Al Gore, former US Vice President and Founder, The Climate Reality Project, spoke at the recently concluded 2016 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. According to him, the future of our planet looks very different today than it did when he last spoke on the TED stage nearly a decade ago….
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Sea level rise has washed away more than 50% of Ghoramara island, Sunderbans
Daesung Lee
If any of us have fixed geographical notions of the nation-state, the rise and fall of sea levels everywhere ought to give us pause. Not just in warnings about the future, but also lessons from the past. Once, England and France were contiguous landmass… our borders are drawn not by us, but by the oceans….
Read More about Nationalists take note – its nature that draws borders, not nation-states
Sukumar Muralidharan reports on Catch News: This year’s economic survey is a catalogue of crises. For one thing, it records that the situation in agriculture has been dismal on account of two successive years of poor monsoons. This is only the fourth time in 115 years that such a misfortune has hit the Indian economy….
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SkyMet founder Jatin Singh says: When SkyMet had said there was an El Nino and the 2014 monsoon won’t be good, the reaction of the then person in charge of IMD was that El Nino was a western conspiracy to play with our devices. But the IMD’s forecast after 2014 became very El Nino based….
Read More about CEO of India’s first private weather forecasting organisation on strange weather trends
January was the globe’s most unusually warm month ever recorded, and the past three months have been the most unusually warm three-month period on record as well, according to NASA. It is the combination of manmade global warming and a record strong El Niño that’s bumped up temperatures to never-before-seen levels since at least 1880….
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Common Dreams reports: A new analysis, published in Science Advances journal, reveals that global water scarcity is a far greater problem than previously thought, affecting 4 billion people—two-thirds of the world’s population. Previous analyses looked at water scarcity at an annual scale, and had found that water scarcity affected between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people….
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Grist / Amelia Bates
People are not going to be frightened into caring. Scientific evidence-based predictions about what will happen 10, 20, or 50 years in the future are not going to make them care, not enough. That requires making it personal. And that requires facing the reality of loss. And that requires experiencing grief. There’s no other way….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: Climate Change, grief and carbon reductionismSciDev Net reports: India, Colombia and Nigeria have the most cases of conflict caused by climate change and environmental disputes, according to a map of global ecological conflict. The Environmental Justice Atlas shows that more than 200 conflicts in India are caused by ecological disputes and scarcities of basic resources such as water and forests….
Read More about Map shows India leads the world in ecological conflict
Decision On GM Mustard Deferred *Mining interests and tribal rights on collision course *Former atomic energy regulator says India needs to pause nuclear plans *Lesser water recorded in Indian reservoirs than last year *Sikkim Organic Mission: We Need To Dig Deeper *Hydro dam boom threatens freshwater fish *Radioactive Water From Fukushima Leaking Into the Pacific…
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #82
Recently, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric that flooded into the media afterwards, that is the sum of what happened at the COP-21 climate conference in Paris….
Read More about Too little, too late: John Michael Greer on the climate accord
25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans
AFP
Rajabhau Deshmukh, a farmer from Beed says: We’ve been reaping merely 20-30% of our average crop in the last few years. Even as bank loans, moneylenders’ debts, relatives’ credits and the interest keep gnawing at us, we’ve to somehow run our homes. To be honest, it seems we are not even allowed to fall sick….
Read More about A Marathwada farmer’s wake-up call to India: try to understand why we die
India, Colombia and Nigeria have the most cases of conflict caused by climate change and environmental disputes, according to a map of global ecological conflict. The Environmental Justice Atlas, released last month, shows that more than 200 conflicts in India are caused by ecological disputes and scarcities of basic resources such as water and forests….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #81Transition Towns movement founder Rob Hopkins writes: The story we tell flows like this: A movement is building. Here are the things different people are doing in their communities, rooted in caring for ourselves, each other and the living world. This shows a different future is possible. Here’s how you can be part of it….
Read More about Time to stop talking about climate change?Bhamy Shenoy writes in Deccan Herald: There is a comforting thought that the fall in solar energy and wind energy prices, and their greater adaption will provide solution to reduce the use of fossil fuels. Often ignored or overlooked reality is the difficulty in reforming the existing energy scenario both in the developed and developing countries….
Read More about Paris Climate Summit: A success? A failure? Or a fraud?
Aadi Kumbruka with various types of legumes, millets, oilseeds and corns grown on his farm.
India Water Portal
Nauri grows 72 varieties of crop on his two-acre farm. “The benefit of mixed cropping is that even in extreme weather events, we get something out of the field. Some crops work well in drought, others in flood. Compare this with mono cropping which won’t even yield enough to eat in severe drought”, he explains….
Read More about Tribals in Odisha humour changing skies with mixed platters
The Economic Times reports: The Central government has unveiled a new Crop Insurance Scheme with the premium to be paid by farmers as low as 1.5 per cent of the sum assured for all rabi crops and 2 per cent for kharif crops. The scheme comes without any cap on overall premium rate to ensure full claims….
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George Varghese
The rains have let us down terribly this year. There were farmers in our area who did not bother planting their rice crop when they realized that it wasn’t going to rain much this year and then there were others that took a chance and planted but didn’t bother harvesting since the crop was a disaster….
Read More about Weathering The Change - A Farmer’s Diary of 2015
Morvarid Fernandez
Morvarid Fernandez writes: Our crops failed, cattle graze the dry paddy straw, and fields remain fallow because there is not enough water. Bore wells are deeper, the lines longer, and the black blister bug – usually a bane – simply did not appear last year. The monsoon of 2015, you ask. But there just wasn’t one….
Read More about Winds of change – A view from Nersa
Climate change is just the most glaring manifestation of real and deeper causes – the growing demands of a growing world population, while our natural resource base is dwindling and the ability of nature to absorb man-made pollution is diminishing – in short, the lunatic idea that in a finite world infinite growth is possible….
Read More about A historic event or a fraud? Critical thoughts on the Paris Climate Accord
The developed world’s average per capita emissions are now a little more than twice the corresponding level in developing countries. But the emissions gap between rich and poor individuals, regardless of nation, has increased. And rich countries and individuals, as always, can rely on their wealth to protect them from many effects of global warming….
Read More about Why technology cannot adequately address climate change
