DesiPundit

Now Mr. Suraiya is a well respected columnist but he is not a climate scientist and his lack of science training shows. He opens his argument not by referring to real science contradicting warming but by pointing out that the writer Michael Crichton has written a science fiction book that questions the human influence on global warming. I kid you not!

The Times of India is not exactly the paragon of journalistic excellence let alone scientific accuracy. But still as Suvrat Kher found out, an anti-global warming argument by Jug Suraiya reeks of tabling an opposing viewpoint for the sake of it, is quite appalling. There is always space for a counter view but it is definitely not this one.

Arun’s dream to swim in the Ganges goes unfulfilled. The river flows too fast in the mountains and in Varanasi,

… the sight of Varanasi’s ghats was depressing. The river was not just unclean, but looked no different from a sewer. It was dark, nearly opaque and was filled with floating organic mass along the bank. At Assi ghat where the river makes a slight bend into the west bank, disposed trash made a thick layer that completely covered the surface. Forget swimming, even touching the water seemed unthinkable.

Suresh writes about his friend Roy who is living with nature in a hut in Wayanad,Kerala.He has made 20 cents of land on the banks of Narasipuzha, his paradise.

I was working as an IT consultant in corporate America for nearly five years. By most definitions I had ‘made it’ — good education, good job, nice car, pretty girlfriend, ‘success.’ Yet, I voluntarily chose to walk away from it all and search for a totally different way of life. Why? Let me share two reasons, one external and one internal, although both are deeply connected.

It is hard, even for a moment, to believe, that Dow Chemicals is not getting special favors from Indian government. Despite recent exposes of a Dow subsidiary paying off government officials to get approvals on poisonous pesticides, and despite Dow’s tainted history with its Indian companies, the government hasn’t come clean to people on if and why the approval process was subverted for Dow’s newest ventures in India.

Indiatime fears that the recent approval for a $100 million R&D facility by Dow Chemicals in Pune might be the next Bhopal in the making given the shady and hasty approval deals in the background and finds the apathy of the Pune youth disappointing.

Ashish Sinha at Pluggd.in compares Green Technology investments in India and the US on the occasion of Earth Day. Are we really doing enough?

Today is ‘Earth day’ and an apt time to look at state of green tech investments happening in India.

First, a quick look at the US market:

• In 2007 venture investment in the alternative energy market in North America and Europe was $5.18 billion, compared with $3.6 billion the previous year.
• The number of financing deals in the industry increased 15 percent last year to 268, and the average deal size rose 20 percent to $14.7 million,

I recall an incident when a bunch of people was talking about how nice it would be if vehicular emissions contained ozone instead of “carbon monoxide and the other poisonous gases.” “It would solve pollution and the ozone problem,” they gushed.

Witnwisdumb is peeved with environmentalists who aren’t aware or don’t bother learning about the real issues and seem to be in the conservation movement just to appear cool.

There are many Saraswati’s. The one of interest is the Ghaggar river system. The Rig-Ved describes the Saraswati as flowing between the Sutlej and the Yamuna. This has led Indologists to identify the Vedic Saraswati with the present day Ghaggar.

In light of news reports of the governments of Haryana and Rajasthan attempting to revive the ancient and mythologically lost river Saraswati, Suvrat clarifies the geological aspects of the issue.

Why is it that so many things done by humans are considered artificial, while everything that animals do is considered natural? Other animals, just like humans, also try to modify their environment according to their capabilities and the resources available to them. Then, why is a skyscraper artificial while an ant-hill is natural?

Partly in response to an Gaurav’s post on saving tigers (linked earlier on DesiPundit), Vivek examines the arguments for saving the tiger while trying to understand the larger issue of impact of a species on the planet.

A tear rolled down its eye and the leopard slowly went down. I cocooned myself from the whole crowd as the cops were taking care of them and I could not see anything but the face of the leopard through the camera. I just broke down at this point and walked away. Could not see all the people going crazy and this poor leopard in that cage in that state.

Kalyan Varma witnesses the asinine behavior of onlookers towards a wounded captured leopard and manages to capture a few photographs of the poor animal.

Karthik has a wonderful and comprehensive listing (with pictures and information) of the 26 species of flowering trees that are often seen around Bangalore.