The Disappearance of the Ganges

[suchandra]

There was recently a tv documentation about Mother Ganges who is today a dead river with not one living entity like fish in it - the most sacred river of India and millions of Indians misuse Ganga Ma as sewage plant - every little village disposes all of its waste into Ganga Ma - no laws by the government. The same what happened in the sixties with all big rivers like Thames, Seine, Mississippi, Danube and Rhine.

Somehow the governments passed laws and now these rivers are full of trouts, fish which only survive in 100% clean water. Why India cant manage to stop turning Mother Ganges into a dead river? Now it is reported that people observe Mother Ganges to gradually disappear - who wonders?

 

 

<!-- the top of the post, the background graphic gets applied here, and we truncate the title itself so it fits, in case of long post titles - title will still show the full title though -->The Disappearance of the Ganges - 2007 Update

 

 

<!-- end .post-top --> <!-- the main section of the post goes here --> By Stephen Knapp (Sri Nandanandana dasa)

As reported in an article by Charles Arthur in the June 8, 1999 edition of The Independent in England, new information has been gathered by scientists at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, regarding how the glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating. As we had explained, the glacier above Gangotri, from which the Ganges River starts, has retreated about one kilometer in the past 20 years or so. In fact, it has been determined that these glaciers are retreating faster than anywhere else on the planet. Professor Syed Hasnain, the main author of the report, relates that all of the glaciers in the middle Himalayas are retreating. He warns that many of the glaciers in this region could disappear by 2035. New fears are that the meltwater could produce catastrophic floods as mountain lakes overflow.

As I explained in my book, The Vedic Prophecies: A New Look into the Future, the Vedic texts reveal that such holy rivers as the Ganges will dry up and become only a series of small lakes, at best. In this way, it may practically disappear, as did the Sarasvati River. This latest report surely seems to show the possibility of this happening sooner than expected. This also shows the reason that the origination mouth of the Ganges, at the ice cave called Gaumukh above Gangotri, is retreating farther away as the years go by. So those travelers who wish to journey to this mouth of the holy Ganga will have to travel farther up into the hills as time goes by. This also indicates why this mouth of the Ganges is always changing in its appearance.

Getting back to the way the glaciers are retreating, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, a research team has found that the mountain glaciers are diminishing in the West as well. The Alps have lost nearly 50% of their ice in the last 100 years. The Major glacier at Mt. Kenya has lost 8% of its size, and 14 of the 27 glaciers in Spain are gone.

The disappearing of the mountain glaciers is also reported in an article by Lily Whiteman in the January/February, 1999 issue of National Parks. It stated that there were more than 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana back in 1850. Now there are only 50, and it is expected that these will also disappear within the next four decades. This is primarily blamed on the increase in global temperatures by only one degree since the 1800’s. Glaciers, because of being too solid and stable to show short-term variations in climate, are particularly good barometers of global warming.

In regard to the Vedic tradition, it explains that the Ganges fell from heaven to earth and was caught on the head of Lord Shiva. This was to prevent the intense damage that the force of it would cause to the earth if it fell directly on to the planet. This took place at Gangotri, where the water backed up into the mountains where much of it froze. The course of the Ganges is said to still flow through the universe and come down to the earth planet. However, much of the river water comes from underneath the glacier. If the glacier at Gaumukh does continue to recede or melt away, and if the Ganges would ever cease its flow or begin to dry up, it would certainly mean the end of an era and a drastic affect on the Vedic spiritual culture as we have known it in India. Indeed, it would never be the same.

2007 Update

I visited Gangotri again in June of 2007, and it was easy to see that the Gaumukh glacier is melting faster than ever. The water that flowed downstream and over the falls at Gangotri was really fierce. This does not mean that there was merely more water in the river, but that the glacier was melting faster than previously. There are a few reasons for this.

One of the issues is that India is building dams on all of its rivers. Along the Ganga there is a dam at Tehri, which has created a green lake that backs up for miles along the river. As was explained to me, this lake now somehow attracts more rain to that area, leaving the clouds drained by the time they get up toward Gangotri. This also leaves the region of Gangotri and Gaumukh drier than before. This also prevents the Gaumukh glacier from being replenished with the rain or snow that it normally would receive. Thus, the rate of it receding away from Bhojbasa or Gangotri is increasing. This is not only from the general affects of global warming, but now also due to not being replenished by rains and snowfall that add water to the glacier. So some people are thinking that the Ganga may reduce its flow, or even stop flowing if this effect increases, in as little as 10-15 years.

When I was in Gangotri ten years ago, the Ganga had a steady but kind of meandering flow over the falls. But now there is lots of water that descends rapidly and powerfully. The village people in the area are simple and feel that it’s just more water in the flow. They don’t see how this may indeed affect the future of the glacier. However, some people do understand that this is a bad sign over the long term, and that it may only deplete the glacier that much sooner.

India is making electricity from its hydro-electric dams along its rivers, so much so that it is selling electricity to other countries, even China. Yet it is odd that they cannot even supply steady electricity to places like Gangotri, which is in a blackout about half the time. Other cities in Uttar Pradesh have a similar fate with regular blackouts. But the building of dams is causing environmental changes, the future affects of which are unsure. Thus, as the glaciers recede and dry, the source of the river water will begin to disappear.

This was further explained in a New York Times article on July 17, 2007, by Somini Sengupta. D.P. Dobhal, 44, a glaciologist with the Wadia Institute for Himalayan Geology, has spent the last three years investigating the Chorabari glacier, the waters of which form the Mandakini River. He reports that the glacier itself has receded 90 feet in three years. On a map drawn in 1962, it was plotted 860 feet from where the glacier starts today.

The article goes on to say that a recent study by the Indian Space Research Organization, using satellite imaging to gauge the changes to 466 glaciers, has found more than a 20 percent reduction in size from 1962 to 2001, with bigger glaciers breaking into smaller pieces, each one retreating faster than its parent. A separate study found the Parbati glacier, one of the largest in the area, to be retreating by 170 feet a year during the 1990s. Another glacier that Mr. Dobhal has tracked, known as Dokriani, lost 20 percent of its size in three decades. Between 1991 and 1995, its beginning or snout inched back 55 feet each year.

Similar losses are being seen around the world. Lonnie G. Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, found a 22 percent loss of ice on the Qori Kalis glacier in Peru between 1963 and 2002. He called it “a repeating theme whether you are in tropical Andes, the Himalayas or Kilimanjaro in Africa.”

A vast and ancient sheet of ice, a glacier is in effect the planet’s most sensitive organ, like an aging knee that feels the onset of winter. Its upper reaches accumulate snow and ice when it is cold; its lower reaches melt when it is warm. Its long-term survival depends on the balance between the buildup and the melting. Glaciers worldwide serve as a barometer for global warming, which has, according to a report this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, been spurred in recent decades by rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Even the Himalayas have grown measurably warmer. A recent study found that mean air temperature in the northwestern Himalayan range had risen by 2.2 degrees Celsius in the last two decades, a rate considerably higher than the rate of increase over the last 100 years.

India’s public response so far has been to blame the industrialized world for rising emissions and resist any mandatory caps of its own. India’s per capita share of emissions is one-twentieth that of industrialized countries, the government points out, going on to argue that any restrictions on emissions would stunt its economic growth. And yet, as critics say, India’s rapid economic advance, combined with a population of more than a billion people and growing, will soon make it a far bigger contributor to greenhouse gases. More to the point, India stands to bear some of the most devastating consequences of human-induced climate change.

* * *

It is also interesting that in 2007, many parts of India were affected by floods from the monsoons, such as in Gujarat, Bihar, Orissa, Kerala, Assam, etc. Yet, in places like Madhya Pradesh, they are facing an acute shortage of drinking which has reached crisis levels. As reported in India Tribune, June 23, 2007, households of many towns in the vicinity of Bhopal are receiving only a trickle of water, and that only once in every three days.

In the rural areas where water is only supplied once in a week, it is more alarming. When it is available, it comes through for only 30-45 minutes. Officials estimate that nearly 65 million people, or 70 percent of its population, are enveloped by this crisis. Furthermore, the quality of the water is also troubling, where sewage is getting mixed in to the water in many places, such as Bhopal.

Bhopal is also hit by this water crisis, but mainly because of its population increase which has grown from 800,000 to 2.4 million in only the last decade. With such a population increase in just ten years, then it could grow to over 5 million in another decade. If other districts in India are growing as quickly, then the water crisis will only continue to spread.

This brings to mind the predictions that, just as there may be wars over oil today, there will be water wars in the future.

As the government of India is already rationing water in as many as 115 urban centers, tens of thousands of people are buying water from private sources. For example, six families in Bhopal are jointly purchasing water from a tanker for Rs. 500 every third day or so. But another problem that India is facing is that ground water levels have been receding for years, so much so that even thousands of hand pumps are no longer operational because they no longer can reach the water. Thus, this water problem seems like it will only increase if some serious strategy is not developed soon.

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[Guruvani]

Looks like the world governments had better start developing de-salination facilities on a large scale because rainfail is going to get scarce in places that need it and abundant in places that don't.

[suchandra]

 

Looks like the world governments had better start developing de-salination facilities on a large scale because rainfail is going to get scarce in places that need it and abundant in places that don't.

 

 

Fourth most polluted river in the world - Mother Ganga must surely feel offended. Desalination, you find lots of headlines like, "Costly desalination plans dropped. Water firm finds it's too expensive. Plans to alleviate water shortages by making sea water drinkable have been abandoned."

 

 

The Hindu.com: According to records available, during the period of late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, a Swiss newspaper published a report which defined the Ganga as the fourth most polluted river in the world. Later, Mr. Gandhi called for cleaning of Ganga and set up the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) which ultimately started on June 14, 1986 at Rajendra Prasad Ghat in Varanasi but it is yet to serve the purpose.

Recently, the Society for Social Action and Research (SAR), an NGO, said in its report that a regular dip in Ganga could lead to several water-borne diseases. However, Ganga water is still considered holy by the Hindus and is used in religious ceremonies and is deemed to provide `punya' (virtue).

 

[Guruvani]

 

Fourth most polluted river in the world - Mother Ganga must surely feel offended. Desalination, you find lots of headlines like, "Costly desalination plans dropped. Water firm finds it's too expensive. Plans to alleviate water shortages by making sea water drinkable have been abandoned."

 

Yep, it's a problem.

 

That is one of the opulences of North Florida that we are setting on the largest fresh water aquafer on the planet.

 

You can dig a hole here with a shovel and find water in many places.

 

We have fresh water springs in this area that all spill out millions of gallons of fresh water daily forming a river of fresh spring water.

 

One of the favorite recreational sports in this area is tubing down this river of cold spring water.

 

Some of the springs spill into the Santa Fe river which then spill into the Suwannee River.

 

We have fresh water all over the place here in abundance.

[suchandra]

 

Yep, it's a problem.

 

That is one of the opulences of North Florida that we are setting on the largest fresh water aquafer on the planet.

 

You can dig a hole here with a shovel and find water in many places.

 

We have fresh water springs in this area that all spill out millions of gallons of fresh water daily forming a river of fresh spring water.

 

One of the favorite recreational sports in this area is tubing down this river of cold spring water.

 

Some of the springs spill into the Santa Fe river which then spill into the Suwannee River.

 

We have fresh water all over the place here in abundance.

 

You mean, there's no rain all over Florida but fresh water springs everywhere? This can only be traced back to the fact that there're must be many Vaishnavas performing Sankirtan yajna - otherwise Mother Nature will be quickly turning it off when sinful people simply use it for feeding fatstock.

[Murali_Mohan_das]

It's truly sobering to read about what is happening specifically with the Ganga. Pollution is without a doubt one of the major material issues (with a spiritual solution) confronting humans (and other life) on the planet today.

 

Also, there is cause for some healthy skepticism with regards to AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming)--the concept that human activity is the primary cause of the modest increase in temperature observed over the globe in the past 100 years.

 

One thing to consider: we have only had accurate record-keeping with regard to weather (temperature, barometric pressure, etc.) for a century (while the Earth planet is believed to be 4.5 billion years old or so). I imagine we've been monitoring glaciers and such for an even shorter period of time.

 

So, we really do not have the data to say that the Himalayan glaciers (and others) have not contracted and expanded greatly over the millenia. It's a safe assumption to make that they indeed *have* done so.

 

While the glaciers may be retreating at the moment, it could be, as some have suggested, that we are actually moving naturally out of a natural global cold spell. There's no need for panic.

 

Where we *do* need to make concerted effort is in the area of pollution. We are poisoning ourselves (and our neighbors) in very many ways.

 

With regards to desalination--I've never understood why we need heavy industrial desalination plants--it seems like there ought to be a practical way to build a passive desalination plant using sunlight to evaporate the water and have it condense on the inside of a green-house-like structure.

[Murali_Mohan_das]

 

You mean, there's no rain all over Florida but fresh water springs everywhere?

 

No rain in Florida??? I was a young boy when I visited Miami (which is in Southern Florida, not the North, like Alachua), but I recall a rainshower happening every afternoon.

[suchandra]

 

No rain in Florida??? I was a young boy when I visited Miami (which is in Southern Florida, not the North, like Alachua), but I recall a rainshower happening every afternoon.

 

Florida Drought 2007 Photos and Video

[Murali_Mohan_das]

 

Florida Drought 2007 Photos and Video

 

Pretty nifty! Is that lake in the south, middle, or north of the state (too lazy to look it up at the moment)?

 

Driving to San Jose Airport last night, I noticed the resevoir by Gilroy was quite low.

 

Of course droughts and floods are nothing new--though it's good to consider that our actions (positive and negative) can affect the weather (directly and via karma).

 

It's well-known that the redwood trees we have here affect the climate surrounding them (they expire moisture as well as inspiring it). Cutting down lots of trees will affect the local climate.

[suchandra]

 

Pretty nifty! Is that lake in the south, middle, or north of the state (too lazy to look it up at the moment)?

 

Driving to San Jose Airport last night, I noticed the resevoir by Gilroy was quite low.

 

Of course droughts and floods are nothing new--though it's good to consider that our actions (positive and negative) can affect the weather (directly and via karma).

 

It's well-known that the redwood trees we have here affect the climate surrounding them (they expire moisture as well as inspiring it). Cutting down lots of trees will affect the local climate.

 

So long HG Sriman Guruvani prabhu chants Hare Krishna in High Springs there will be always enough fresh water in abundance.

[Guruvani]

 

You mean, there's no rain all over Florida but fresh water springs everywhere? This can only be traced back to the fact that there're must be many Vaishnavas performing Sankirtan yajna - otherwise Mother Nature will be quickly turning it off when sinful people simply use it for feeding fatstock.

We have been in a drought the last year, but lately we have been getting lots of good rain and the forecast for an active hurricane season has just been revived.

 

Florida is used to having lots of rain, but North Florida almost always has a dry spring. Then summer rains and winter rains are frequent.

Last winter we had a dry winter and then a dry spring so the vegetation was getting thirsty.

 

Lately it has been very wet and hot.

But, even with the drought the springs were still kicking out millions of gallons each everyday.

 

We still need lots of rain to get the water table back up to where we like it.

But, my 60' well is still kicking out water faithfully, so the water table is not down real low.

[Guruvani]

 

Florida Drought 2007 Photos and Video

 

Yep, Lake Okeechobee was even on fire just before the summer rains started.

But, we have more water up here than South Florida.

Tampa wants to start tapping into the reserves of North Florida but North Floridians are fighting it.

 

Within 5 minutes of my house are probably the greatest occurence of large fresh water springs anywhere in the world.

 

That makes this little town a bit of a tourist attraction, but we still keep our small town charm.

[Murali_Mohan_das]

Not to distract from the plight of the Ganges, but to put the AGW issue into some more perspective, here is the latest post on RealClimate. It is one of many examples of the dilemmas that scientists face when doing this sort of research.

 

Just how much can you trust your data???

 

http://realclimate.org/ [this site was set up by climate scientists to debunk some of the AGW skeptics' claims]

 

 

1934 and all that

 

Filed under:

• Instrumental Record
  
• Climate Science

— gavin @ 5:33 PM

Another week, another ado over nothing.

 

Last Saturday, Steve McIntyre wrote an email to NASA GISS pointing out that for some North American stations in the GISTEMP analysis, there was an odd jump in going from 1999 to 2000. On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of US temperature data. There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched, but that turned out not to be the case. There were in fact a number of small offsets (of both sign) between the same stations in the two different data sets. The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear.

 

This was duly done by Tuesday, an email thanking McIntyre was sent and the data analysis (which had been due in any case for the processing of the July numbers) was updated accordingly along with an acknowledgment to McIntyre and update of the methodology.

 

The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area).

[Murali_Mohan_das]

That last quote was from the climate scientists. Here is how The Register (a bunch of cheeky Brit geeks) played the story:

 

 

An inconvenient update

 

Cool heads notice flaw in US warming data

 

By Lucy Sherriff

 

Published Thursday 16th August 2007 15:02 GMT

 

Comment Last week, statistician and amateur meteorologist Steve McIntyre notified NASA of an error in its climate data. The results of the hasty correction mean that as far as the US is concerned, 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record. 1934 is.

 

Headline-grabbing statements that nine out of ten of the hottest years on record were in the last decade are no longer correct, for the US, at least (bad news for Mr Gore, certainly). And those who remain sceptical about the nature of the link between human activity and global warming were delighted, as the Goddard Institute for Space Studies had to quietly admit the mistake and publish corrected data.

 

But what does this mean for the rest of us? What was the glitch? Where was the miscalculation? And do we need to check our data? Can we all hop into our Humvees and barrel around town, untroubled by our carbon emissions?

 

Goddard itself says the change is not significant enough to change the overall trends associated with global warming. Is it right?

Richard Allen, environmental systems scientist at the Centre for Atmospheric Science, thinks the revision is not worth getting too agitated about.

 

"The US only provides two per cent of the data, so it is not important as far as global temperature change goes," he told us.

 

But this is only true if we assume the rest of the world is not suffering from a similar (or entirely different) glitch. So what was the problem?

 

"What happens is that station data [the raw temperature readings from US weather stations] are corrected for slight changes, such as urbanisation. NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] in the US normally does this, it supplies it in near real time to GISS and NASA. But for some reason, they stopped doing this, and some stations didn't have their corrections. Now they do." Allen explains.

 

Allen argues that discontinuities like this do tend to get picked up pretty quickly, and says this whole episode is a good example of how this happens. "Nothing is perfect," he says. "But there are a lot of scientists out there who are working very carefully. So it is unlikely that it is a big problem."

 

Because the error in the US data is so specific to the way the US manages its figures, it seems unlikely that the data from the rest of the world will be afflicted by the same problem.

 

Meanwhile, McIntyre is unhappy with the way Goddard handled the situation. He says that the failure to put out an official announcement of the update left GISS open to accusations that it being less than frank.

The rather taciturn handling of the change has provoked some to wonder whether a revision in the opposite direction might have been given more prominence. And who can honestly say that it wouldn't?

 

That alone should be a sobering thought for those working in the field.

But botched PR doesn't prove that global warming isn't happening. That changes had to be made needs to be taken seriously. The scientific community should take note and make sure the rest of the data is in order.

For those who are interested, the old data is here, and the recalculated data is here. The old and new temperatures differ by a hundredth of a degree. ®

 

 

Not to distract from the plight of the Ganges, but to put the AGW issue into some more perspective, here is the latest post on RealClimate. It is one of many examples of the dilemmas that scientists face when doing this sort of research.

 

Just how much can you trust your data???

 

http://realclimate.org/ [this site was set up by climate scientists to debunk some of the AGW skeptics' claims]

[Svarupa]

 

 

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Maha-Vishnu and His representatives like Lord Shiva control the material creation or mahat-tattva like the flow of the Ganges.