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Global warming—a looming catastrophe for Pakistan
The UN Secretary General has recently warned that the world is “heading towards an abyss”. Rising sea levels will inundate many coastal cities such as Karachi. Pakistan and some other south Asian countries are at extreme risk.
With only a two to three degree rise in average global temperature over the next 50 years, most of Pakistan could become uninhabitable, and tens of millions could die due to mass famines caused by failures of crops due to lack of water. The possibility of a nuclear confrontation between Pakistan and India over water disputes cannot be ruled out as large populations suffer from hunger and death.
India has wisely constructed a large number of dams over the last few decades but Pakistan seems to be bent on committing mass suicide due to criminal negligence by successive governments to construct large dams and reservoirs. Modelling studies predict that as the glaciers melt rapidly during the next 20 years, we will face vast flooding of rivers. This precious water must be captured and stored, not allowed to cause devastation and just go waste. After 20 to 30 years, as the rivers dry up, the country could face long periods of drought. We must therefore, over the next 10 to 15 years, create enough water storage capacity to meet at least five to seven years of our national needs, to cope with these long periods of droughts.
We must act with a sense of urgency.
Robots learning like children
At the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova, robots have been created with the ability to learn from their surroundings, just as children do when they are growing up. The robot has the size of a toddler, and its brain has been designed so that it learns by interacting with its surroundings. Scientists hope to understand from the robot, named “iCub”, how human beings think and learn. iCub can recognise human faces and detect specific objects against a background. It has fingers which can clasp objects and it is learning how to catch a ball in mid-air. In time, it is hoped that iCub will also learn to recognise difference sounds and finally learn to speak.
Eleven European universities and research institutes have joined together in this Robot-Cub project with a US 12 million grant from the European Union. Twenty iCubs are being manufactured of which eight have already been sent to selected laboratories in Europe and Turkey, where they will be subjected to various training programmes. Other robots previously developed are the wheeled robot Khepera, built by a Swiss consortium, and the Japanese humanoid robots HRP-2, PINO and Asimo which can play music or walk on uneven surfaces. Robots have a huge potential in both industrial and military areas, and countries with the most advanced robotic armies may one day rule the world.
Once robots become super intelligent and learn to replicate themselves, there may no longer be any need for those frail and volatile biological earthlings called “humans”!
The Ozone hole
In 1974 , Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, working at the University of California, Irvine warned that certain chemicals used as refrigerants (chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs) could break down in the stratosphere, releasing chlorine which could destroy atmospheric ozone. Ozone protects the earth's surface from the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation. It was not until 1985 that the world was put on high alert when a team of scientists from the British Antarctic Survey discovered the ozone hole above the Antarctica. In 1987, under the Montreal Protocol, countries agreed to phase out the production of CFCs as well as the bromine containing compounds used in fire extinguishers.
For the first time in human history, the world acted in unison to tackle a major environmental problem. Rowland and Molina shared the 1995 Nobel Prize with Paul Crutzen of Germany for unravelling the ozone chemistry involved.
After peaking in the late 1990s, the concentration of ozone destroying compounds is declining in the stratosphere, and the holes in the ozone layer are gradually closing. Why are the holes above the poles? Outside the polar regions only a few hundred molecules of ozone are catalytically destroyed by each chlorine atom. In the polar stratosphere, however, the ice particles present in the stratospheric clouds provide the surface on which the chlorine atoms rapidly attack tens of thousands of ozone molecules, and the loss rate can reach up to three per cent per day in the centre of the ozone hole in Antarctica. It has been calculated that if no action had been taken in 1987, two-third of the atmospheric zone would have been destroyed by 2065, resulting in a dramatic rise in skin cancer.
