About Me
- Rudra Prasad
- BKU, WB, India
- I am a simple,cool,simple minded, active person. Blogging is my one of the favorite hobby.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Facts That you should Know
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Rapid Climate Change
What is climate change?
The Earth's climate has always varied, so the term climate change is now generally used to describe the changes caused by human activity - specifically, greenhouse emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane, which build up in the atmosphere and trap heat.
Is it the same as global warming?
As human activity increases the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere far beyond their natural levels, much more heat is trapped. Hence, the term climate change is often used interchangeably with global warming.
Can it be explained by natural causes?
Measurements at the Earth's surface show that average temperatures have risen by some 0.4C since the 1970s. Scientists are confident this change can be blamed on human emissions because the increase is too big to be explained by natural causes.
Although natural factors such as changes in the sun and large volcanic eruptions are known to have warmed and cooled the planet in the past, these effects are not powerful enough to explain the rapid warming seen recently. Only an increased greenhouse effect caused by higher amounts of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere can explain it.
What is the main greenhouse gas?
Water vapour in the atmosphere produces the strongest greenhouse effect, but it has been in balance for millions of years. Human emissions, though relatively small, tip that balance.
Carbon dioxide is the chief greenhouse gas produced by human activity. It is produced when we burn fossil fuels: oil, gas and coal. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million (ppm).
Before the industrial revolution, the carbon dioxide level was about 280ppm. It is now 386ppm and rising by 2-3ppm each year. When other greenhouse gases such as methane are included, the total level in the atmosphere, known as the carbon dioxide equivalent, is closer to 440ppm.
What future temperature rise is expected?
Scientists say continued emissions will cause the planet to heat up further. To work out how much, they use computer models based on the programs used to predict the weather.
These models are not perfect, and struggle to simulate some features of the climate system such as clouds. To get around this, the scientists run many different versions and pool the results. The computer models predict that if emissions continue to rise at the present rate, average temperatures will most likely increase by 4C by 2100.
There are uncertainties, though - for example, the planet's oceans, forests and soils could release their massive stocks of carbon as the world warms, leading to much greater temperature rises than human emissions alone would cause.
Why are warmer temperatures bad?
Most plants and animals have evolved to live in a fairly narrow ecological niche. Some will move to find their desired conditions, others will be able to adapt. Those that cannot move or adapt will perish. Some animals, such as the polar bear, have nowhere to move to.
A warmer climate will affect agriculture and water availability. Increased temperatures are also expected to limit rainfall in some regions and bring more extreme weather events such as storms to others.
Sea levels will rise - gradually at first as the extra warmth works its way into the oceans and makes them expand; more quickly if the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and west Antarctica start to break up.
How can we tackle global warming?
Scientists say the only realistic way at present is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How to do that - and where - is a political hot potato.
Because it takes time for the heat to build up in the atmosphere, and because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time, there is a lag in the system, which means the effect of any changes will not be felt for decades. Put bluntly, we are headed for about another 0.5C of warming whatever we do.
What are the Kyoto protocol and the Copenhagen climate talks?
The world's only existing treaty to limit emissions, the Kyoto protocol, has had limited success, and expires in 2012. Politicians are working to develop a replacement that would include countries excluded from Kyoto, such as China, and those that refused to join, such as the US.
From December 7, environment ministers and officials will meet in Copenhagen to thrash out a successor to Kyoto. The two week event is being seen by many environmentalists as a crucial diplomatic opportunity to create an international agreement on meaningful cuts in emissions that will prevent the worst consequences of climate change.
Can renewable energy help?
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that we already have most of the technology we need to bring down emissions significantly. These include renewable energy sources such as windmills, geothermal and solar panels, as well as more efficient cars and power stations.
What about carbon trading?
Carbon trading is a market mechanism to achieve cuts in emissions. Countries or groups of countries (such as the EU) first agree a cap or maximum emissions level. Individual companies are then either given or must purchase carbon credits - the right to emit a certain amount of CO2. If they exceed their allowance they must purchase permits from another company that has company that has fallen short of its cap. If the cost of buying carbon credits is high enough it incentivises companies to invest in measures to reduce their emissions.
To date, the EU's emissions trading scheme has been heavily criticised for failing to reduce emissions. In the first phase, the number of permits issued was too high, sending the carbon price crashing and so removing any incentive for companies to spend money reducing their emissions. The environmentalist James Lovelock has branded Europe's carbon trading scheme a "scam".
What about carbon offsetting?
Offsetting is controversial because some people see it as an excuse not to change our behaviour. There are also concerns about whether it delivers the promised savings, as much of the market is unregulated.
What about storing the CO2 underground or blocking the sun?
One technology that would allow us to continue burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil without increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere is carbon capture and storage (CCS). This involves extracting CO2 at power stations then pumping it underground. Critics argue the technology will prove expensive and is several years away from being proven.
A more drastic approach is so-called geo-engineering. These are major technological fixes such as seeding clouds to bounce some of the sun's radiation back into space or stimulating the growth of algae in the oceans to soak up CO2. These are much more speculative, but Barack Obama's scientific adviser, John Holdren, has said that he is open to even these drastic measures.
Carbon Emission
Cpoenhagen Climate summit

Butterfly - Small Beauty


Its Time to wake Up
And this is you...
Then there will be no way...
No Way.........
Even not this way.........
So its better to go through this way
Start Saving your home from today
Your Home..........

Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Rain Forest

Rainforests are forests characterized by high rainfall, with definitions setting minimum normal annual rainfall between 1750–2000 mm (68-78 inches).
From 40 to 75% of all species on Earth are indigenous to the rainforests. It has been estimated that many millions of species of plants, insects, and microorganisms are still undiscovered. Tropical rainforests have been called the "jewels of the Earth", and the "world's largest pharmacy", because of the large number of natural medicines discovered there. Rainforests are also responsible for 28% of the worlds oxygen turn over, often misunderstood as oxygen production. processing it through photosynthesis from carbon dioxide and through breathing to carbon dioxide.
The undergrowth in a rainforest is restricted in many areas by the lack of sunlight at ground level. This makes it possible to walk through the forest. If the leaf canopy is destroyed or thinned, the ground beneath is soon colonized by a dense, tangled growth of vines, shrubs, and small trees called a jungle. There are two types of rainforest, tropical rainforest and temperate rainforest.
Monday, June 8, 2009
OzONE Hole
The discovery of the Antarctic "ozone hole" by British Antarctic Survey scientists Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin (announced in a paper in Nature in May 1985) came as a shock to the scientific community, because the observed decline in polar ozone was far larger than anyone had anticipated. Satellite measurements showing massive depletion of ozone around the south pole were becoming available at the same time. However, these were initially rejected as unreasonable by data quality control algorithms (they were filtered out as errors since the values were unexpectedly low); the ozone hole was detected only in satellite data when the raw data was reprocessed following evidence of ozone depletion in in situ observations. When the software was rerun without the flags, the ozone hole was seen as far back as 1976.
Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), proposed that chemical reactions on polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) in the cold Antarctic stratosphere caused a massive, though localized and seasonal, increase in the amount of chlorine present in active, ozone-destroying forms. The polar stratospheric clouds in Antarctica are only formed when there are very low temperatures, as low as -80 degrees C, and early spring conditions. In such conditions the ice crystals of the cloud provide a suitable surface for conversion of unreactive chlorine compounds into reactive chlorine compounds which can deplete ozone easily.
Moreover the polar vortex formed over Antarctica is very tight and the reaction which occurs on the surface of the cloud crystals is far different from when it occurs in atmosphere. These conditions have led to ozone hole formation in Antarctica. This hypothesis was decisively confirmed, first by laboratory measurements and subsequently by direct measurements, from the ground and from high-altitude airplanes, of very high concentrations of chlorine monoxide (ClO) in the Antarctic stratosphere.
Alternative hypotheses, which had attributed the ozone hole to variations in solar UV radiation or to changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, were also tested and shown to be untenable.
Meanwhile, analysis of ozone measurements from the worldwide network of ground-based Dobson spectrophotometers led an international panel to conclude that the ozone layer was in fact being depleted, at all latitudes outside of the tropics. These trends were confirmed by satellite measurements. As a consequence, the major halocarbon producing nations agreed to phase out production of CFCs, halons, and related compounds, a process that was completed in 1996.
Since 1981 the United Nations Environment Programme has sponsored a series of reports on scientific assessment of ozone depletion. The most recent is from 2007 where satellite measurements have shown the hole in the ozone layer is recovering and is now the smallest it has been for about a decade.Sunday, June 7, 2009
Our Green Earth

Global Warming

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the last century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century. The IPCC also concludes that natural phenomena such as solar variation and volcanoes produced most of the warming from pre-industrial times to 1950 and had a small cooling effect afterward. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.
Climate model projections summarized in the latest IPCC report indicate that global surface temperature will probably rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the twenty-first century. The uncertainty in this estimate arises from the use of models with differing sensitivity to greenhouse gas concentrations and the use of differing estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions. Some other uncertainties include how warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe. Most studies focus on the period up to 2100. However, warming is expected to continue beyond 2100 even if emissions stop, because of the large heat capacity of the oceans and the long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Increasing global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts. The continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice is expected, with the Arctic region being particularly affected. Other likely effects include shrinkage of the Amazon rainforest and Boreal forests, increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions and changes in agricultural yields.
Political and public debate continues regarding what actions (if any) to take in response to global warming. The available options are mitigation to reduce further emissions; adaptation to reduce the damage caused by warming; and, more speculatively, geoengineering to reverse global warming. Most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.





















