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Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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Warming imperils stratocumulus clouds

News

  • Marine clouds that protect us from hothouse Earth conditions by reflecting sunlight back into space could break up and vanish if CO2 in the atmosphere triples, researchers warned.

Findings

  • So-called stratocumulus clouds cover about 20 percent of subtropical oceans, mostly near western seaboards such as the coasts of California, Mexico and Peru.
  • When they disappear, Earth warms dramatically, by about eight degrees Celsius in addition to the global warming that comes from enhanced greenhouse concentrations alone.
  • A temperature increase of that magnitude would melt polar ice and lift sea levels tens of metres.
  • The last time the planet was that hot, some 50 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch, crocodiles roamed the Arctic.
  • Even half that much warming would overwhelm humanity’s capacity to adapt.
  • A barely one-degree increase since the mid-19th century mostly in the last 50 years has been enough to worsen heatwaves, droughts, and flooding, along with cyclones engorged by rising seas.
  • The findings, may solve a long-standing mystery about the early Eocene Epoch 50 million years ago, when temperatures were about 12C warmer than today.
  • Climate models indicate that CO2 levels would have had to rise above 4,000 ppm to explain that level of warming, but geological evidence shows concentrations only 25-to-50 percent that high.How low clouds over tropical oceans respond to global warming is probably the largest contributor to uncertainties in climate predictions.

Climate change affected fisheries globally: Study

News

  • Climate change has taken a toll on several of the world’s fisheries, and overfishing has magnified the problem, researchers have warned.

Findings

  • The study suggests that ocean warming has led to an estimated 4.1 per cent drop in sustainable catches, on average, for many species of fish and shellfish from 1930 to 2010.
  • In five regions of the world, including the East China Sea and North Sea, the estimated decline was 15 to 35 per cent.
  • Overfishing not only makes fisheries more vulnerable to ocean warming, but continued warming will hinder efforts to rebuild overfished populations, the study suggested.
  • For the study, the scientists studied the impact of ocean warming on 235 populations of 124 species in 38 ecological regions around the world.
  • Species included fish, crustaceans such as shrimp, and molluscs such as sea scallops.
  • Their analysis covered about one third of the reported global catch, and losing species outweighed the winners as the oceans warmed.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

Immigration from India is unpopular in UK: study

News

  • Britons don’t want higher levels of immigration from India and many other non-EU countries even if it comes at the price of not securing a free trade agreement, new research in the U.K. has found.

Findings

  • Only higher levels of immigration from the U.S., Canada and Australia would be tolerated in exchange for trade arrangements, polling carried out on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society.
  • The research points to one of the tensions at the heart of Brexit: while the British government pushes its vision of a “global” Britain, reaching out beyond Europe, with public opinion stacked against immigration from beyond the EU as well as from within it, the government could struggle to reach deals to boost trade with these nations.
  • Opinion polling conducted, suggested that just 9% of the public were willing to accept significantly higher levels of immigration from India, with just 26% willing to accept slightly higher levels.
  • The same applies to a range of countries from South Africa, to China to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, Russia, Japan and Saudi Arabia as well as to the EU and individual member states such as France, Germany and Italy.
  • A trade deal with India has been repeatedly touted by the UK government, India has highlighted its concerns around Britain’s immigration policy, particularly towards students and professionals.
  • While Britain is overhauling its immigration regime to bring in a system based on the skills set of the person wanting to come to the UK rather than on their origin, it has been adamant that its fundamental approach has been welcoming of the “brightest and the best.”
  • Last year in evidence to a parliamentary committee, Britain’s foreign office insisted that India accounted for the largest number of individuals staying in the UK illegally. In addition, according to official figures out last week, Indian professionals accounted for the majority of Tier 2 work visas in 2018.
  • In an acknowledgement of the significance accorded to Britain’s immigration regime by India, earlier this year officials from Britain’s Home Office travelled to New Delhi to “road test” the proposals for a new post-Brexit immigration system.

Pakistan confiscates seminaries, assets of JuD, FIF

News

  • Pakistan intensified its ongoing crackdown against the banned organisations and took control of several seminaries and assets belonging to Mumbai terror attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed-led Jamaat-ud-Dawa and its wing Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF).

Beyond News

  • The confiscation of properties of JuD and FIF comes after Pakistan formally placed the proscribed organisations in the list of banned organisations.
  • According to Pakistan’s National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) list, which was updated, the JuD and FIF were among 70 organisations proscribed by the Ministry of Interior under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997.
  • At least two seminaries and property belonging to proscribed JuD and FIF were taken over by the government in a fresh crackdown launched by the law enforcement agencies under the National Action Plan (NAP).
  • Following the Punjab government’s directives, the administrators were appointed at the seminaries to take over their control.
  • The management and operational control of the properties were taken over by the district administration of Attock.
  • The Pakistan government also put out another order saying it has frozen assets of all UN designated organisations like JuD, FIF.
  • The US Department of the Treasury has designated its chief Saeed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and the US, since 2012, has offered a USD 10 million reward for information that brings Saeed to justice.
  • Saeed was listed under UN Security Council Resolution 1267 in December 2008. He was released from house arrest in Pakistan in November 2017.
  • The NACTA has so far declared 70 terrorist organisations as banned and a sizeable number of these organisations are based in Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
  • Already, government has arrested at least 44 individuals of various banned groups.
  • The crackdown came amid tensions with India following a suicide attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror group that killed 40 CRPF soldiers.
  • India last week handed over the dossier to Pakistan to take action against the JeM, as pressure mounted on Islamabad to take action against individual and organisation listed by the UN Security Council as terrorists.

Environment Ministry plugs loophole that allowed plastic waste import

plastics eating bacteria

News

  • The government has plugged a loophole that allowed the import of plastic waste into India for processing.

Beyond News

  • Solid plastic waste has been prohibited from import into the country including in Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and by Export Oriented Units (EOU),” the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) said in an order made public. The change in law was part of the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management & Transboundary Movement) Amendment Rules, 2019.
  • Indian firms are importing plastic scraps from China, Italy, Japan and Malawi for recycling and the imports of PET bottle scrap & flakes has increased from 12,000 tonnes in FY 16-17 to 48,000 tonnes in FY 17-18 growing @ 290%. India has already imported 25,000 MT in the first 3 months of FY 18-19.
  • India consumes about 13 million tonnes of plastic and recycles only about 4 million tonnes. To incentivise domestic plastic recycling units, the government had banned the import of plastic waste, particularly PET bottles, in 2015. In 2016, an amendment allowed such imports as long as they were carried out by agencies situated in SEZs.
  • The lack of an efficient waste collection and segregation system is the root cause for much of the plastic not making its way to recycling centres.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

ISRO, French space agency seal agreement on maritime security

News

  • National space agency ISRO and its French counterpart CNES sealed an agreement to set up a joint maritime surveillance system in the country in May.

Beyond News

  • The two nations will explore putting up a constellation of low-Earth orbiting satellites that will identify and track movement of ships globally and in particular those moving in the Indian Ocean region where France has its Reunion Islands.
  • Before that, they will initially share data from their present space systems and develop new algorithms to analyse them, according to the Paris based National Centre for Space Studies.
  • The agreement comes a year after the broad collaboration plan the two governments initiated during French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit in March last 2018.
  • The CNES-ISRO agreement [intends] to supply an operational system for detecting, identifying and tracking ships in the Indian Ocean. It provides for a maritime surveillance centre to be set up in India in May this year; sharing of capacity to process existing satellite data and joint development of associated algorithms.
  • For the next phase of the programme, studies for an orbital infrastructure to be operated jointly by the two countries are ongoing. CNES is working with its industry partners and with ISRO to devise the most appropriate technical solution.
  • The two agencies have put up two climate and ocean weather monitoring satellites Megha-Tropiques (of 2011) and SARAL-AltiKa (2013) that are considered a model.

Indore gets cleanest city tag for third year in a row

News

  • Indore was adjudged India’s cleanest city for the third straight year in the central government’s cleanliness survey announced.
  • The second and third positions in the category were grabbed by Ambikapur in Chhattisgarh and Mysuru in Karnataka.

Beyond News

  • While the New Delhi Municipal Council area was given the ‘Cleanest Small City’ award, Uttarakhand’s Gauchar was adjudged the ‘Best Ganga Town’ in the central government survey.
  • The ‘Cleanest Big City’ award has been bagged by Ahmedabad, while Raipur is the ‘Fastest Moving Big City’.
  • Ujjain has been the adjudged the ‘Cleanest Medium City’ and Mathura-Vrindavan bagged the tag of the ‘Fastest Moving Medium Cities’.
  • Top-ranked cities received a statue of Mahatma Gandhi as a memento for their work towards cleanliness. Swachh Survekshan 2019 covered all urban local bodies in the country, making it the largest such cleanliness survey in the world.

Assam gets ‘smart’ fence along border

News

  • A digital ‘barrier’ has finally filled a 61 km gap on the 4,096.7 km India-Bangladesh border fence three decades after the project kick started.

Beyond News

  • Assam shares a 263 km border with Bangladesh. Much of the border was fenced, but a 61 km stretch in Dhubri district remained open owing to the terrain dictated by the Brahmaputra.
  • Union Home Minister inaugurated an electronic surveillance system that “is expected to diminish challenges faced by the Border Security Force in manning this stretch against cross-border crimes.”
  • Comprising microwave communication, optical fibre cables, cameras, and an intrusion detection device, this system is called BOLD-QIT (Border Electronically Dominated QRT Interception Technique) and was established under the Comprehensive Integrated Border Management System.
  • The Centre, had taken the cue from Israel and in 2017 decided to go for a technological solution for fool-proof sealing of the border.
  • This stretch is where the vast Brahmaputra and its numerous channels with chars (sandbars) in between flow into Bangladesh. Infiltrators, cattle smugglers and others invariably took advantage of the difficulty in keeping vigil along this stretch, even on speedboats. This system has given us the eyes and ears where it is difficult for our men to see and hear.
  • Fencing of the India-Bangladesh border, a long-time demand in Assam for checking illegal influx, started in the 1990s. Phase I, covering Assam, Meghalaya and West Bengal, cost ₹854.35 crore. Phase II included Tripura and Mizoram, the last of the five States bordering Bangladesh, and cost ₹1,930.06 crore.
  • The third phase entailed overhauling the fence erected during Phase I and merging the work under Phase II in 2012. The work is yet to be completed. After a pilot project in West Bengal, the government sanctioned a ₹1,327 crore project for floodlighting 2,840 km of the India-Bangladesh border.

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