India will launch a national programme on black carbon on December 15. Environment minister Jairam Ramesh said the programme will cover measurement, monitoring and modeling for black carbon but ruled out India agreeing for inclusion of black carbon into the framework of UN climate talks. "Our position on the issue is clear. We are starting the programme on black carbon as it is a health issue more than environment issue for us," he told reporters on Tuesday. The Indian black carbon project will be a joint venture of India and foreign scientists and it will also recommend measures to reduce black carbon emissions, whose primarily source is kerosene stoves. India has also thwarted the move of United States and European Union to move hydroflourocarbons (HFCs) out of Kyoto Protocol and into the Montreal Protocol, which governs ozone-depleting substances. The HFC, a climate change causing gas, is a by-product of ozone depleting substance. The move would have hit five Indian companies, who own half of the world's carbon credits earned by reducing HFC emissions and have earned over US $ 300 million dollars so far.  "HFC is a green house gas and it should remain so," Ramesh said, after meeting US and European negotiators on the issue.   Is food security sustainable under global climate change? Since roughly 2000, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing from stockpiles, in 2007 the reserves fell to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record. According to the great 18th century British scholar, Robert Malthus, while human population increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, agricultural production increases arithmetically, much more slowly. In 1943 as many as four million people died in the "Malthusian correction" known as the Bengal Famine. For the following two decades, India had to import millions of tons of grain to feed its people. Consequently a group of international agricultural research centers helped to produce more than double the world's average yields of corn, rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, an achievement called "the green revolution”. It is very important to note that the "green revolution” could out-produce the prior wheat cultivars as long as there was plenty of water and synthetic fertilizer and minimal impacts from diseases and insects and competition from weeds. To that end, for example, the Indian government subsidized canals, fertilizer availability, and the drilling of tube wells for irrigation and gave farmers free electricity to pump the water. Today, the miracle of the green revolution is over in northern India: yield has essentially flattened since the mid-1990s. Over-irrigation has led to steep drops in the water table, now tapped by 1.3 million tube wells, while thousands of hectares of productive land have been lost due to salinity and water-logging. Forty years of intensive irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides have not been kind to the loamy gray fields of Punjab, India, nor, in some cases, to the people themselves. Still there are some that believe that these problems are due to the abuse of the land management practices for gaining increased crop yields. Nevertheless, with world population rapidly increasing toward nine billion by the mid-21st century, there is a need for doubling the level of current food production by 2030. Virtually all our knowledge of the effects of global climate change on crop production and yield is based on studies that involve the impact of one variable at a time, although that has little resemblance to the real world conditions as described in the previous section (#2). In principle, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will stimulate plant biomass production and yield, particularly in C3 plants (mostly vegetation from the temperate climate, e.g., wheat). For decades artificial exposure to elevated levels of carbon dioxide has been used to produce intensively managed high yielding horticultural crops in greenhouses. Plant uptake of increasing levels of carbon dioxide is dependent on the availability of more nitrogen. The impact of excess nitrogen on surface waters and hypoxia has been mentioned previously. In addition excess atmospheric deposition of nitrogen is known to change native, perennial plant community structure and biodiversity by favoring nitrogen-loving species and suppressing others. Where carbohydrate to protein ratio is not balanced, the excess carbon assimilated by the plant will be converted to unwanted starch. That has implications in disease and pest incidence. For example, insects will have to feed on more foliage to obtain the required protein levels or migrate to new species that do not accumulate starch, C4 plants (mostly vegetation from the tropical climate, e.g., corn, that do not respond to elevated carbon dioxide levels, as much as the C3 plants do). While increasing carbon dioxide concentrations can stimulate crop production, it should be remembered that any increases in the levels of surface ultraviolet radiation and ozone would counteract that beneficial effect. A predominant number of studies show that the negative effects of elevated surface level ozone offset the stimulatory effect of carbon dioxide. In addition to the direct effects of trace gases on crops, greenhouse gas-induced increases in air temperatures will have a significant effect. There is evidence to show that night-time increases in temperature has an impact on flowering and seed filling in cereals and on blast disease incidence in rice. Increases in air temperature will affect precipitation patterns. C4 (tropical plant species) are adapted for heat and water limitation (drought). Thus, the soybean growing regions of the Midwestern United states might shift to the cultivation of sorghum. Similarly, warmer spring and fall will prolong the growth season, but induce rapid crop growth and early maturity, thus resulting in decreased yields. Two billion people (one third the global population) already live in the driest parts of the globe, and climate change is projected to slash yields in these regions even further. No matter how great their yield potential, plants still need water to grow. And in the not too distant future, every year could be a drought year for much of the world. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), by 2025 availability of fresh water supply will be the single largest limiting factor affecting global population. Conclusions In the final analysis, global climate change is much more complicated than simply global warming.  The interactive effects of the multiple climate variables and their impacts on crop production preclude deterministic or definitive predictions. The associated uncertainties are too large and must be assessed at local scales. More recently, due to the demand for alternative sources of energy, the use of cropping systems has been diverted from food to the production of bio-fuels such as ethanol. As more grain has been diverted to the production of bio-fuels for vehicles, annual worldwide consumption of grain has risen from 815 million metric tons in 1960 to 2.16 billion in 2008. Since 2005, the mad rush to bio-fuels alone has pushed the growth of grain consumption from about 20 million tons annually to 50 million tons, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Recent climate studies show that extreme heat waves are very likely to become common in the tropics and subtropics by the end of the century. Himalayan glaciers that now provide water for hundreds of millions of people, livestock, and farmland in China and India are melting faster than expected. In the worst-case scenario, yields for some grain crops could decline by 10 to 15% in South Asia by 2030. Projections for southern Africa are worse. In a region already racked by water scarcity and food insecurity, the all-important corn harvest could drop by 30 to 47%.  Meanwhile the population clock keeps going, with 2.5 more children being born every second (National Geographic, December 2009). *

courtesy- Newsletter of ISEB India.

Leh: At least 85 people were killed and many others went missing after heavy downpour triggered flash floods devastating Leh in the Ladakh region.

85 bodies have been recovered from the flooded areas, J and K Director General of Police Kuldeep Khoda said. Among the dead were three jawans of the Army Service Corps.

"At least 350 people are in the army hospital with injuries. And many more people are trapped under houses and buildings that have collapsed.He said a massive rescue operation was underway involving the state police, paramilitary forces and the army in Leh town.

According to sources, the cloudburst happened between 12.30 and 1.00 am on Friday.

The BSNL network was completely damaged, besides the runway of the Leh airport, cutting off the town from the rest of the country.

The district hospital and two buildings housing offices of the Union Home Ministry were also affected.

Five villages have been hit in the sudden downpour and flashfloods. These included Choglumsar and Shapoo. Old Leh city was among the worst affected. The main bus stand was flattened.

Leh is located at a height of 11,500 feet above sea level, 424 kilometres from Srinagar. The worst hit was Choglumsar area, 13 kms from here, where 14 bodies were recovered, officials said.

Khoda said the toll may go up. "The actual damage will be known only after the water receded," another senior official said.

A polytechnic college, headquarters of the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) camp, many government offices and houses have been damaged. The Leh airport has been inundated.

Prof. Shakeel Romshoo, a geologist at Srinagar University, said new rivulets had cut deep channels in the mountain gorges of the region and flood waters had inundated low-lying areas.

"It's a challenging topography with steep and unstable slopes. Water flow and velocity being very high, the flash floods have caused huge damage," he said.

"Mud and water is everywhere," said Kashmiri businessman Kausar Makhdoomi, who was on holiday in Leh.

Makhdoomi said the rainfall started before midnight and that water later started coursing down the area's mountains in streams and rivulets. The flooding had damaged several homes and other buildings by Friday morning, he said.

"There was utter confusion and people started to panic," he said.

As many as 6,000 army men, and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and police personnel have launched a massive relief and rescue operation.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, while expressing grief over the tragedy, has directed the civil and police administration to undertake relief and rescue work on a war footing.

All flights from Delhi to Leh have been cancelled.

(With PTI, IANS and AP inputs)

In a paper appearing May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Yangyang Xu, climate researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, have identified three avenues by which those countries can avoid reaching the warming threshold, a point beyond which many scientists believe climate change will present unmanageable negative consequences for society.

"Without an integrated approach that combines CO₂ emission reductions with reductions in other climate warmers and climate-neutral air-pollution laws, we are certain to pass the 2-degree C and likely reach a 4 degree C threshold during this century," said Ramanathan. "Fortunately there is still time to avert unmanageable climate changes, but we must act now."

Using a synthesis of National Science Foundation-funded research performed over the last 20 years, Ramanathan and Xu describe three steps that must be taken simultaneously to avoid the threshold, stressing that carbon dioxide control alone is not sufficient.

Recommended steps include stabilizing CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, and fashioning warming-neutral pollution laws that will balance the removal of aerosols that have an atmospheric cooling effect with the removal of warming agents such as soot and ozone. Finally, the authors advocate achieving reductions in methane, hydrofluorocarbons and other greenhouse gases that remain in the atmosphere for short periods of time. The authors write that aggressive simultaneous pursuit of these strategies could reduce the probability of reaching the temperature threshold to less than 10 percent before the year 2050.

"By taking a comprehensive look at human induced climate change, this paper clearly separates the global actions which must be undertaken simultaneously -- and how quickly these actions must be taken," said Larry Smarr, founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and a collaborator with Ramanathan on CO₂ reduction strategies. "This paper should be required reading for all policy makers."

The 2-degree C global temperature increase limit translates to a radiant energy increase of 2.5 watts per square meter. Ramanathan and Xu note that even if greenhouse gas emissions stop increasing in the next five years, human activities will probably create almost double that much radiant energy, which is compensated partially by the masking effect of certain kinds of aerosols that are produced in large part by pollution. Tiny particles of sulfates and other pollutants serve to cool the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight rather than absorbing it, directing heat away from the earth's surface. Therefore, the authors argue, pollution control measures must take into account and counterbalance the warming that will happen when certain types of pollutants are removed from the skies.

Ramanathan and Xu acknowledge that there are uncertainties about the nature of aerosols and the sensitivity of climate to mitigation actions that make the effects of their suggested course of action hard to determine with precision. They propose demonstration projects to clarify and reduce the uncertainties and verify the efficacies of the various mitigation avenues proposed in the study. The authors add that trends in energy added to the oceans would respond to mitigation actions even before 2050, making them an important diagnostic tool that can gauge the success of mitigation within 20 years.

Supporters of the so-called Copenhagen Accord agreed that the 2-degree C threshold must not be crossed, but the United Nations-sponsored conference did not produce hoped-for binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Scientists have suggested that exceeding that temperature threshold would trigger irreversible phenomena such as widespread release of methane from melting permafrost and large-scale glacial melt, both of which scenarios would exacerbate climate change-related problems such as sea-level rise and acceleration of global warming.

Avoiding the threshold requires holding carbon dioxide levels to less than 441 parts per million, according to the authors, only slightly higher than today's value of 389 ppm. This equates to a 50-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and an 80-percent reduction by 2100. Ramanathan and Xu acknowledge that such drastic reduction will require a "portfolio of actions in the energy, industrial, agricultural and forestry sections." Some of these actions will require development of new technologies.

"A massive decarbonization of the energy sector is necessary to accomplish this Herculean task," the authors write.

But the strategies not focused on CO₂ reduction can largely take advantage of existing technologies and more aggressive enforcement of existing regulations. Actions that can be taken immediately include replacement of biomass-fueled stoves with cleaner alternatives in developing countries and retrofitting of diesel filters on vehicles throughout the world.

"The 'low-hanging fruits' approach to one of mankind's great challenges is very appealing because it is a win-win approach," said Jay Fein, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funds much of Ramanathan's research. "It cleans up the environment, protects human health and helps to sustain the 2-degree C threshold."

The authors also point out that the world has already succeeded before in removing dangerous warming agents. The 1987 Montreal Protocol regulated the use of chlorofluorocarbons and the damaging effect of the chemicals on the planet's ozone layer was diminished. Ramanathan and Xu note that were it not for the Montreal Protocol, the warming effect of chlorofluorocarbons would have added between 0.6 and 1.6 watts per square meter of extra heat energy by now.

Courtesy : Science daily