Care for Earth

• A Better & Human Technology
• What is global warming?
• News update
• Steps you can take to help save the environment

Technology is in our hands; we are not in the hands of technology. We can drop all those parts which are dangerous, poisonous, and we can discover substitutes which enhance the ecology, which enhance the life of man, which enhance his outer and inner richness and bring a balance into the world.

“Dhyan Tara, it is one of the most complicated questions.... It is true that, "by using modern technology we are hurting this vibrating, juicy earth with the dead garbage of plastic, radioactivity, bad air and so on." This question has two possible answers. One is that: "Go back... to the point where all modern technology is dropped" -- which superficially looks right. If modern technology is creating an ecological crisis on the earth, disturbing the balance of nature, then it is a very simplistic solution to drop modern technology and go back.

I have another alternative. It is not the fault of modern technology; the fault is that we have not been very clear what we want from modern technology and what we don't want. The scientist has been discovering almost in a blind way, and whatever he discovers we start using -- without thinking of the aftereffects.

Going back is impossible and idiotic, the only way is forward. We need a better technology -- better than modern technology, which can avoid plastic garbage and disturbance in the ecology. The scientist has to be very alert that whatever he is doing should become an intrinsic part of the organic whole; technology should not go against the whole. And it is possible, because technology does not lead you somewhere in particular; it is you who go on discovering things in a blind way.

Now that it is clear that whatever we have discovered up to now, much of it is a disturbance in the harmony -- is finally going to destroy life on the earth -- still, scientists go on piling up nuclear weapons. They don't have the guts to say to the politicians, "It is enough. We are not slaves. We cannot create anything that is going to destroy life."

All the scientists of the world have to come to a consensus: they have to make a world academy of sciences, which decides what should be discovered and what should not be discovered. If something wrong is discovered, it should be undiscovered immediately.

We need a superior technology, a more enlightened technology. I go forwards. Technology is in our hands; we are not in the hands of technology. We can drop all those parts which are dangerous, poisonous, and we can discover substitutes which enhance the ecology, which enhance the life of man, which enhance his outer and inner richness and bring a balance into the world.

But I don't see anybody in the whole world preaching for a more sophisticated, more enlightened technology. Sometimes I wonder: millions of people, thousands of great scientists -- are they all blind? Can't they see what they are doing is cutting their own roots?

And if technology can manage to do miracles -- it has managed on the path of destructiveness, it can also manage miracles on the path of creativeness. All that has been discovered, if it is a disturbance to nature, should be dropped. But I don't see that electricity is a danger to nature; I don't see that railway lines or airplanes are disturbing the ecology; I don't see that innocent telegrams, post offices, have to be destroyed. That will be moving to the other extreme.

That is how the human mind works: it works like the pendulum of a clock, from one end to the other end. It never stops in the middle. I want human consciousness to stop exactly in the middle, so that it can see both sides. Certainly, destructiveness cannot be supported; and the energy that goes into creating destructive things has to be converted into creativity.

You could not have cold and hot water in your bathrooms -- that depends on modern technology. It is true that it has polluted the air, but that is our fault, not the fault of modern technology. If we had insisted that petrol should be refined to such a point that it did not pollute the air, and that there should be devices which went on every car, to purify the air of whatever damage the petrol was doing, so the balance remained the same.... but it was, in a way, natural. You know something only when it has happened.

Nobody was aware that going to the moon was creating dangerous holes in the protective shield around the earth. There is a subtle, invisible layer of ozone twenty miles above the earth, all around it. This ozone layer has been protective. It does not allow all the rays of the sun to enter; it allows only the rays which are helpful for life, for trees, for human beings -- and the destructive rays are turned back. But nobody was aware of it, so nobody can be blamed for it.

When our first rockets went beyond the twenty-mile thick atmosphere, they created holes in the ozone layer; and from those holes, the protective layers disappeared. Now the all the rays of the sun can enter through those holes, and they have brought many diseases which have not been known before.

But now we can make arrangements if we want to go to the moon. In the first place, it is lunatic; only people who are in some way mad want to go to the moon. For what? -- there is neither water nor greenery nor air to breathe. What is the point of it all? Perhaps military experts may be the only ones who are deeply interested in acquiring the moon -- because then the moon can be made a base for throwing nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union, if America gets hold of the moon, or if the Soviet Union gets hold of the moon, it becomes their territory.

But even if you want to go to the moon, you should be careful not to create these holes; and if you are creating them, you should immediately make arrangements that they are covered again, so destructive rays from the sun cannot reach the earth.

One thing has to be remembered, Tara: man can only go forward; there is no way backward. And there is no point, either. It is just people's imagination that in the past, when there was no technology, everything was beautiful and good. That is absolutely wrong. I will give you a few examples.

Hindus brag very much that in the golden old days, people were so rich that locks were never used on the doors. Yes, it is mentioned in the scriptures that locks were not used. But it does not say that people were so rich and there was no stealing around -- hence, locks were not used. My conclusion is just the opposite: locks were not invented yet, so how could they use them? Secondly, people were very poor; there was nothing to lock up.

And if somebody says that people were rich and there were no locks and there was no stealing, then they should look again into all the scriptures of the past. Gautam Buddha, every day for forty-two years continually, was teaching that stealing is evil. I wonder whom he was teaching? If there was no stealing happening -- even locks were not needed -- then he must have been mad, talking to people who have never stolen and who were not going to steal, they were themselves so rich. Then why did he go on, every day?

And it was not only Gautam Buddha; Mahavira went on doing the same, and other scriptures and other masters of the past all insisted that stealing was a sin. That is enough proof that there were thieves all around. So the only possible way to explain why locks were not used is mine: because locks were not invented yet.

Locks are also part of technology. If you go to an aboriginal society living in the forest they don't use locks, because they cannot create locks and they are not rich enough even to purchase locks from the cities. And for what? -- because they don't have anything in their houses. If they can get one meal a day, that is a great blessing from God. Most of them don't get even one meal a day.

Technology should not be looked at only negatively. In India, just before this century, nine children used to die out of ten. Today, the situation has reversed: only one child dies out of ten, because of the advancement of medicine. The clothes you are wearing... soon it will be impossible to provide cotton clothes for everybody -- and there is no need either: better clothes can be produced by technology. Just as a symbol of my philosophy, I never use anything that is cotton. My clothes are pure productions of technology -- one hundred percent polyester.

Technology can create better houses, lighter houses and more beautiful; there is no need to use heavy material, costly material. Technology is bound to create better food, more proportionate, giving you all the vitamins that are needed and giving you a better taste, too -- now plants are not so scientific. Any flavor can be given to your food. There is no need for people to eat meat just for taste, because any food can be given the flavor of meat.

Technology has a better side also; but if you drop all modern technology, you will be falling into the dark ages, and it will be the greatest violence on the earth, preached by the man who thought that his philosophy was nonviolent.

Technology has a better side also; but if you drop all modern technology, you will be falling into the dark ages, and it will be the greatest violence on the earth, preached by the man who thought that his philosophy was nonviolent.

But something has to be done. Up to now, technology has been just groping. Now we can give it a direction; and we can drop all those things which are destructive of ecology, harmony, nature, life.

I am all for technology -- but a better technology, a more human technology.

The Rebellious Spirit # 8

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Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-twentieth century, and its projected continuation.

The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the hundred years ending in 2005. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations" via an enhanced greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.

These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC, the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.

Climate model projections summarized by the IPCC indicate that average global surface temperature will likely rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the twenty-first century. This range of values results from the use of differing scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions as well as models with differing climate sensitivity. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming and sea level rise are expected to continue for more than a thousand years even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. The delay in reaching equilibrium is a result of the large heat capacity of the oceans.

Increasing global temperature is expected to cause sea level to rise, an increase in the intensity of extreme weather events, and significant changes to the amount and pattern of precipitation. Other expected effects of global warming include changes in agricultural yields, modifications of trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.

Remaining scientific uncertainties include the amount of warming expected in the future, and how warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe. Most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there is ongoing political and public debate worldwide regarding what, if any, action should be taken to reduce or reverse future warming or to adapt to its expected consequences.

Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

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The Heat Is On

G. K. Pakavath

SCIENTISTS, across the globe, have suggested various techniques through which global warming can be avoided, but there is no foolproof solution to the problem. Every idea is either too expensive or too risky to try.

Temperature increase
True, the temperature is not off the charts as yet, but most expert opinion and super computer modellings indicate that it will be soon. Especially if mankind continues to feast in an orgy of fuel burning and does nothing to compensate for the damage it is doing to the planet’s ecology.

Scientific studies and reports, including the one released recently by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), conclude that though geo-cyclical changes in the climate are natural, for the first time, climate change is happening because of human activity. The picture that emerges from the research study is appalling. It is just horrendous realising what damage climate change can do to ecosystems.

According to the IPCC report, equatorial lands that are home to hundreds of millions of people will become uninhabitable as food and water run out due to climate change. Tropical nations from Africa to the Pacific, mostly poor, are likely to bear the brunt, but those nearer the poles, mostly rich, may briefly benefit.

Don’t dismiss it as one of the favourite whines of environmental campaigners. The result of the melting of most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2030, as predicted by the IPCC, could be truly catastrophic for Nepal and its neighbours. Rivers mothered by the Himalayan glaciers are the lifeline of hundreds of millions of people in the Indian subcontinent and China, most of whom live far from the Himalayas. Nearly 70 per cent of the discharge into the Ganga is from rivers in Nepal, which means that if the Himalayan glaciers dry up, so will the Ganga downstream in India.

The Himalayan glaciers are the largest store of water outside the polar ice caps, and feed seven great Asian rivers - Ganga, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Salween, Yangtze and Huang Ho. The glaciers are believed to be retreating at a rate of about 10-15 metres a year. The Khumbu glacier, a popular climbing route to the summit of Mount Everest, has retreated more than 5 km from where Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set out to conquer the world’s highest peak in 1953.

At least for a few decades, there would be a few winners with the global warming. And less cold toward the poles could also mean fewer deaths in winter, lower heating bills and more tourism - aiding nations from Scandinavia to New Zealand. This means we can have positive effects in some sectors and very negative in others. Hence, it is impossible to say what the bottom line will be.

he temperature rises of 2-3º Celsius predicted by 2050 spell global disaster for both humanity and the environment. It says that up to 40 per cent of animal and plant species face extinction as rising temperatures destroy the ecosystems that support them. And it points out that the 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere each year are acidifying the oceans - threatening to destroy coral reefs, plankton and many commercial fish species.

By the middle of the century, the report warns, more than 200 million people could have been forced from their native lands by rising sea levels, floods and droughts, with many more facing early deaths from malnutrition and heat stress. We have diseased the planet through our actions. Let us not, however, take recourse to radical cures that might make the problem worse than it already is. Humanity has already harmed the planet’s climate cycle extensively; it now needs to mend that problem as soon as possible in case the damage turns out to be even worse than has been forecast.

If human activity causes degradation of the earth and its resources, it should be human activity itself which must remedy the situation. Oil spills, for instance, are a good example of where this is already being implemented. Spills are an unfortunate outcome of a technology which creates giant-sized tankers that often run aground and release their disruptive cargo into the ocean.

New technology
As a result, wide-ranging life chains are devastated. But bacterial pollution control, which seeks to utilise genetically engineered microbes capable of metabolising petroleum, is a high-tech response towards solving such problems in the future. It is the same thing with carbon dioxide emissions and the geo-engineering methods that are now being considered to tackle and reverse the effects of global warming. The moral of the story is clear: we need new technology to cure the ills of old or misused ones.

Courtesy: http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np

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SHASHI ON SUNDAY : Let's make haste while the sun shines

20 Jul 2008, 0318 hrs IST, Shashi Tharoor

In all the brouhaha about the Indo-US nuclear deal, not enough attention has been paid to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent announcement of a credible energy plan for India that goes way beyond the nuclear. By far the most welcome component of his six-point plan to increase the country's reliance on sustainable sources of energy was the prime minister's declaration that the development of India's capacity to tap the power of the sun would be central to the strategy.

"In this strategy, the sun occupies centrestage," the PM memorably said, "as it should, being literally the original source of all energy. We will pool all our scientific, technical and managerial talents, with financial sources, to develop solar energy as a source of abundant energy to power our economy and to transform the lives of our people." Dr Singh added, and this was no hyperbole: "Our success in this endeavour will change the face of India."

As a layman who has no particular competence to weigh in on the scientific aspects of the debate over climate change, I have often wondered why a country like India, with its abundance of natural sunshine, hasn't done more to focus on developing solar energy. The prime minister made it clear that India has no choice, over the next few years, but to move away from economic activity based on fossil fuels to a far greater use of non-fossil fuels. The price of oil alone is proof enough that we have to reduce our dependence on non-renewable (and dwindling) sources of carbon-based energy to renewable and sustainable sources instead.

Of these, solar power is the most obvious one for India. But the existing technology is prohibitively expensive. Solar panels, made from silicon (which itself consumes non-renewable petroleum energy in its manufacture), cost 10 times the price of the cheapest fossil fuels. Indian scientists who have worked on reducing these costs are few and far between, and have little success to report. But with the new governmental emphasis on solar energy as a priority, a new research thrust ought to be feasible, given adequate government funding and tax incentives.

It's interesting that all the pressure on India from the international climate change community has lain in the direction of cutting back on our country's carbon emissions. There's no doubt that Indian industry contributes to the global build-up of greenhouse gases, but as New Delhi has repeatedly pointed out, the bulk of that problem was created by 200 years of western industrialisation, to which India contributed little. Even today, Indian emissions, on a per capita basis, are amongst the lowest in the world. But the debate need not be conducted on that tediously familiar ground. Instead, there's a different point worth making: that of all the possible ways you could combat global warming, the least effective would be the path of simply cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

That conclusion isn't mine: it comes from a panel of eight of the world's top economists, including five Nobel laureates, who were gathered together by the Copenhagen Consensus, a highly innovative mechanism put together by the smart young Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, author of a remarkable (and admittedly controversial) book called The Sceptical Environmentalist. Dr Lomborg convened the panel to examine worldwide research findings on the best ways to tackle 10 global challenges: air pollution, conflict, disease, global warming, hunger and malnutrition, lack of education, gender inequity, lack of water and sanitation, terrorism, and trade barriers. The panelists' job, as experts, was to examine, through a cost-benefit approach, a variety of possible solutions to each of these ten challenges. Lomborg set them an interesting challenge of their own: to create a list of priorities enumerating how, in their view, the sum of $800 billion could most effectively be spent over the next 100 years in tackling these problems.

The results were fascinating. Lomborg's panel concluded that the least effective use of resources in slowing down the pace of global warming would be to spend $800 billion over 100 years solely on cutting back carbon emissions. Such action would, they determined, reduce the planet's unavoidable increases in temperature by less than 0.2 degrees centigrade by the end of this century. Even taking into account the environmental damage that would be caused by the persistence of global warming, the world would in fact be able to prevent only $685 billion worth of damage — while spending $800 billion in the attempt.

The Copenhagen Consensus economists did not draw the conclusion from this that the world should ignore the problem — the effects of climate change are too serious to be neglected. Instead, they concluded that a more effective response than the attempt to reduce emissions would be to significantly increase research on, and the development of, other energy sources than carbon — such as solar energy and (though this would be less welcome in India, where agriculture is meant to feed people, not run their cars) second-generation biofuels.

"Even if every nation spent 0.05% of its gross domestic product on research and development of low-carbon energy," Dr Lomborg argues, "this would be only about one-tenth as costly as the Kyoto Protocol and would save dramatically more than any of Kyoto's likely successors."

India can afford to spend that 0.05% — and what's more, we have trained scientists and engineers who, given the proper incentives, can take the challenge on. The scale of India's energy needs, and the abundance of sunshine, should also mean that we should be able to benefit from economies of scale unavailable to smaller countries. There is no question that nuclear efforts are essential as well, which is why the government should be applauded for seeking to end India's nuclear pariah status (currently, our nuclear scientists cannot even get visas to a number of countries as a result of the post-Pokhran sanctions) and to put the country on the road to energy self-sufficiency. But equally, we need to do everything we can to ensure that solar energy should be able to rival nuclear energy in contributing to India's needs by 2020.

"Our vision is to make India's economic development energy efficient," the PM said as he announced the energy plan. "Our people have a right to economic and social development and to discard the ignominy of widespread poverty." He's right. May the sun illuminate the way forward.

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Himachal Pradesh to launch plantation drive to combat climate change

July 21st, 2008 - 10:09 am ICT by IANS
By Vishal Gulati

Shimla, July 21 (IANS) Himachal Pradesh is launching a massive plantation drive next month to increase the state’s forest cover as part of its contribution to lowering global warming. The state already has a quarter of its geographical area under forest cover. In the first phase, the government hopes, at least one member of the targeted 120,000 rural families will plant a medicinal or herbal sapling on Aug 3, which is being observed as “Van Mahotsava (plantation)” day, state Forest Minister J.P. Nadda told IANS.

The objective is to make the afforestation programme a mass movement in the state, which has 25.81 percent of its geographical area under forest cover, he added.

“Himachal Pradesh is in fact the first state in the country to take the initiative in combating climate change at the micro-level,” Nadda said.

The government would provide 1.4 million saplings of 57 species free of cost to the rural families.

“The species will be planted on the basis of the agro-climatic conditions of different areas,” the minister said.

After the Aug 3 drive, the forest department would carry out an afforestation programme over 20,000 hectares, Nadda said, adding that a compensatory afforestation programme would be launched later to cover 1,800 hectares in 37 selected blocks.

Referring to earlier plantation drives that focused on planting commercial species like pine and khair, the minister said the adverse impact of the pine forests on other fauna species was grave: they did not allow any other species to survive.

The acidic pine needles had also contributed to soil degradation in vast areas in the state, the minister said.

The latest report of the Forest Survey of India has revealed that the area of the state’s moderate dense forests (tree-cover ranging from 40 to 70 percent), which account for more than 50 percent of the total green cover, have decreased from 7,883 sq km to 7,831 sq km, a reduction of 52 sq km.

However, the area under very dense forests (tree-cover in excess of 70 percent) has marginally increased from 1,093 sq km to 1,097 sq km.

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