Sikhi And Environmentalism

[Mehtab Singh]

Harinder Singh veerji is right. I saw in the newspaper here (I am in USA) that some middle class families in this country have started growing vegetables in their own backyard lawn to save money on groceries as they don't trust which harmful pesticides are sprayed on the vegetables they buy from the market. In future, we all will have to grow our own vegetables, have our own cows/buffaloes/goats for milk, make makhan/paneer etc. at home. Maybe then we (especially me) can have the kind of strong build which Punjabis of the past had.

If you stay in a flat, your majj can be parked in the balcony.

[wjkk wjkf]

I grow tomatoes, saag, mint, carrots, corriander, basil, collyflower and much more -all you need is some soil and some seeds - best way is to plant in small containers first then grow them out in the garden...its fun and the food tastes amasing

[xHarinder_singh]

I grow tomatoes, saag, mint, carrots, corriander, basil, collyflower and much more -all you need is some soil and some seeds - best way is to plant in small containers first then grow them out in the garden...its fun and the food tastes amasing

oohhh my pyare cute sweet brother. God bless u! Doing gardening and singing gurbani is an amazing experience. Living with nature is like doing bhagti.

[wjkk wjkf]

I grow tomatoes, saag, mint, carrots, corriander, basil, collyflower and much more -all you need is some soil and some seeds - best way is to plant in small containers first then grow them out in the garden...its fun and the food tastes amasing

oohhh my pyare cute sweet brother. God bless u! Doing gardening and singing gurbani is an amazing experience. Living with nature is like doing bhagti.

:6 sister!

[xHarinder_singh]

I grow tomatoes, saag, mint, carrots, corriander, basil, collyflower and much more -all you need is some soil and some seeds - best way is to plant in small containers first then grow them out in the garden...its fun and the food tastes amasing

oohhh my pyare cute sweet brother. God bless u! Doing gardening and singing gurbani is an amazing experience. Living with nature is like doing bhagti.

:6 sister!

hahaha, alright! dear sweet cute sister jeeooooo. GOD BLESS U!

[xHarinder_singh]

souce : http://lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/?id...mp;IssueNum=214

According to paleontologist and NASA astrobiologist Peter Ward, we are about to climate-change ourselves right back to the Stone Age. Ward studies prehistoric mass extinctions, and, in his latest book, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future, the scientist explores new data showing why, in the heavily carbon-ated atmospheres of the very distant past, oppressive heat levels would have been the least of your worries. More ominously, Ward argues, a universally sweltering climate kick started a feedback cycle, disrupting the delicate balance that keeps our planet breathing. To reach a carbon-saturation of 800 to 1,000 parts per million - a figure currently posited by climate modelers - could be to precipitate a level of destruction not seen for millions of years. And it won't take millions of years to get there. "The first big mass mortalities of humans will likely start around 2050," Ward says. "And by 2100, this will just be an unrecognizable globe to us."

-Mindy Farabee

CityBeat: The global-warming scenarios you posit are some of the worst.

Peter Ward: I think there are two biggies, the first being sea-level rise. That's going to happen faster and be more subtly devastating that anyone knows.

The thing that scares me so much now is, so much of human food now is being produced in deltas. The problem with sea-level rise is that it injects salt water up into places where salt previously hadn't been. And in the next few years, just from the heating we've already done, we are going to have a one- to three-meter sea-level rise, from thermal expansion of the ocean. Well, it turns out if you go to Bangladesh, even a five-foot rise would cause 13 million people to be displaced.

At the same time, the really scary thing going on is the melting of the Greenland ice cap. The two great big stores of fresh water are the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. Greenland melts and sea level rises; the measurements are imprecise, but it's between eight and 20 feet. But if the Antarctic sheet is combined with Greenland, that causes a rise of 240 feet.

Now, what you need to do is go back to any map of the Cretaceous Period to see what that looks like. A 240-foot rise just utterly changes the whole shape of the world. We're looking at a world that's absolutely unfathomable. And yet the sea-level rise is not the worst thing that could happen. Because that's displacement and crop change, and you can work around that.

The worst of the possibilities coming from global warming comes from these mass extinctions of the past. If we hook into one of those, you have a toxic atmosphere that no one can breathe. You have every human on the planet with a respirator.

How does that happen?

For years, of course, we thought past extinctions were all Armageddon and Deep Impact - just impact, impact, impact. It's only been the past few years we've found out about these nasty sulfur bacteria that filled up the oceans during these past extinctions. At first it was thought that's a coincidence - we had a mass extinction, and then the oceans filled with this sludge of sulfur bacteria. Then the discovery was made what kind of sulfur bacteria they are. They're forms that can only thrive when the ocean is super-saturated in hydrogen sulfide. We have found bugs that can only exist if there's so much hydrosulfide in the oceans that it's going to leak into the atmosphere and poison things on land. So that was the major discovery of the past couple years that had people so horrified.

This is related to the so-called "conveyer belt" that keeps our oceans circulating?

When the Arctic is warm and the Antarctic is warm, there are no ocean currents. What's driving currents now is a warm tropics and a cold high latitude - that's why there's wind, that's why there's currents. In the past when we've had globally warmed worlds, we've had little wind, a largely stagnant world. What keeps our oceans oxygenated is the presence of these currents. Without warm and cold that stops. And many times in the past [that's caused] an anoxic ocean - a no-oxygen ocean - and when that happens you get these super bugs. It's happened over and over in the past, and it's in our future if we keep doing what we're going to do.

And that kills everything?

Some things do survive. It's not universal throughout in these mass extinctions. The closest it came was [during the] Permian [Period], when 90 percent of all species went extinct. But 90 percent of all species had to translate to 99.9999 percent of all individuals. You would see a case where, here and there, there'd be some eddies. Some pockets of oxygen existed, and not everybody died out. But the planet itself would have been a big biological desert. It's a major, mass wholesale mortality of the planet, and after the Permian it stayed that way for three to five million years: this empty planet where all that thrived were bacteria.

Why do you believe we've entered another mass extinction now?

If you ask me, it really started during the Ice Ages, when humans really started killing off the big Ice Age mammals. That was the opening shot. But we're really going to be increasing the tempo of it as we warm the world. If we warm it too fast, plants can't migrate out of the way, and we kill them off simply because their ranges get run over by climates they can't deal with. In the oceans, we're already seeing the coral reefs dying out because of two things: It's warmer than they can deal with, but also, so much carbon dioxide is being pumped into the ocean that it's acidifying them. For instance, in the Arctic we're seeing terapods with the shells being eaten off their backs, literally. It's crazy what's happening.

In your book, you say our climate has only been stable for 10,000 years, and that stability is what human civilization is predicated on.

Absolutely, our crops are only predictable because we don't see much change in climate. Weather becomes unpredictable if we globally warm a little bit. On the way [to a globally warmed world] we go into these instabilities, as it jumps back and forth between two states before reaching an end state. Well, [as that happens] farms fail. And human civilization is based on food - that we have this abundance of food. We quit being cave people and started being a civilization when there was an abundance of food. If we cut back on farm yields, we face catastrophe. And this is what a change climate will do.

For instance, the wheat belt turns into the dust belt. All the Republicans with all the farm subsidies in the world, I'm sorry, if you have 10 years of dust and then come back to being good, the farmers are all busted and gone away.