Author Archives: Srinivas Chakravarty

India Ready with ‘Comprehensive’ Plan on INDCs Ahead of Paris Meet: Javadekar

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The Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change (Independent Charge), Shri Prakash Javadekar addressing a Press Conference on Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), in New Delhi on August 24, 2015. The Secretary, Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Shri Ashok Lavasa and the Director General (M&C), Press Information Bureau, Shri A.P. Frank Noronha are also seen. (PIB Photo).

India’s environment minister Prakash Javadekar has reiterated India’s stand on compliance with the Climate Change agreements in the past and to forge ahead with its comprehensive plan at the Paris Summit to be held in December this year.

The minsiter said India is finalizing its draft proposal before the crucial UN climate change conference in Paris and unlike most other countries whose ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCs) reflect only mitigation measures, India will have two different templates — one for adaptation and the other for mitigation apart from technology and capacity build up, Javadekar said.

Wrapping up an 8-month effort, the minister said “We are at an advanced stage of preparing our INDC… We have been engaged in this exercise and widest consultations have taken place with all ministries, state governments, research institutes, industry, think tanks and many organisations.”

Javadekar said all elements will be part of India’s INDCs, including efforts for mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology and capacity building, he said preparing for the final draft. He said India’s INDCs reflect the mandate of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

However, India is still a latecomer in terms of submission of its INDCs as the US, China and the European Union countries have already submitted their INDCs. Some of the projects undertaken by the ministry of forests and environment will figure in the INDCs, it is learnt.

But India has made it evident in all global gatherings that “Developed world would now have to walk the talk and will have to provide green climate fund to the developing world.”

Being a developing nation, India has maintained its “Common but Differentiated Responsibility” approach to global climate change and sought the developed world to pay the developing world or poorer nations like India and defer the carbon tax model for some more time.

The UN has been insisting on a “realistic” trajectory to mobilize $100 billion per year by 2020 that was pledged by developed countries in 2009 – with resources above and beyond official development assistance (ODA).

The UN Green Climate Fund has remained a lukewarm effort without funds.

Imagine World Map Without Humans, Here It Is!

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An interesting study by Arhus University in Spain has come out with a world map sans humans and how it would have shaped the animal world on Earth, if man had not appeared about 100,000 years ago.

 

The fact that the greatest diversity of large mammals is found in Africa reflects past human activities – and not climatic or other environmental constraints. This is determined in a new study, which presents what the world map of mammals would look like if modern man (Homo sapiens) had never existed.

In a world without humans, most of northern Europe would probably now be home to not only wolves, Eurasian elk (moose) and bears, but also animals such as elephants and rhinoceroses.

This is demonstrated in a new study conducted by researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark. In a previous analysis, they have shown that the mass extinction of large mammals during the Last Ice Age and in subsequent millennia (the late-Quaternary megafauna extinction) is largely explainable from the expansion of modern man (Homo sapiens) across the world.

In this follow-up study, they investigate what the natural worldwide diversity patterns of mammals would be like in the absence of past and present human impacts, based on estimates of the natural distribution of each species according to its ecology, biogeography and the current natural environmental template. They provide the first estimate of how the mammal diversity world map would have appeared without the impact of modern man.

“Northern Europe is far from the only place in which humans have reduced the diversity of mammals – it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And, in most places, there’s a very large deficit in mammal diversity relative to what it would naturally have been”, says Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, who is one of the researchers behind the study.

Antarctic Detector Confirms Cosmic Neutrino Sighting

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IMAGE: A A HIGH-ENERGY NEUTRINO EVENT OF THE NORTHERN SKY SUPERIMPOSED ON A VIEW OF THE ICECUBE LAB AT THE SOUTH POLE.(CREDIT: ICECUBE COLLABORATION)

Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have sorted through the billions of subatomic particles that zip through its frozen cubic-kilometer-sized detector each year to gather powerful new evidence in support of 2013 observations confirming the existence of cosmic neutrinos.

In the new study, the detection of 21 ultra high-energy muons — secondary particles created on the very rare occasions when neutrinos interact with other particles –provides independent confirmation of astrophysical neutrinos from our galaxy as well as cosmic neutrinos from sources outside the Milky Way.

The observations were reported in the journalPhysical Review Letters by the IceCube Collaboration, which called the data an “unequivocal signal” for astrophysical neutrinos, ultra high-energy particles that have traversed space unimpeded by stars, planets, galaxies, magnetic fields or clouds of interstellar dust — phenomena that, at very high energies, significantly attenuate more mundane particles like photons.

Because they have almost no mass and no electric charge, neutrinos can be very hard to detect and are only observed indirectly when they collide with other particles to create muons, telltale secondary particles.

The IceCube Collaboration, a large international consortium headquartered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has taken on the huge challenge of sifting through a mass of observations to identify perhaps a few dozen of the highest-energy neutrinos that have traveled from sources in the Milky Way and beyond our galaxy.

 

“Looking for muon neutrinos reaching the detector through the Earth is the way IceCube was supposed to do neutrino astronomy and it has delivered,” explains Francis Halzen, a UW-Madison professor of physics and the principal investigator of IceCube. “This is as close to independent confirmation as one can get with a unique instrument.”

Between May 2010 and May 2012, IceCube recorded more than 35,000 neutrinos. However, only about 20 of those neutrino events were clocked at energy levels indicative of astrophysical or cosmic sources.

 

But while the new observations confirm the existence of astrophysical neutrinos and the means to detect them using the IceCube Observatory, actual point sources of high-energy neutrinos remain to be identified.

Albrecht Karle, a UW-Madison professor of physics and a senior author of the Physical Review Letters report, notes that while the neutrino-induced tracks recorded by the IceCube detector have a good pointing resolution, within less than a degree, the IceCube team has not observed a significant number of neutrinos emanating from any single source.

 

IceCube is based at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at UW-Madison. The observatory was built with major support from the National Science Foundation as well as support from partner funding agencies worldwide. More than 300 physicists and engineers from the United States, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Korea and Denmark are involved in the project.