India doing enough to combat global warming : PM

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rubbished criticism from developed nations that India was not doing enough to combat global warming, saying it fully recognised the importance of the issue.

He also said that domestic capacity should be strengthened to meet the challenges arising out of growing energy needs.

“We fully recognise not just how important this issue is to India but also our own obligation to address it,” he said apparently referring to criticism from developed nations on the issue.

The Prime Minister was addressing a national conference of state ministers of environment and forests in New Delhi.

“Our energy needs will increase sharply in the decades to come. We can and must walk a different road, an environment-friendly road,” he said.

For this, Singh said, access to new technologies available with developed countries was required.

“We must also make own investments in environment-friendly technologies.”

For strengthening scientific foundations of environment policies and capacity to deal with the challenges, he said, “We must involve more stakeholders particularly youth to lead the movement for environmental protection.”

As a step towards this direction, he asked States to create their own action plans consistent with the National Action Plan on Climate Change unveiled last year.

RMLD fights against global warming

Reading Municipal Light Department (RMLD) announced Monday that it continues to support the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “Change the World, Start with ENERGY STAR” campaign to encourage customers to reduce energy use in their homes.

RMLD participates, along with millions of Americans, in the fight against global warming by encouraging individual actions that can make a big difference in reducing energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions. 

The ENERGY STAR pledge at RMLD website encourages Americans to:

· Change light bulbs to those that have earned the ENERGY STAR label.

· Use a programmable thermostat to save energy while asleep or away from home.

· Enable power management settings on computers and monitors so they go into “sleep mode” when away or not in use.

· Make their next purchase an ENERGY STAR qualified product, such as home electronics, office products, and/or appliances.

· Make sure their homes are well sealed and insulated.

“We want to do our part to reduce our country’s greenhouse gas emissions and help fight global warming,” said RMLD General Manager Vinnie Cameron. “We are proud to spread the word about the difference that individuals in our community can make by taking energy-saving steps in the workplace and at home. If every American household took the actions in the pledge, it is estimated that we would save more than 110 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, more than $18 billion in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to more than 18 million cars.”

“Becoming part of the solution to global warming takes less time and effort than you might think. You can start by taking simple steps like changing a light or looking for the ENERGY STAR label when you purchase new products,” said Kathleen Hogan, director of the Climate Protection Partnerships Division at EPA. “We are delighted to work with RMLD and others across the country who are helping in the fight against global warming. Together, we can all make a difference and protect our environment through simple everyday actions.”

ENERGY STAR was introduced by EPA in 1992 as a voluntary, market-based partnership to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency. Today, the ENERGY STAR label can be found on more than 50 different kinds of products, as well as new homes and buildings. Products that have earned the ENERGY STAR designation prevent greenhouse gas emissions by meeting strict energy-efficiency specifications set by the government. In 2007, Americans, with the help of ENERGY STAR, saved $16 billion on their energy bills while reducing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of 27 million vehicles.

The big melt: 2 trillion tons of ice since 2003

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland,Antarctica and Alaskahave melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren't complete yet, but this year's ice loss, while still significant, won't be as severe as 2007.

The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large winter snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.

In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend.

Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn't add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about half a millimeter of sea level rise a year, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwallysaid in a telephone interview from the conference.

Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.

Other research, being presented this week at the geophysical meeting point to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice.

"It's not getting better; it's continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification," Zwally said. "There's no reversal taking place."

Scientists studying sea ice will announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That's when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe.

As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of white ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the fall. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are six to 10 degrees warmer than they were in the 1980s, said research scientist Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

That's a strong and early impact of global warming, she said.

"The pace of change is starting to outstrip our ability to keep up with it, in terms of our understanding of it," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and a co-author of the Arctic amplification study.

Two other studies coming out at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane - the second most potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane, Stroeve says.

A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. In late summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea at levels that were 10 times higher than they were in the mid-1990s, he said based on a study this summer.

The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said.

That, Semiletov said, "should alarm people."

Asia shrouded in deadly brown clouds

If you've noticed a haze over the city, here's a possibly big reason for it. A dirty brown haze, sometimes more than a mile thick, is darkening
Asia shrouded in deadly brown clouds skies over vast areas of Asia, the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns and threatening health and food supplies.

The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as ''atmospheric brown clouds''. When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the UN Environment Program.

Soot levels in the air were reported to have risen alarmingly in Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and 10 other megacities — Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Lagos
, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.

Brown clouds were also cited as dimming the light by as much as 25% in some places including New Delhi, Karachi, Shanghai and Beijing. The clouds have been found to be more than a mile thick around glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions.

One of the most serious problems resulting from the brown haze that envelopes vast areas of Asia, the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, is the retreat of the glaciers in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush and in Tibet, according to lead researcher Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences
at the University of California in San Diego.

The glaciers feed most Asian rivers and "have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia," Ramanathan said.

Monsoon rains over India and south-east Asia have decreased between 5% and 7% overall since the 1950s, the report says, naming brown clouds and global warming as a possible cause.

Likewise, they may have contributed to the melting of China's glaciers, which have shrunk 5% since the 1950s. The volume of China's nearly 47,000 glaciers has fallen by 3,000 sq km in the past 25 years, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Health problems associated with particulate pollution, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, are linked to nearly 350,000 premature deaths in India and China every year, said Henning Rohde, a University of Stockholm scientist who worked on the study.

Soot winds up on the surface of the glaciers that feed the Ganga, Indus, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which makes the glaciers absorb more sunlight and melt more quickly and also pollutes the rivers, the researchers say.

The worst-hit appears to be the Chinese city of Guangzhou, where sunlight in winter had dimmed by more than 20% since the 1970s. For India as a whole, the dimming trend has been running at about 2% per decade between 1960 and 2000 - more than doubling between 1980 and 2004, it adds.

Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by Ramanathan in 1990, the clouds were depicted on Thursday as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known.

The phenomenon complicates the climate change scenario, because the brown clouds also help cool the earth's surface and mask the impact of global warming by an average of 40%, said the report. The enormous cloud masses can move across continents within three to four days. Although they also form over the eastern US and Europe, winter snow and rain tend to lessen the impact in those areas.

The Arctic: Losing Its Cool

Arctic powers the "heat pump"

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The Arctic is critical to the globe's climate and influence temperatures everywhere.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the Arctic plays a primary role in distributing heat around the world through what is known as the "heat pump." The ocean's currents circulate heat throughout the world, through a system known as the "great conveyor belt." Two main forces keep the conveyor moving: winds and ocean density differences. The Arctic is key to the density differences.

The conveyor belt's critical points are where surface waters plunge into deep waters. This happens only in a few places, two of which are in the North Atlantic. As the ocean surface waters cool in the far north, they become denser and sink toward the bottom of the ocean. There, the cold water flows toward the equator. This combination of sinking and flow helps drive the ocean conveyor.

Because the cold waters that flow south must be replaced, warm surface currents flow farther north and deliver warmth to places far north. Without the ocean conveyor's heat pump, Europe's temperate climate would be much colder.

Global warming is changing that key spot in the North Atlantic where the surface waters plunge. A mix of increased precipitation, river run-off and melting ice—all related to climate change—is making surface waters in the north less salty and dense, weakening this major pump in the ocean's natural circulation.

Arctic melt is speeding up warming

Also speeding up the Earth's warming is the loss of Arctic ice. Like a mirror, ice bounces sunlight back toward space, preventing sunlight from heating the surface. Winds carry the cooler air down from Canada into the U.S., cooling our climate.

Open water and bare soil are not as bright as ice and snow, so they absorb heat instead of reflecting it. When ice melts, the Earth's darker surfaces are exposed and thus absorb more solar energy. This extra heat melts even more ice, which leads to even more dark surfaces and absorption. This is what scientists call a positive feedback loop. Once the loop gets going, it tends to keep going—and to speed up. Less ice means less cooling much faster. Or, as the American Meteorological Society's senior scientist Susan Joy Hassol put it to U.S. senators in a committee hearing in 2004: "What we're looking at is having a less efficient air conditioner."

Loss of Arctic ice is not just speculation—it's already happening. The year 2003 brought a dramatic example of Arctic ice disappearing. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, the largest in the Arctic, broke in two, draining a unique freshwater lake that was home to a rare microbial ecosystem. Since the 1970s, 400,000 square miles of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. That's the size of Texas and California combined. (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2001) Even worse, the years 2002 through 2006 have all seen record or near-record low ice cover. The most recent report by the IPCC finds that nearly all of the Arctic Ocean could lose year-round ice cover by the end of the 21st century if greenhouse gas emissions reach the higher end of current estimates. (IPCC 2007)

What this means for the rest of us

While the Arctic melt has profound effects on the region's people and ecosystems, it also spells trouble for the rest of the world. For instance, the changes to the ocean's circulation system would mean that though some places will get much warmer, other places, such as Europe, which won't get the warmth from the Gulf Stream, will get much cooler.

One of the thaw's most pressing concerns on the world beyond the Arctic is sea-level rise. When melting glaciers spill into the ocean, sea levels around the globe rise. The booming cities and counties along the East and West coasts house half of the U.S. population and are among the communities that will be most threatened by melting ice.

Currently, the retreat of the world's glaciers is adding enormous amounts of fresh water to the ocean. Between 1961 and 1997, for instance, about 890 cubic miles of ice has been lost. That means that melting glacier ice has added about 980 trillion (or 979,994,261,211,428.5) gallons of water to the oceans. That would be like dumping more than a million Olympic-sized swimming pools into our oceans.

Some studies have even suggested the possibility that warming over the next several centuries would lead to the complete, irreversible disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet. Were that to occur, sea levels would rise an extra 23 feet.

"If we ignore the Arctic's warning—and it is warming—the polar bears and native Alaskans won't be the only ones who suffer," notes Environmental Defense scientist Dr. Bill Chameides. "Our children and grandchildren could pay a hefty price."

Global warming : INDIA

We keep reading about rising temperatures and sea-levels in other parts of the world like United States and the UK, but actually India is one of the most vulnerable countries when it comes to effects of global warming. India has a vast coastal line and the rising sea levels caused by global warming will cause an ecological disaster.

Bengal will suffer
The Himalayan glaciers have started to melt and the average rate of retreat is almost twice (34 metres) per year as compared to the 1971 levels of 19 metres. The melting glaciers will cause temperatures and sea-levels to rise and there will be a cascading effect on the crops and the monsoons. Worse - whole islands are expected to vanish! In fact two have already gone under - two islands in the Sunderbans, an area which India shares with Bangladesh. Temperatures in the group of islands has already gone up by one degree centigrade.

Rising sea-levels will be a disaster
While some climatologists say that sea levels will increase by just 4-35 inches from 1990 levels in another hundred years…some feel that the range could be higher - 20-55 inches. Thats a lot and will affect human habitat in a big way. In fact, as far back as 1993 a study to evaluate the impact of rising sea levels on India was carried out by JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University). They calculated what would happen if the sea-levels rose by just 1 metre…and they found that as many as 7 million people would be displaced and 5,764 sq km of land and 4,200 km of roads would be lost!

Why is only the east coast of India being affected?
This is because the Bay of Bengal is landlocked from three sides and there is a huge delta of the rivers Brahmaputra and the Ganga. These rivers will carry the water from the melting Himalayan snows. However this does not mean that the western coastal regions are immune…just that the eastern coast is more vulnerable at this stage.

So what are these green house gases which are causing the snows to melt? According to the Wiki greenhouse gases are “include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozonecomponents of the atmosphere that contribute to the greenhouse effect. Some greenhouse gases occur naturally in the atmosphere, while others result from human activities.

This is the report of UN environmental study......
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Global warming: Forcing Tuvaluans to migrate!

MOST OF us have not heard about Tuvalu. In fact, what importance can a sparsely populated island – the third least populated country in the world, with an economy that survives on subsistence farming, fishing and foreign aid with no natural resources, be of to the global community? Oblivious to the vast majority of the people on this planet, this tiny Polynesian island nation has succumbed to global warming, forcing evacuation of its inhabitants and creating the first global warming refugees of the world.

Tuvalu, with its four reef islands and five true atolls, lies on the Pacific Ocean, midway between Hawaii and Australia. The rising sea level, the obvious outcome of global warming, is gradually engulfing this island nation. In the next 50 years, the country would completely disappear from the face of the earth. The highest point of the nation is only five meters above the sea level. 3000 Tuvaluans have already been evacuated and the remaining 8000 are waiting to leave the country, sometime in the near future. For the Tuvaluan refugees, challenges of settling in Australia and New Zealand are myriad. Tuvalu was a country where its inhabitants were used to live simple life in small islands with few cars, where locals spent most of the time barefoot on the sand, living in communities where during hot nights one can even sleep on a local airstrip. For these simple islanders, adjusting to large cities with their high-rises and highways is not easy. Nonetheless, Tuvaluans prefer to immigrate to the neighboring countries, as they notice the gradual environmental changes on their island. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has detected Tuvalu’s sea level rising at a rate of 5.5 millimeters every year, on par with average sea level rise worldwide.

As the Tuvaluans are being displaced from their homes, to add to their woes, the islanders are stranded in a political quagmire, surrounding the definition of the term ‘refugee’.
The United Nations, under the Geneva Conventions, describes ‘a refugee, strictly as a person displaced from his or her homeland because of war or political persecution’. Lack of formal recognition of climate refugees has made Australia, reluctant to grant refugee status to the displaced Tuvaluans. However, the government of New Zealand had generously agreed to accept the climate refugees of Tuvalu, guaranteeing them residency, housing, counseling services and other benefits.

With global warming continuing unabated, it has been estimated that by 2050, there would be 200 million climate refugees worldwide. Particularly vulnerable to the rising sea level are the low-lying coastal countries in the Pacific, most of Bangladesh and big cities like Shanghai, Hamburg, Bangkok, Jakarta, Mumbai, Manila, Buenos Aires, London and Venice. The apathy of the UN and the global community regarding the plight of the climate refugees of Tuvalu would soon change into great concerns, when coastal flooding begins threatening the populous nations of the world.

We are expecting readers comments and reviews about this.