Message in a bottle

Six sins that make drought invincible

It’s drought time again. Nothing new in this announcement. Each year, first we have crippling droughts between December and June, and then devastating floods in the next few months. It’s a cycle of despair, which is more or less predictable. But this is not an inevitable cycle of nature we must live with.

Kudankulam meltdown

Relief in verse

Poems about the tsunami that hit Japan last year were among the winners at the country’s annual Imperial Palace poetry contest. One winner, a 72-year-old tailor, wrote of his relief upon learning that his son was safe after three days of uncertainty. Another winning poem sang of the author’s pride in alternative energy, depicting the dazzling landscape of solar panels in the morning light.

Future shock

It is a definite recipe for disaster, barely short of apocalypse. Thousands may die, millions get affected, and assets worth billions of dollars get destroyed. As human-induced greenhouse gases increase, so will extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts.

A home-grown drought

Monsoon this year has failed most of India, causing drought in even well-irrigated and rainfed areas. Ravleen Kaur reports how our food preferences are making us vulnerable to drought

@110 km/hr

 

That sinking feeling

Raging Kosi waters surrounded Ramnarayan Rai for 12 days in Madhepura's Batona village. Holed up in his house, he watched his younger brother, a youth of 28, waste and die of hunger. Two days after the death, his courage gave way when the body started decaying. He lit a matchstick and placed it on the lips of his dead brother--symbolic of Hindu funeral--and threw the body in the river Kosi--Sorrow of Bihar.

The hockey-stick curve

There has been a rapid increase of co2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the past 250 years: from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 379 ppm. All greenhouse gases add up to the equivalent of 430 ppm of co2. That this increase has had a warming effect because of heat energy trapped in the atmosphere is clear when one compares the well known hockey-stick graph of emissions with corresponding global temperature change.

Short circuit

STRAIT FORWARD A 150-year-old dream acquires shape