The Sebinomics Blog 1.0

This quote is taken from Gurcharan Das’ book “India Unbound” and really makes the point in the Flat World.

This blog entry provides additional facts to the presentation “Ecology And Our Environment” held by Sabrina Meier, Joshua Hung, and myself, at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland on Monday, November 13, 2006. 

I am a frequent reader of TIME magazine and The Economist, and I like to watch documentaries about our environment on TV and in the theater. In the past few weeks, I happened to come across many different articles—more than ever—on the effects of global warming, greenhouse gases, India’s and China’s disastrous approach to environment, and I watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth“, a fascinating documentary on global warming. All the material I have seen and read made me realize that we are on a crusade to destruction, which needs to end soon. If we take a look at the following photograph, don’t you want to keep this wonderful star clean and safe?

Let us define ecology: Ecology is the study of the interactions between living things (including human beings) and the environment.

To prevent destroying our ecosystem, we have to work hand in hand and be aware of what we can damage. For instance, the ten hottest years ever recorded in history have occurred in the past fourteen years. 

Unfortunately, our politicians still don’t really know how to tackle this issue. Let’s see what one of our prominent leaders has to say about global warming: 

I don’t want to sound like a doom’s day promoter, but somehow this looks like a warning to me. And, if we take a look at natural catastrophes—not even mentioning insurance cases—the year 2005 was a scary year all over the world with catastrophes including Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (August 2005), the Tsunami in South Asia (December 2004), storms and floods in Switzerland (August 2005), and Mumbai (July 2005), just to mention a few. Since Mumbai might not have gotten a lot of attention in Europe and the US, I would like to share a few data here:

“Mumbai, India – July 26, 2005″
37 inches of rain in 24 hours
Water levels reached 7 feet
The most an Indian city has ever received in one day
The death toll in Western India reached 1000

And, what is The Greenhouse Effect exactly? 

Taking a look at the following graphs, we can recognize a cyclical phenomenon where the amount of Carbon Dioxide, abbreviated as CO2, is increasing and decreasing with the temperature. What we need to consider is that the amount of CO2 has never been as high as today, and if we continue not to care, it will have disastrous consequences. 

One of the biggest problems caused by global warming is the melting of the poles. The extent of the sea-ice has dropped by 1.5 million square kilometers since 1970. This is a big problem for our environment because the sea-ice works like a gigantic mirror. More than 90% of the sunlight bounces off the sea-ice and the earth stays cooler. As the ice melts, the ocean absorbs more than 90% and that warms up the earth. If the oceans get warmer the coral riffs die and with them many species that depend on these riffs. All the ocean streams on our planet are connected with each other and they work like a conveyor: the so-called “ocean conveyor belt“. For example, if there is an anomaly somewhere in Greenland—because its ice melts away and cools off the water stream on its coast—the effect of the water temperature will be felt all the way to the coral riffs in Australia because of the ocean conveyor and will gradually kill live in those waters. And by the way, this is actually happening as I am writing this blog:

Speaking of the melting poles: For the first time in history scientists have found drowned polar bears. This is a very disturbing fact because polar bears are good swimmers and swim distances up to 100 km or more. When they get tired and look for a little place of ice to rest and they cannot find any ice, the polar bears just get going until they are tired and drown. Scientists are expecting the extinction of the polar bear species by the end of the century.

I don’t know about you, but I think polar bears have absolutely no guilt in what is happening to our environment and I see it as homicide if they die by our hand! 

Furthermore, the presentation discusses these TIME magazine articles:

-Visions of Green
-Running out of breath
-Awashing trash
-Saving Seoul
-Choking the growth
-Toxic shock
-China’s water woes

Please find these articles at TIME.com following this link, http://www.time.com/time/asia/2006/environment/index.html.

I don’t belong to any environmental organization such as WWF, Greenpeace or others, but I like our planet and I especially like animals. Dolphins, penguins, and polar bears are among the funniest and cutest animals, and if we don’t consider changing our habits or just think about the consequences of our actions, we might not be able to see the following pictures anymore: 

I hope this blog entry and the presentation—for whom as seen the presentation—were able to give you an insight into what is happening on our globe and what the issues are. 

(Source: http://www.newint.org/issue357/Images/together.gif)

Let us interact with our environment in a rather sustainable way—together!

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All information in this blog entry is taken from the following sources:
Al Gore “An Inconventient Truth”
Ecology [Encyclopedia] http://kosmoi.com/Life/Ecology
Polar Bears on thin Ice http://www.savebiogems.org/polar
Paleoclimate Ancient Temperatures http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/paleoclimate.htm