Climate change and CO2 level

Many scientists say that the recent harsh global winter witnessed around the world in no way undermines the enormous body of evidence pointing to a warming world with disrupted weather patterns. If one considers IPCC's view that a doubling of CO2 will result in a warming likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, it is long time before we witness that type of concentration rise. However, as per some UN report, a 2-degree rise in temperature would result in 15-17%fall in rise and wheat yields. This is matter of grave concern since we need to grow more and more food crops to feed ever increasing population growth in under-developed and developing countries.

As per some reported data there is 30 ppm (380 ppm – 350 ppm) rise in the measured atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration between 1990 and 2006. There is a tendency in the relationship to be linear-quadratic and all efforts need to be made to keep the linear relationship for the concentration vs time. Let us look seriously at all the possibilities and techniques, including reforestation and use of seaweed and algae to remove CO2 from the environment/ocean waters.

However, it is unscientific to blame the CO2 level alone to the present climate change. Natural events are also taking place periodically and results in warming and cooling of the environment. Every citizen of the world is looking at the United Nations Organization to make realistic assessment of the environmental impact of the greenhouse gas concentrations in the air and the extent of the warming caused. Is the warming so caused is only responsible for the climate change?

Maharashtra (Mumbai) Cadaver Donation Day

March 27 is observed as the Cadaver Donation Day in Maharashtra State with the aim of increasing awareness amongst the people so that more and more people come forward to donate their organs after death. Case studies have shown that the cadaver transplants work almost as well as donations from live donors. Law permitting cadaver donations came into being 14 years ago. The Law permits three types of organ donations: related living, unrelated living and cadaveric donations. As per the Transplant Protocol, everyone can donate eyes, skin and bones within 6 hours of death. However, only persons who are brain-dead can donate solid organs such as kidneys, liver and heart.

The numbers have been increasing slowly from single digit to double digits. The organ donations, in general, are just a fraction of what is needed for the lakhs of patients with kidney or liver diseases and undergoing costly treatments. Due to the acute shortage, illegal kidney bazaars are thriving in the country. In India, 15,000 people require a liver transplant every year and only 150 get lucky in getting a donor. Overall, India requires 22,000 donors annually. From where, this number of donations will come?

The government is considering “presumed consent” from serious /brain-dead patients in hospitals. Of course, this presumed consent goes against the premise of voluntary donation. It is advised that each hospital can have a transplant coordinator to identify and counsel the family of potential donors. Typically, there is a Zonal Transplantation Coordination Centre (ZTCC), a quasi-government organization coordinating diseased donor transplants in Mumbai, located at Sion Hospital.

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Climate Change and human evolution

The climate changes which we are witnessing today are assumed to be mainly due to the global warming caused by man-made activities. There are some recent evidences in various scientific forums in the internet (The environment site.org) to show that the presumption of the climate changes was due to GHG emissions and the resultant global warming is a hoax. New data challenges the above reasoning.

Some environmentalist has warned that the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau would turn the Ganga and Yangtze rivers into seasonal rivers that dry up in summers and could eventually lead to unmanageable food shortages. The projections were based on the fact that China and India are the world’s leading producers of wheat and rice, the staple food for the billions. Glacier experts feel that loss of glaciers would take away a summertime source of river water, drinking water and hydroelectric power in populous, relatively poor places like South Asia and the cities along the western slope of the Andes.

There is a cyclic behavior seen in the natural events which are occurring over hundreds of years in the past. One can expect much more severe natural events in the future. In the event of any such catastrophe, “doomsday vault” was designed and is getting ready at Norway for inauguration. The vault (Svalbard Global Seed Vault), made up of three cold chambers each measuring 27 x 10 metres tunnel bored into the sandstone and limestone in a remote Arctic mountain, 1000 km from the North Pole. The facility has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet’s main food crops. This will make it possible to reestablish the plants if they are destroyed by any major disasters.

Studies also have shown that the new human species were evolved over millions of years during which the climate was highly variable, such as formation and vanishing of giant lakes, periods of extreme heat, severe drought, etc.

In the name of carbon dioxide, let us not throttle the industrial revolutiion which is taking place in countries like India and China.

Online evils - Privacy is lost

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented World Wide Web (www) two decades ago, cautions the surfers to be aware of indiscretion on the internet. It has grown much beyond the expectations and has become a massive and permanent data “archives” in human history. The www was started to facilitate information-sharing among researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory known as CERN. However, the destructive potential of the invention is also unlimited. The privacy of the personal data put on the web can never be guaranteed. Whatever is being typed on the web can be read by everybody else too – is causing a lot of anxiety among the net users. Individual privacy is lost, particularly through social networking sites. The feeling is that one is being made “naked” and studied in detail!

Big business houses are using the net for total commercialization. They are able to snoop on the surfers / consumers, and their surfing habits. He also said that the internet service providers should provide neutral service and not commercially exploit the personal data, such as medical records and credit card information, of the consumers without their knowledge.

Do we have any foolproof method of maintaining the personal information provided in the net for a specific cause, as personal?

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD)

Kidneys are responsible for filtering waste products from the blood. When the kidney function is impaired, the waste starts accumulating, leading finally to a rise in bad cholesterol levels. This means the CKD patients have more risk of dying from a heart attack. It is important that the kidney patients need to control their blood pressure, LDL bad cholesterol and diabetic status. Epidemiological studies showed that the CKD increased the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, even amongst early kidney ailments. It is known for long that the number of kidney patients suffering a heart attack is more as compared to patients without any kidney problems.

In India, over 7.5 lakh people suffer from CKD. The treatments for kidney damage available are dialysis or kidney transplantation. Dialysis is a very expensive procedure. It is method of removing toxic substances from the blood using a machine when the kidneys are unable to do so due to failure of their function. Depending upon the extent of the damage, each dialysis session may last for 6-8 hours, 5-7 times a week. At present, 1.5 lakh new patients suffer from the end-stage renal failure annually. Of this, only 3500 get kidney transplants and 6000 undergo dialysis. Depending on the condition, one has to spend about 3 to 4 thousand rupees for each dialysis session in private clinics. Kidney transplantation is also an expensive proposition which can be afforded by the rich only.

It is reported that there is an acute shortage of dialysis centers and nephrologists (kidney specialists) in India for management of kidney diseases. Kidney donors are hard to come by. Cadaver donations are very rare. Cadaver donations should be legally supported to make it mandatory for the hospitals to convince the relatives of the patients for donation of the organs from brain-dead patients. Media can play a major role in public awareness by sensitizing the issue and facilitate organ donations. The Health Ministry should seriously look into the medico-legal aspects of the stem cell research for producing new cell lines for the treatment of such diseases. Stem cell banking should be made easily affordable as part of long-term program.

Today’s women-empowered

There is really no word to describe today’s women, empowered and independent and demanding. She gets what she wants. The change has taken place very fast. Everybody hoped that she will still retain the basic instincts of family and values relationships.

It is true that once upon a time her opinion was no opinion. It will be generally vetoed by the men in the family. Today’s woman has her opinion and she also dares to defend it. If she is right, she wins and if she loses, still she wins. Today’s women prefer economic independence and go for jobs to earn money. She is well educated oozes with sexuality. She dares to prefer job instead of marriage. She also prefers to choose her own soul mate. If things do not click to her satisfaction, she is prepared to part ways. She wants to enjoy life at any cost, in filmy style. Technologies, consumer goods and automobiles are feminized to target the new liberated women.

But, what we witnessed on the Women’s Day shocked us. I quote the two incidents to which I and my wife were the witnesses on the Women’s Day.

1. Scene: A car parked in front of a Mall. The car was locked, the parking lights were on. One mobile phone was on the dashboard. A small girl, may be of one and half years, was sitting in the front seat and crying loudly which could be heard even through the closed windows. One lady in pants, about 35 years old, probably the girl’s mother, was talking to the girl through the glass window, asking the girl to stop crying. She was telling the child that her dad is going to come within two minutes. I too was waiting for my car, to load the grocery bags from the trolley. I was there for full 15 minutes. They were still waiting for the child’s dad to open the locked car. All this time, the child was crying and the lady was trying to console her. My queries as to what happened remained unanswered. My vehicle came and I went away wondering when the small girl’s papa will come and release the girl from her confinement. I could only pity the girl child and couldn’t sleep that night. Flashes of the child shouting, with tears rolling was haunting me. Do we have any laws to tackle such type of irresponsible parents?

2. Scene: A higher income group housing society. Time about 9 p.m. Two children 2 years and 8 years old are standing near the main entrance to the building. A watchman was doing his duty of opening and closing of the gates as the cars come inside the compound. We too happened to come back at that time after our evening stroll. We saw two familiar faces of the children looking at us, and we just wished them. The younger of the two said that their parents have gone out to drop somebody at the railway station and have not yet returned. He also said that he was feeling hungry. We didn’t have anything to offer at that time for the hungry children. We went home and my wife took a pack of cream biscuits and went down again to give to the children.

Very innocently, the children first refused the biscuits, but the smaller one just couldn’t control his hunger and grabbed the biscuits from my wife’s hands and started eating. The elder one was not willing to take initially, and then accepted saying thanks. Then he also told us not to tell this to their parents and requested us to leave them alone lest their parents will see us giving them biscuits. Again, the incident of a young mother enjoying herself leaving the small hungry children to fend themselves was haunting me for some time.

Later on, we came to know that this is the common practice with many young couples of leaving children in the building and go away for fun drives. These incidents may be of very minor nature and least traumatizing type which we witnessed. We realized that the new liberated women are capable of much more ruthless acts against their children.

Society needs women who are educated and liberated, but still caring for relationships, be loved for love sake and have the emotions which are binding her with her family. That will be the ideal woman. What you think?

Salt pans around Mumbai soon to be gobbled up

Mumbai politicians are all set to get about 5500 acres of salt pan land released in connivance with the builders lobby for development as real estate. Mumbai is surrounded by thousands of acres of salt pans and mangroves and any development work results in destroying the mangroves. During monsoon months, these salt pans are flooded by rain water and serve as natural reservoirs.

These areas are leased out by the government to a few families for use as salt pans and lack of space for housing made these salt pans as potential for real estate development. Powerful builders-politicians lobby is working to get these areas released from the protection of eco-sensitive stringent Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ), which prohibits any construction close to creeks, mangroves and the high tide line. Mumbai has seen worst floods in the recent years.

Geologists are of the opinion that the salt pan plots are not suitable for reclamation since the soil in these mudflats is weakened by the continuous production of salt over the years. Any construction over these lands will need very deep foundations. Mass housing projects are likely to come up.

In spite of the resistance from some NGOs, the government (salt department) is likely to fall in line with the builders lobby and the city will loose its much open flat space encircling the city. It will be an environmental disaster.