Global Warming in Pakistan
Global Warming Can Affect Agricultural Ecosystem - 8/1/08
The agricultural ecosystem can collapse due to global warming and associated risks as it is feared that rising temperature can lead to catastrophes like droughts, water shortages, productivity and biodiversity loss across the world, said Dr Tariq Mehmood, University of Arid Agriculture Rawalpindi's (UAAR) Department of Environmental Sciences chairman, here on Thursday.
Talking to a delegation of Monsoon Asian Agro-Environmental Research Consortium (MARCO) here, he said 70 percent of the total land of Pakistan was located in arid and semi-arid regions, while droughts and loss of biological productivity were common phenomena in the country.
Mehmood said Pakistan was confronted with environmental deterioration in agro-ecosystem and it may cause change in land use due to contamination of farmlands by chemical pollutants from industries.
The consortium was constituted to conduct result-oriented research to solve environmental problems affecting agriculture and achieve sustainable development by maintaining a sound agro-ecosystem in the monsoon region and dissemination of results to its members for effective natural resource management and policy-making.
Pakistan: Deforestation Reason Behind Global Warming - 7/24/08
Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has said that deforestation is the basic reason for global warming, water scarcity and food shortage in many parts of the world including Pakistan. The Prime Minister said this while talking to Tohru Kuroha, President Environmental Measurement Services (EMS) Inc., Japan who called on him at the PM's House Thursday morning.
The Prime Minister said Pakistan is a water scarce country and requires modern technology capable of holding moisture for a long time for agricultural cultivation and afforestation.
The Prime Minister said that Pakistan would welcome cooperation between the EMS and Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) and National Research Council (NARC) in the field of agriculture and environment.
He said that the cooperation with EMS in providing new technology to address the issue of water scarcity has come at the right time for the country and will boost the agricultural growth.
Pakistan's Wetter Weather Linked to Global Warming - 4/28/06
New data from millennium-long tree-ring analyses are indicating that mountains in northern Pakistan have grown significantly wetter over the past century than they have been over the last millennium - quite possibly due to human-induced global warming, the researchers say.
"Tree rings can tell a lot about precipitation changes over time," such as how much precipitation fell and whether it fell in the form of rain or snow, says Kerstin Treydte of the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL in Birmensdorf, Switzerland, and lead author of the study in today's Nature.
Increasing global temperatures over the past 150 years are "at least partly" the result of "the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases during this time," the team wrote. "We're not atmospheric scientists," Treydte says, "so we're not going to argue that the increasing precipitation is directly caused by a carbon dioxide increase" in the atmosphere. "What we will say, is that at the same time as the Industrial Revolution began, carbon dioxide increased, and there was a coincidental increase in precipitation - so there could be a human role," she says.
One of the biggest uncertainties in predicting climate change involves the hydrologic cycle - both "the net effect of water in the climate system and the way in which water will be redistributed over the surface of the planet," wrote Michael Evans of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson in an accompanying commentary also in today's Nature. Understanding the hydrologic cycle and how it might be affected by warming temperatures is complex.
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