paris – formally, the 21st Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But changes to the climate are already underway, so there has to be a separate and additional response to climate-fragility risks, starting now and carried through for – in the best case – some decades at least.
Three key sectors require action – climate change adaptation, development and humanitarian aid, and peacebuilding. But single sector action won’t work against compound risk. Virtually by definition, integrated approaches are necessary. Further, the problem faced does not respect national boundaries and is in any case too big and too complex for a single government to handle, so the response needs also to be internationally cooperative and coordinated.
A response to the vicious cycle contained in each of the seven climate-fragility risks will not work if it relies on responding to each crisis as it arrives. What people in the hardest hit countries need is assistance in mounting and implementing a long-term and sustained preventive response. That’s how we move from managing crises to avoiding them.
The current menu of action
A New Climate for Peace looks at the current international policy architecture for addressing the compound risks. There is plenty of activity but:
- Climate change adaptation plans rarely address fragility and conflict comprehensively.
- Development and humanitarian aid does not routinely take account of the need for climate-proofing and still has problems absorbing conflict sensitivity.
- Peacebuilding similarly tends to leave climate change aside as somebody else’s problem.
What needs to be done
Many things can and should be done. It is not hard to identify them. The report insists that it will only happen if there is strong and clear political leadership. With the G7 governments in mind, it identifies entry points for developing a coordinated, integrated approach:
- Within G7 member governments, remember that integration begins at home and make climate-fragility risks a central foreign policy priority.
- Improve coordination among G7 members by coming together for a new dialogue.
- Set the global resilience agenda by bringing the new integrated approach to global and multilateral discussions and institutions.
- Extend the dialogue by listening to and working with a wide range of actors, including in countries affected by fragility.
- And to embody this new approach, as areas in which it could be implemented, the report identifies five action areas:
- Strengthening global risk assessment by covering all aspects and making the results available and accessible;
- Improving food security to minimise food price crises, thus minimising their conflict consequences;
- Improving disaster risk reduction by absorbing conflict sensitivity into planning and training;
- Checking and strengthening the institutions and agreements that can help settle transboundary water disputes;
- Recalibrating development strategies and international development assistance so as to give greater priority to building local resilience.
But where to start?
There is, then, no real difficulty in identifying what action to take and how to do it. The likely objection to the list of action areas is only that it is incomplete. The challenge is, how to start?
Here is what the G7 communiqué says:
“We therefore welcome the external study, commissioned by the G7 Foreign Ministries in 2014 and now submitted to us under the title “An New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks” …
“We agree on the need to better understand, identify, monitor and address the compound risks associated with climate change and fragility…
“We have decided to set up and task a working group with evaluating the study’s recommendations up to the end of 2015 in order for it to report back to us regarding possible implementation in time for our meeting in 2016.”
Start here – we’ve been invited to
It is not exactly a clarion call for path breaking action. It lacks the necessary political juice. But it is an open invitation to keep pressing.
The first part of the case – that there is a major global problem – has now been made and is grounded in solid evidence. With this, virtually as a corollary, goes the second part of the case: business as usual is not an option, change is needed.
The third part of the case – there are many things that can usefully be done to alleviate and manage the compound climate-fragility risks – has also been made.
It is the fourth part of the case – now is the time – that has to be made and has to persuade. Let’s get to it.
This article is published in collaboration with Open Democracy. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.
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Author: Dan Smith has been the secretary general of International Alert since 2003.
Image: Three men hold a globe in their hands. REUTERS Kieran Doherty.
Why do climate models differ from the real world?
Earlier this year, weather and climate agencies around the world declared 2014 the warmest year on record, even though the increase in global mean temperature has slowed. This warming “hiatus” has puzzled climate scientists, as it deviates from climate models which project a continuing temperature increase. Climate expert Jochem Marotzke visited MIT last week to deliver the 15th annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture, “Recent Global Temperature Trends: What do they tell us about anthropogenic climate change?” in which he discussed the hiatus as well as the abilities and limitations of climate models.
Marotzke is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and was an MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) faculty member in the 1990s. He has spent his career researching the role of the ocean in climate and climate change, and recently expanded his interests to include multi-year to decadal climate prediction. “If you look at other central indicators of global climate, such as sea ice melt, ocean heat uptake, and sea-level rise, they show that global warming is continuing,” Marotzke said. “But this particular indicator, global surface temperature, is rising at a much lower rate now. This is something that as a climate research community we need to take seriously; we need to understand it and communicate the issues about it.”
For the past 15 years, increases in global mean surface temperature have slowed contrary to what climate model simulations predicted. Known as the warming “hiatus”, this phenomenon is largely due to natural variability: Cyclical climate processes such as La Niña and fluctuations in the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface can disrupt the warming trend. Additionally, the oceans absorb an enormous amount of excess heat energy trapped by the atmosphere — as much as 93 percent, Marotzke said. Light-reflecting aerosols from volcanoes also contribute to the slowdown.
The failure of climate models to predict this hiatus has long perplexed scientists and bred some public mistrust in climate models. Climate-change skeptics claim the hiatus is proof that global warming doesn’t exist, and that climate models overestimate greenhouse gases’ warming effects. Marotzke ardently disagrees. He shared with the audience a study published in Nature earlier this year in which he and co-author Piers Forster of the University of Leeds analyzed 114 model simulations of 15-year global mean temperature trends since the beginning of the 20th century. If their analysis showed that models consistently overestimated or underestimated the amount of warming compared to real-world observations, then the models must have a systematic bias.
Fortunately the simulations performed fairly well, producing a range of predictions for each 15-year period in which actual observed temperature trends for those periods fell. Even if the observed trends at times fell close to range edges, they were not biased to one side or the other. Although the models didn’t accurately predict the current warming hiatus, which is not unusual, they also failed to predict other accelerated warming or hiatus events. In fact, the models underestimated warming in some periods compared to the observations. “The claim that models systematically overestimate warming from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is unfounded,” said Marotzke.
To find out what these simulated short-term temperature trends actually tell us about the climate, Marotzke and Forster performed a multiple regression analysis, which aimed to identify the most significant factors contributing to the trend. For shorter 15-year periods, the analysis found random natural variability in the climate system had the largest influence — approximately three times the impact of all other physical factors combined. Only when Marotzke and Forster analyzed model simulations of global mean temperature trends spanning 62 years did differences in factors including ocean heat absorption, greenhouse gas concentration, and aerosol pollution begin to make a noticeable difference.
In other words, modeling 15-year-long periods only shows the impact of natural variations in the climate system. To see anthropogenic influences on climate change, we have to look at the bigger picture. “The hiatus masks anthropogenic warming,” said Marotzke. “It is a huge distraction, but an incredibly fascinating one.”
The 15th annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture was sponsored by the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the MIT Center for Global Change Science. The lecture series honors the memory of Professor Henry Kendall (1926-1999), a 1990 Nobel Laureate, a longtime member of MIT’s physics faculty, and an ardent environmentalist. A founding member and chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists, he played a leading role in organizing scientific community statements on global problems, including the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity in 1992 and the Call for Action at the Kyoto Climate Summit in 1997.
This article is published in collaboration with MIT News. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.
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Author: Cassie Martin is a Science Writer at MIT News.
Image: A view is seen from the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) in Sao Sebastiao do Uatuma in the middle of the Amazon forest in Amazonas state. REUTERS/Bruno Kelly.
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