sharpeye

Our  Independence Day By Dr. Arvind Kumar  15th August marks the completion of 65 th years of emergence of India as an independent sovereign nation. It is both an occasion of celebrations as well as that of introspection to ascertain as to where we have missed the train. Undoubtedly, much progress has been registered in many fields, but our failures outweigh our achievements. We celebrate our independence day with the usual exuberance that has seemingly lost much of its meaning and the rhetoric which has also lost much of its sheen. Admittedly, it is an occasion that makes every Indian proud of being free from the servility of the imperial power that ruled us for about three centuries. However, there are several unanswered questions that make us uneasy and squirm as we happily move on mouthing platitudes of having attained independence. On the eve of India's first Independence Day, Mahatma Gandhi had refused to attend the celebrations at Red Fort and instea...

More Heatwaves Likely By Dr Arvind Kumar According to a new statistical analysis recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a recent rise in deadly, debilitating, and expensive heatwaves was caused by climate change. This analysis reveals that extreme heatwaves have increased by at least 50 times during the last three decades. The researchers associated with this analysis, including James Hansen of NASA, conclude that climate change is the only explanation for such a statistical jump. James Hansen, a prominent scientist and outspoken climate change activist, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post recently: "This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked ...

Hiroshima To Fukushima By Dr Arvind Kumar A ugust 6th, the anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit. The Hiroshima tragedy was a catastrophe which brought to the world the birth of atomic weapons. This nuclear tragedy did not teach the world to stop all the nuclear production. Rather the opposite: the super powers and other small states moved to produce and engage in nuclear weapons’ production, proliferation. At the same time, this Hiroshima catastrophe was a big obstacle to any use of any atomic bombs, during all the Cold War years. Hiroshima kept the entire world wild awake during the Cold War period, to prevent any use of nuclear weapons again. And it has never been used again. The end of the Cold War set the entire world free from t...

Future Air Pollution By Dr Arvind Kumar According to a recently published study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics , an Open Access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), it has been reported that air pollution is a major health risk that may worsen with increasing industrial activity. At present, urban outdoor air pollution causes 1.3 million estimated deaths per year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. It is further revealed that most of the world's population will be subject to degraded air quality by 2050 if human-made emissions continue as usual. In this business-as-usual scenario, the average world citizen four decades from now will experience similar air pollution to that of today's average East Asian citizen. The researchers applied a multi pollutant index (MPI), suited for global model output to identify possible future hot spots of poor air quality. It appears that East and South Asia and the Middle East represent such hotsp...

Sustainable Consumption By Dr Arvind Kumar The following warning signal came from World Widelife Fund’s 2008 report on ‘Living Planet’: “The earth is running out of natural resources like land, water and minerals so quickly that if nothing is done, some predictions say that by 2030 humankind will need the equivalent of two planets to sustain our current lifestyle.” It seems that over the past four this warning has remained unheeded. At this juncture it is worth noting as to what exactly can be done to reduce environmental impact – which has got further worsened – and how shoud we go about doing about it? Preventing environmental damage in the first place is seen as a preferable strategy to asking people to mitigate it after the fact. However, according to Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout (Greens), addressing sustainable consumption was “as crucial as [addressing] the production side. They need to go hand-in-hand but it’s far more difficult. How do you tell people what to consume? Y...