Swacch Bharat and the Holy Views' Paper

When  this scheme - Swacch Bharat/Clean India' was launched on the October the 2nd 2014, the holy views paper made her readers' write, ' Why what would be the duty of the corporation workers?, How can all employees leave their jobs and go sweeping the public places? First of let his heart be removed of the dirt and then let him clean the garbage'.

This is the attitude of the paper when around 50% of the population (Just 650 million)  has got no toilets to use and 60% of the schools have no toilets. Relieving in public is the order of the day. Thanks to the arrival of Pepsi and Coke we got plastic bottles to take water to wash off the sins on the sides of the 65000 kms of rail network. Nothing moves this views' paper. 


Today I read ,"The Bombay High Court on Wednesday criticised the Maharashtra governmentfor failing to put an end to the practice of manual scavengers at Pandharpur in Solapur district despite the Chief Minister visiting the pilgrimage city every year for a function.

A division bench headed by Justice AS Oka was hearing a public interest litigation filed by Campaign Against Manual Scavenging which alleged that the inhuman practice of manually collecting human excreta continued even today as the number of toilets was very less in Pandharpur which is visited by lakhs of pilgrims during the Ekadashi festival every year.

The court has several times in the past expressed its anguish on the issue and the apathy by the state government to address the problem.

"Every year the state Chief Minister and several senior bureaucrats visit the city to perform puja on behalf of the government. And still the government could not put an end to manual scavenging," Justice Oka said.

The court also came down heavily on the devotees who visit Pandharpur during the festival. A group of devotees had earlier approached the court seeking permission to conduct puja on the river bed there.

The devotees had said that it was their fundamental right to practice their religion. The court on Wednesday, however, told the devotees that it was also their fundamental duty to keep their environment clean and non-polluted.
The court said that rivers and lakes are the wealth of the nation and not property of the devotees.

In October 2009, the Pandharpur Municipal Council had forwarded a proposal of Rs 21 crore to the government seeking to construct 5321 mobile toilets in the city. However, till date no decision has been taken, the court was informed. Last year, the government assured the court that about 4500 toilets would be constructed there."

Source :http://www.dnaindia.com/

IPCC Report

31 March 2014 – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today issued a report saying the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents and across the oceans. The world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate. The report also concludes that there are opportunities to respond to such risks, though the risks will be difficult to manage with high levels of warming.

The report, titled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, from Working Group II of the IPCC, details the impacts of climate change to date, the future risks from a changing climate, and the opportunities for effective action to reduce risks. A total of 309 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and review editors, drawn from 70 countries, were selected to produce the report. They enlisted the help of 436 contributing authors, and a total of 1,729 expert and government reviewers.

The report concludes that responding to climate change involves making choices about risks in a changing world. The nature of the risks of climate change is increasingly clear, though climate change will also continue to produce surprises. The report identifies vulnerable people, industries, and ecosystems around the world. It finds that risk from a changing climate comes from vulnerability (lack of preparedness) and exposure (people or assets in harm’s way) overlapping with hazards (triggering climate events or trends). Each of these three components can be a target for smart actions to decrease risk.

“We live in an era of man-made climate change,” said Vicente Barros, Co-Chair of Working Group II. “In many cases, we are not prepared for the climate-related risks that we already face. Investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future.”

Adaptation to reduce the risks from a changing climate is now starting to occur, but with a stronger focus on reacting to past events than on preparing for a changing future, according to Chris Field, Co-Chair of Working Group II.

“Climate-change adaptation is not an exotic agenda that has never been tried. Governments, firms, and communities around the world are building experience with adaptation,” Field said. “This experience forms a starting point for bolder, more ambitious adaptations that will be important as climate and society continue to change.”

Future risks from a changing climate depend strongly on the amount of future climate change. Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe and pervasive impacts that may be surprising or irreversible.

“With high levels of warming that result from continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, risks will be challenging to manage, and even serious, sustained investments in adaptation will face limits,” said Field.

Observed impacts of climate change have already affected agriculture, human health, ecosystems on land and in the oceans, water supplies, and some people’s livelihoods. The striking feature of observed impacts is that they are occurring from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the wealthiest countries to the poorest.

“The report concludes that people, societies, and ecosystems are vulnerable around the world, but with different vulnerability in different places. Climate change often interacts with other stresses to increase risk,” Field said.

Adaptation can play a key role in decreasing these risks, Barros noted. “Part of the reason
adaptation is so important is that the world faces a host of risks from climate change already baked into the climate system, due to past emissions and existing infrastructure,” said Barros.

Field added: “Understanding that climate change is a challenge in managing risk opens a wide range of opportunities for integrating adaptation with economic and social development and with initiatives to limit future warming. We definitely face challenges, but understanding those challenges and tackling them creatively can make climate-change adaptation an important way to help build a more vibrant world in the near-term and beyond.”

An Increase or Decrease of 2 Degree Temperature can Cause Havoc on this Planet

21st century ‘hottest’ on record as global warming continues – UN

Devastating weather patterns and increasing temperatures will last into the foreseeable future as global warming is expected to continue, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed today as it explained that 2014’s ranking as the “hottest year on record” is part of a larger climate trend.

“The overall warming trend is more important than the ranking of an individual year,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud clarified today in a press release. “Analysis of the datasets indicates that 2014 was nominally the warmest on record, although there is very little difference between the three hottest years.”

High sea temperatures, the UN agency has said, have contributed to exceptionally heavy rainfall and floods in many countries and extreme drought in others. Twelve major Atlantic storms battered the United Kingdom in early months of 2014, while floods devastated much of the Balkans throughout May. The monthly precipitation over the Pacific side of western Japan for August 2014, meanwhile, was 301 per cent above normal – the highest since area-averaged statistics began in 1946.

At the same time, crippling droughts have struck large swathes of the continental United States while Northeast China and parts of the Yellow River basin did not reach half of the summer average, causing severe drought.

The diverse climate impact which afflicted nations around the planet throughout 2014 were, in fact, consistent with the expectation of a changing climate, Mr. Jarraud continued.

In addition, he warned that 14 of the 15 hottest years recorded have all been in the 21st century, adding the UN agency’s expectation that global warming would continue “given that rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the increasing heat content of the oceans are committing us to a warmer future.”

Around 93 per cent of the excess energy trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and other human activities ends up in the oceans, the WMO press release noted, as it pointed out that global sea-surface temperatures had reached “record levels” in 2014, even in the absence of a “fully developed El Niño” weather pattern. High temperatures in 1998 – the hottest year before the 21st century – occurred during a strong El Niño year.

The WMO has released its latest findings regarding its global temperature analysis in advance of climate change negotiations scheduled to be held in Geneva from 8 to 13 February. These talks are expected to help pave the way towards the December 2015 conference scheduled in Paris, France, where a new universal UN-backed treaty on climate change will be adopted.

via UN News Centre

Climate Change 2015

As Kyoto Protocol turns 10, UN says ‘first critical step’ must trigger new 2015 emissions-curbing deal

As momentum builds towards negotiations in Paris next year on a universal climate agreement, the United Nations announced today that early analysis shows that countries with targets under the landmark Kyoto Protocol – the world’s first emission reduction treaty – have collectively exceeded their original ambition.

According to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), those countries who took on targets under the treaty have reduced their emissions by over 20 per cent – well in excess of the 5 per cent target they aimed to meet.

The achievement, which comes as the world today marks the 10th anniversary of the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, underlines what can be achieved via international cooperative action.

The news also comes as countries meeting in Geneva last week produced negotiating text for a successor climate change agreement that is excepted to be approved later this year in Paris – the next key chapter in humanity’s quest to chart a defining path to keep the world and its people under a 2 degree C temperature rise.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC said: “The Kyoto Protocol was a remarkable achievement in many ways. It not only underscored the scientific reality that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall. But it also put in place pioneering concepts, flexible options, practical solutions and procedures for accountability that we often take for granted today”.

Continuing, Ms. Figueres said she is convinced that without the treaty and its various mechanisms “we would not be as far forward as we are today in respect to, for example, the growing penetration of renewable energies.” The Kyoto Protocol’s vision also helped spawn new and innovative initiatives like supporting developing countries to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, she added.

“The Kyoto Protocol was the first critical step – today we must take further and more far reaching action towards a truly sustainable future for seven billion, rising to over nine billion, people. Despite our best efforts, greenhouse gases continue to rise, threatening sustainable development and putting millions if not billions of people at risk over the coming decades, “said Ms. Figueres.

As such, the Paris agreement of December 2015 would bring all nations into common cause in support of men, women and children everywhere.

“It needs to be a long term, paradigm shift that reflects today’s scientific reality – one that speaks to the urgency of swiftly peaking global greenhouse gas emissions, triggering a deep de-carbonization of the global economy and achieving climate neutrality in the second half of the century,” she added.

The Protocol, an international agreement under the UNFCCC, was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005.

During its first commitment period, from 2008 to 2012, 37 industrialized countries and the European Community committed to take a leading role in climate action by reducing their emissions to an average of just over five percent against 1990 levels.

The UNFCCC secretariat is expected to complete final accounting for the first phase later this year or early next year.

“Paris will not solve climate change at a pen stroke. But similarly it must trigger a world-wide over-achievement and a clear sense of direction that can restore the natural balance of emissions on planet Earth,” said Ms. Figueres.

via UN News Centre

The Largest Mammals on Land

African elephants are the largest land animals on Earth. They are slightly larger than their Asian cousins and can be identified by their larger ears that look somewhat like the continent of Africa. (Asian elephants have smaller, rounded ears.)

Elephant ears radiate heat to help keep these large animals cool, but sometimes the African heat is too much. Elephants are fond of water and enjoy showering by sucking water into their trunks and spraying it all over themselves. Afterwards, they often spray their skin with a protective coating of dust.

An elephant's trunk is actually a long nose used for smelling, breathing, trumpeting, drinking, and also for grabbing things—especially a potential meal. The trunk alone contains about 100,000 different muscles. African elephants have two fingerlike features on the end of their trunk that they can use to grab small items. (Asian elephants have one.)

Both male and female African elephants have tusks they use to dig for food and water and strip bark from trees. Males use the tusks to battle one another, but the ivory has also attracted violence of a far more dangerous sort.

Because ivory is so valuable to some humans, many elephants have been killed for their tusks. This trade is illegal today, but it has not been completely eliminated, and some African elephant populations remain endangered.

Elephants eat roots, grasses, fruit, and bark, and they eat a lot of these things. An adult elephant can consume up to 300 pounds (136 kilograms) of food in a single day.

These hungry animals do not sleep much, and they roam over great distances while foraging for the large quantities of food that they require to sustain their massive bodies.

Female elephants (cows) live in family herds with their young, but adult males (bulls) tend to roam on their own.

Having a baby elephant is a serious commitment. Elephants have a longer pregnancy than any other mammal—almost 22 months. Cows usually give birth to one calf every two to four years. At birth, elephants already weigh some 200 pounds (91 kilograms) and stand about 3 feet (1 meter) tall.

African elephants, unlike their Asian relatives, are not easily domesticated. They range throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the rain forests of central and West Africa. The continent’s northernmost elephants are found in Mali’s Sahel desert. The small, nomadic herd of Mali elephants migrates in a circular route through the desert in search of water.

Source: National Geographic

Influenza

Swine influenza in humans

Most swine influenza viruses (SIVs) do not cause disease in humans. However, some countries have reported cases of human infection with SIVs. Most of these human infections have been mild and the viruses have not spread further to other people. The H1N1 virus that caused the influenza pandemic in 2009-2010, thought to have originated in swine, is an example of an SIV that was able to spread easily among people and also cause disease.

Because pigs can become infected with influenza viruses from a variety of different hosts (such as birds and humans), they can act as a "mixing vessel," facilitating the reassortment of influenza genes from different viruses and creating a "new" influenza virus. The concern is that such "new" reassortant viruses may be more easily spread from person to person, or may cause more severe disease in humans than the original viruses. WHO and animal health sector partners are working at the human-animal interface to identify and reduce animal health and public health risks within national contexts.

Trash or Treasure

From a problem of scarcity, it is the problem of plenty today. Every city in the world is producing a hill nearby it- made up of plastic, e-waste, glass, toxic chemicals and of course the food and vegetable waste. The market economy forces, entices people to go for more and  more and more. In the earlier days people used to have just two or three pairs of dresses. In the traditional India, we used to go to rivers or ponds or wells and would be washing the previous day clothes and wear the ones washed and  dried up the previous day. The dirt collected in the pond would be settling down as sediments and the farmers would be using them as reinforcements for their farm lands. Every year this routine would be there. And the water bodies get cleaned.

Today each one of us has got a minimum of 20-100 pairs of dresses and the women folk store even 500- 1000 sarees or other dress items. Somebody has invented the term 'shopping' and people proudly use the term even as they return from a shop after purchasing a pocket of table salt.   I think 'purchasing' is different from 'shopping' in Indian context. The people who use the earlier ones have got a need for the things they have purchased. But the shoppingwalahs are for fun and mirth.


Every trip a trash

People reenter them homes after every time they go outside with a big shopping bag. This has to be avoided. It is not their affordability and the products' availability but the earth's capability to bear this stress that matters. 


Some tips yet again to save our planet from trash

• Don't open your wallet and swipe your cards unless it is absolutely essential.
• Don't buy or keep more than 10 sets of dresses in your wardrobe
• Gift the habit of gifting for the sake of this planet as every one is in possession of everything in plenty. If you want gift 'LOVE'.
• Plan your food habits in such a way that reduces your time in the kitchen
• Go for boiled or fresh foods and simply you take food once in a day that has n't seen the gas stove/oven
• Step out with a jute or cloth bag and say no to the offer of poly packs.
• Do not get attracted by the packaging and buy products
• Do not believe in the success of stories of billionaires who are handful and learn from the success stories of ordinary men and women who lead a contented life
• Be contented with what you have and not to crave to climb on the so called 'success ladder'.
• Success has to be measured in wealth means the greatest men of modern times Mahatma, Lincoln, Teresa, Abdul Kalam and others would be considered a failure
• Possess thirst for knowledge and not money and materials
• Prefer containers for liquid items and say a big NO to sachets
• Buy products like TV  Refriegerator and ensure that the company takes back the packaging materials back.

People who do matter

Do not  create an impression in the minds of the rural folk that every one is in heaven whoever resides in a city

Telecast the sufferings of the poor, homeless and the jobless in a city and ways to live happily in a village