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Religious leaders and locals of this sleepy town are doing their bit to save the endangered fresh water dolphins found in the river Ganga.

Their efforts are bearing fruits as in the 165 km stretch of the Upper Ganga between Bijnor and Narora, the number of the endangered aquatic species is on the increase.

In 1993-94, the number of the dolphins (Platanista gangetica) in this stretch was just 20. However, with the intervention of the community and with help from World Wildlife Fund (WWF) experts, the count has doubled to around 40, including calves.

Sandeep Behera, freshwater programme coordinator from WWF calls the efforts an excellent example of community participation in aquatic species conservation.

Locals of Karnawas villagers have set up a sewage treatment plant to ensure that dirty water does not pollute the river and in turn wipe-out dolphins, Behera said to a news agency.

“Atleast 85 families of the village are using this treatment plant. We will soon set up another such plant, again without the help of government,” adds 25-year-old Himanshu Sharma, a local and volunteer with WWF.

Fishing activities are banned and so is mining. “In fact now farmers have stopped using chemical fertilisers and instead started using eco-friendly manure cow-dung on the agricultural land situated on the banks of the river,” Sharma says.

In yet another eco-friendly measure, farmers are being encouraged to set up vermi-composting units. Polythene is collected and then burnt at a safer place lest it choke the river, the activist adds.

However, Bahera stresses on efforts for long-term survival of the dolphins. “If not poaching then declining water level will take a toll on the conservation efforts,” he says.

River dolphins being deep water pool swimmers and hunters are facing the threat of extinction as the water level in the Ganga if falling due to siltation.

“Also, due to damming of the river, less quantity of water is being released from Tehri dam. The species are depending only on water from Ramganga river which is being released to meet the nearby Narora nuclear power plant,” Behera says.

Damming of the river has already isolated the dolphin population which are now concentrated either in extreme upper stream or lower stream of the river in the region.

Besides dolphins, the stretch is rich in other wildlife too having over 120 species of waterfowl, red-handed gulls and cranes on the islands and the grassy areas that lie along the banks of the river.

The dolphin which is protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, and the Convention on Migratory Species can grow as large as 2.7m in length and weighs up to 90kg having life span of around 30 years.

The Ganges River dolphin is among the four “obligate” freshwater dolphins found in the world. The other three are found in the Yangtze River in China, the Indus River in Pakistan and Amazon River in Latin America.

Although there are several species of marine dolphins whose ranges include some freshwater habitats, these four species live only in rivers and lakes and need extensive conservation efforts to prevent them from becoming extinct, says Behera.

Asian cities from New Delhi to Beijing are getting darker, glaciers on the mighty Himalayas are melting faster and weather system is getting more extreme, a United Nations study has warned.

This alarming phenomenon has also spread its dragnet to other cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangkok, Tehran, Cairo, Seoul, Karachi, Dhaka and Shanghai.

What common citizens perceived for long as an early onset of winter, is not so. The UN study now says this is the result of burning of fossil fuels and biomass, the Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), made of soot and other man-made particles, are more than three km-thick. The report compiled by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has said that the dimming is as much as between 10-25 per cent over cities like New Delhi, Karachi, Beijing and Shanghai.

But the worst hit appears to be the Chinese city of Guangzhou, where sunlight in winter had dimmed by more than 20 per cent since the 1970s.

For India as a whole, the dimming trend has been running at about two per cent per decade between 1960 and 2000 - more than doubling between 1980 and 2004, it adds.

In China the observed dimming trend from the 1950s to the 1990s was about 3 to 4 per cent per decade, with the larger trends after the 1970s, says the report.

It warns that the layer that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean, are in some cases and regions aggravating the impacts of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, a team of experts drawn from research centres in Asia, including China and India, said.

The study was conducted by the team drawn from research centres in Asia including India and China, Europe and the United States, announced their latest and most detailed assessment of the phenomenon.

The brown clouds, the toxic result of burning of fossil fuels and biomass, are in some cases and regions aggravating the impacts of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, the report stresses.

This is because ABCs lead to the formation of particles like black carbon and soot that absorb sunlight and heat the air; and gases such as ozone enhance the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.

Globally however, brown clouds may be countering or ‘masking’ the warming impacts of climate change by between 20 and up to 80 per cent, the researchers suggest.

The cloud is also affecting air quality and agriculture in Asia and increasing risks to human health and food production for three billion people.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UNEP, said, “I expect the Atmospheric Brown Cloud to be now firmly on the international community’s radar as a result of today’s report”.

The five regional hotspots for ABCs identified in the report includes the Indo-Gangetic plains in South Asia from the northwest and northeast regions of eastern Pakistan across India to Bangladesh and Myanmar, the UNEP said in a press statement.

New Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai feature in the list of 13 megacities where ABCs are reducing the sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface, making the cities “darker or dimmer”.

Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, head of the United Nations Environment’s scientific panel which is carrying out the research, said the report brings ever more clarity to the ABC phenomena and in doing so must trigger an international response.

“One of the most serious problems highlighted in the report is the documented retreat of the Hind Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the head-waters for most Asian rivers and thus have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia,” he said.

Scientists said there are also brown clouds elsewhereincluding over parts of North America, Europe, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin.

ABCs, says the report, can reduce sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface in two ways. Some of the particles such as sulphates, linked with burning coal and other fossil fuels, reflect and scatter rays back into space.

Others, also linked with fossil fuel and biomass burning, in particular black carbon in soot, absorb sunlight before it reaches the ground. The overall effect is to make ‘hot spot’ cities darker or dimmer.

The report says particles and aerosols in the ABCs may act to inhibit the formation of rain drops and rainfall. “The net effect is an extension of cloud life-times,” says the report.

ABCs shield the surface from sunlight by reflecting solar radiation back to space and by absorbing heat in the atmosphere. These two dimming phenomena can act to artificially cool the Earth’s surface especially during dry seasons. The pollution can also be transported around the world via winds in the upper troposphere.

The Planning Commission is considering a project to supply 350-million cubic feet of water per year to help protect the wetlands in Rajasthan’s Keoladeo National Park, a World Heritage Site that has been hit by recurrent water crises in the past.

The project is one of the many activities that have been drawn up to restore the park to its past glory, a senior official said.

Keoladeo’s wetlands attract migratory birds from Europe and Asia during winter. Birds from other parts of India also visit.

The Gobardhan drain, located 25 km from the sanctuary, will be linked via a canal to be dug under the project, estimated at Rs 640 million.

“Water from Gobardhan drain will supplement the current water supplies to the park. Alternatively, other sources are being explored to ensure continuous water supply,” Rajesh Gupta, assistant conservator of forests and research officer of the park, said.

“Around 550 billion cubic feet of water is required to sustain the park’s wetlands,” he said, adding: “The Planning Commission’s approval is due any time now.”

In the past, vast swatches of wetlands have been turning into woodlands due to water shortage. Ample rainfall this year has revitalised the wetlands again, attracting birds for nesting.

The park currently receives water from Pachna dam in the neighbouring Karauli district, some 120 km from the reserve.

“Water from the reservoir was supplied (to the park) twice this year between July 16-23 and Aug 9-23. About 80-90 percent of the water requirement has been met,” he said.

Spread across 29 sq km, Keoladeo’s sensitive wetland ecosystems need water to replenish.

Many birds have already assembled this year in the wetlands to spend the cold season.

An eco-development project that is now underway in the park would be expanded further to cover other activities.

Around 15-20 committees, involving local people, have been formed to undertake conservation projects.

People are engaged to uproot Prosopis zulifora, a plant species in the park that sucks in huge amounts of underground water, causing imbalance in the water table.

Seeds of these plants germinate in marshlands where water has dried. In submerged areas seeds die. The problem is more serious in dry season as winds help spread the seeds to other areas, Gupta said.

Efforts are also on to bring water to the park from the Chambal river through the Chiksana canal that will supply 60-75 million cubic feet of water.

Besides, the quantity of water from Gobardhan drain to the park can be increased in the future if required, he said.

The sanctuary was declared a National Park in 1981. Migratory birds like the Siberian crane, ruddy shelduck, red-crested pochard, marsh harrier, among others, come here during winter.

The intermingling of thousands of these birds on the wetlands makes for a spectacular site to behold.

A biologist has discovered a new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant in the Amazon rainforest, which is most likely a descendant of the very first ants to evolve.

The biologist in question is University of Texas at Austin evolutionary biologist Christian Rabeling.

The new ant is named Martialis heureka, which translates roughly to “ant from Mars,” because the ant has a combination of characteristics never before recorded.

It is adapted for dwelling in the soil, is two to three millimeters long, pale, and has no eyes and large mandibles, which Rabeling and colleagues suspect it uses to capture prey.

The ant also belongs to its own new subfamily, one of 21 subfamilies in ants. This is the first time that a new subfamily of ants with living species has been discovered since 1923.

According to Rabeling, his discovery will help biologists better understand the biodiversity and evolution of ants, which are abundant and ecologically important insects.

“This discovery hints at a wealth of species, possibly of great evolutionary importance, still hidden in the soils of the remaining rainforests,” said Rabeling and his co-authors.

Rabeling collected the only known specimen of the new ant species in 2003 from leaf-litter at the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária in Manaus, Brazil.

He and his colleagues found that the ant was a new species, genus and subfamily after morphological and genetic analysis.

Analysis of DNA from the ant’s legs confirmed its phylogenetic position at the very base of the ant evolutionary tree.

“This discovery lends support to the idea that blind subterranean predator ants arose at the dawn of ant evolution,” said Rabeling.

Though Rabeling does not suggest that the ancestor to all ants was blind and subterranean, these adaptations arose early and have persisted over the years.

“Based on our data and the fossil record, we assume that the ancestor of this ant was somewhat wasp-like, perhaps similar to the Cretaceous amber fossil Sphecomyrma, which is widely known as the evolutionary missing link between wasps and ants,” he said.

Rabeling speculates that the new ant species evolved adaptations over time to its subterranean habitat (for example, loss of eyes and pale body color), while retaining some of its ancestor’s physical characteristics.

“The new ant species is hidden in environmentally stable tropical soils with potentially less competition from other ants and in a relatively stable microclimate,” he said. “It could represent a ‘relict’ species that retained some ancestral morphological characteristics,” he added.

A team of Indian scientists have explained how carbon nanotubes could replace conventional materials in water-purification systems, which could be the answer to ensuring a safe supply of drinking water for regions of the world stricken by periodic drought or where water contamination is rife.

At present, more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion people lack access to proper sanitation, nearly all of them in the developing countries.

Also, currently, a third of the world’s population live in water-stressed countries, and by 2025, this is expected to rise to two-thirds.

S Kar, RC Bindal, S Prabhakar, PK Tewari, K Dasgupta, and D Sathiyamoorthy of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, India, have explained how new water purification technologies are constantly being investigated, but to be viable in the developing world, these have to be relatively simple and inexpensive to install, operate, and maintain.

They have turned to nanostructured, the carbon nanotubes, and hollow carbon fibers less than a billionth the thickness of a human hair.

The unique chemical properties of carbon nanotubes mean that only very small molecules, such as water molecules can pass along their interiors, whereas viruses, bacteria, toxic metal ions, and large noxious organic molecules cannot.

The team points out that the smooth and water repellant interior of carbon nanotubes means that a filter based on this technology would be very efficient, allowing a high flow rate of water through the filter without fouling.

Importantly, the power needed to drive water through such a system will be low compared to conventional membrane technology.

However, to be useful as a nanotech filtration system for contaminated water, these nanoscale structures needs to be engineered to form well-defined arrangements to allow the efficient decontamination of water.

The team has now investigated the potential of forming water filtration systems based on carbon nanotubes that could remove arsenic, fluoride, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals.

Carbon nanotubes have impressive credentials for water purification, according to the researchers.

Scientists working on to recreate forces that occurred immediately after the Big Bang, which created the world, have received death threats from critics who claim it could cause the end of the universe.

The experiment going inside a 27-kms tunnel deep beneath the French-Swiss border which is ready to fire up the biggest experiment in recent times on Wednesday hope to recapture conditions not seen since the birth of the universe almost 14 billion years ago, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The machine costing a staggering 4.4 billion pounds is located at Cern, a Geneva based nuclear research lab.

But now, some of the scientists working on the machine, including a Welsh miner’s son and a former pop star, have received threatening e-mails.

They have also been flooded by telephone calls from worried people who fear the experiments could trigger earthquakes and could cause mini black holes that would destroy the world.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will fire particles around the tunnel. It will then smash protons - one of the building blocks of matter - into each other at energies up to seven times greater than ever achieved.

Experts hope to find answers to some of the biggest questions in physics such as why the universe looks the way it does and how to explain mass, gravity and mysterious “dark matter”.

One of the leading figures behind the experiment is Dr Lynn Evans, the son of a miner, who said his fascination with science started as a boy, when he would create small explosions with his chemistry set at his council house in Aberdare.

Another is Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, who also said that the team members have received death threats.

maybe its because they are getting such ludicrous information from so many ridiculous sources? Some say its because of Al Gore. Some say the sun is cooling. Some say the Sun is warming. Some say its natural. Some say there isn’t enough CO2 in the atmosphere to compare with the other gases. Some say that CO2 isn’t a Greenhouse Gas. Some say we are going in an ice age. And it goes on and on and on…

It seems that scientists can agree on what causes global warming, so why isn’t there a consistent and solid arguement against it?

 

Actually, I don’t have a problem in multiple counter-arguments when dealing with such a complex and diverse subject as AGW. In fact, I would expect to see different arguments in a true debate.

For example, suggesting that the AGW is false because solar radiation is responsible is a valid counter-argument. So valid, of course, that AGW proponents looked at it seriously, evaluated the data and have been able to say, ‘nope, it ain’t that!’

Fact is, you want a lot of different arguments made against any hypothesis: It is by surviving that questioning that a hypothesis becomes a robust theory and more complete as the advocates are forced to fine tune and adjust the theory to answer the questions.

I would love to believe that the sceptics are putting up objections in the spirit of pure science and of furthering the pursuit of truth but unfortunately, the motive for the variety of counter arguments is, in most cases (but not all - there are a few good thinkers out there in scepticland!) - closer to what Dana says.
The support for that is the lack of clear thinking, lack of counter research or facts and the plain weirdness of the counter claims.

Edit to idoni…
This is another case of putting incorrect words into my mouth - I do wish you sceptics would stop doing that!

For the record:
I am an AGW “believer” but:
- I do NOT think AGW is caused by oil companies
- I do NOT think AGW is caused by Bush
- I do NOT think AGW is caused by Republicans
- I do NOT think AGW is caused by people who don’t recycle
Although I DO think that these people - in general - there are some generalisations here - are not doing all they could to help alleviate the problem.

And I do NOT wear a shirt saying “green is the new black” but even if I did, does wearing a shirt with a slogan trivialise an issue? Can we say that breast cancer is not ’serious’ because some women wear “I am a survivor” t-shirts or that war is a casual thing not to be worried about because people wore “make love not war” t-shirts or that Nelson Mandela is irrelevant because people wore “Free Nelson Mandela” shirts, etc, etc…

Please, if you want to refute an argument, use a less petty example.

And to WYSIWYG
None of your links work - looks impressive but, like most sceptic responses, it is all style, no substance!

As for the rest of your rant, it’s just that - a rant, unsubstantiated, unexplained and false. For example, people have “done the math” which is where we get the forecasts for global temperature rise, sea level rise, etc.

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Because they’re wrong. They’re using the core dump strategy.

A core dump is when you’re taking a science test and reach a question that you can’t answer, but you see a key term in the question. So you dump out all the information you know about that key term, hoping you’ll have some useful information there and get a few points.

Global warming ’skeptics’ dump out every argument they can find against man-made global warming, hoping they’ll either hit on a valid point or simply create enough confusion that people will be unconvinced by the theory. They’re not really expecting to disprove the theory, they’re just trying to score a few points and delay action.

So you ask them ‘okay why don’t you believe the theory?’ and they don’t have a valid reason, so they dump out ‘Al Gore/sunspots/Mars/water vapor/cow farts/soda pop/Roy Spencer/consensus isn’t science/conspiracy theories/Galileo/etc.’ Just whatever they can find on the internet in the hopes of convincing people that the science isn’t settled.

What are some reasons why we need to conserve plastic bags?

 

We shouldn’t use them at all. We have some great other choices. We can use hemp bags, organic cotton, or even paper (I know trees have to make these but we can plant a tree, it is better than plastic) You can save some of the ones you have and use them as doggie poo bags, that is what I do, at least the bag has been used twice and I don’t need to buy more plastic bags for the doggie.
I can only figure that making the plastic bag is toxic and so if we reduce the number we use not as many bags will be made and that will reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in the air.

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well actually we shouldnt use them at all.
they are very wasteful on the enviroment and almost always end up in a landfill or in the ocean( which people are now using as another type of trash dump) unless people decide to recycle them which that process also has trash.

The green bags that you see at stores such as wal mart and target are great and we use tham all the time.
they hold more and it helps the enviroment.

Ok I work at a public library and I discard all of the old books out of the system. Usually when I do this I PRINT out the 1 page record, so that I can go back into a different program and delete it. Two different programs, one to delete it out of the card catalog, and one to delete it out of the entire system. Ok, to save paper, my boss wants me to WRITE down the # on the pocket page instead of printing it out. Thats all fine and good, but clicking print is 3x faster, and it’s easier to read when I go back into the system to delete it. So, Americas tax dollars are paying me to do something I could easily do in about 15 hours, but will now take me about 25-30 hours. I’m probably saving about 300 sheets of paper a week, or roughly 1 pack. 1 pack. 1 pack of paper, twice as long to do the work. Your tax dollars are paying for it. I can’t change the situation, but was just wondering how YOU as tax payers feel about this. Is 1 pack of paper WORTH it ?

 

You forgot something in your figures….how much electricity, water, and fuel did it take to get the tree from where it was growing, logged it, trasport it, process it into paper, trasport the paper to the stores, have someone from the library pick up the office supplies?

Once you figure in all the above costs, it DOES make it ever so much more economical for you to write the number out.

What I’m wondering is why you cannot have multiple screens open on your computer at once? Can you not cut and paste the number, title, author of the book onto another sheet in a program like Word Perfect, or Word Pad, and then print that single page out at the end of the day?

That would be the best of both worlds. Everything would be neat, clean, and clear. It would use less paper than a human writing out the numbers, since most humans can not print as neatly and small as a computer can print, AND it would speed things up.

So you are saving all the energy used to produce those 300 sheets of paper, AND saving the tax payer money, because you should be able to perform this job function in a very speedy way.

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It depends upon your work load, and what isn’t being done while you’re doing the more time consuming method.

As a public employee, I can tell you that my department is overstaffed most of the time, as evidenced by the amount of solitaire and web surfing that gets done.

If we REALLY had to, we could get by with less.

Can you not cut and paste the info to a word doc and print that out? I do that kind of thing all the time.

What pisses me off as a tax payer is bureaucracy, and the resulting people with little business experience in charge of making business decisions with my money, like there is an unending supply, and they have no idea how to accurately compute real data on which to base their decisions. That an the idea that the answer is either “a” or “b” without making the effort of looking for a c, d, or e.

Apparently this is already being done as sewage sludge is processed into pellets.

“Toronto currently turns only a small amount of its sludge into fertilizer pellets but has plans to increase that to about half.”

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ontario/arti…

 

At least two cities sell it in bags — Milorganite and Philorganic, from Milwaukee (WI) and Philadelpia (PA), respectively. It is not recommended for use on food crops. In addition, some places dispose of secondary effluent by spraying it on land, mostly in forested areas. The effluent boosts growth dramatically, either from the organic fertilizer or just from the added water. This sort of disposal acts similar to tertiary sewage treatment, purifying whatever water makes it to the streams or aquifers.

This is nothing new, people are just afraid of the contaminants in the sludge. Things like pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, and other toxins may be present. But for non-food applications it’s generally considered safe.