Thursday, 17 December 2009
What is Bhakti?
Bhakti is an ancient Sanskrit word which means Pure Love and Devotion. “Pure” implies that there is no adulteration or mixture of anything else. Love in its highest and most perfect state must be entirely pure and devoid of any other desire than to give happiness and benefit to the beloved, the object of one’s love. In the ancient Vedic literatures, the Supreme object of the love of all beings is the Absolute Truth, the Supreme Personality of Godhead who is the source of all that exists and the foundation of the entire creation. That Absolute Living Being is known by many thousands of names in many languages. But amongst all of these names one of His most prominent and perfect names is KRSNA (pronounced Krishna), which means the All Attractive and All Beautiful. KRSNA is the source of every living being and all energy and is also the supreme controller of all that exists. He is eternal and has no origin Himself. He is ever existent and has an eternal form full of Bliss and knowledge, Sat, Chit and Ananda. Pure Love and Devotion to Him is the supreme perfection of all living beings and by attaining this, they enter into the eternal spiritual world where they can eternally associate with and serve the All-Love Sri Krsna along with His eternal associates.
Source: www.purebhakti.com
Source: www.purebhakti.com
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
Monday, 14 December 2009
Proposal: 25 billion dollars to save tropical forests
A global policy to preserve forests and limit carbon dioxide emissions will likely be folded into a draft text this week at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, UN negotiators are preparing a 25 billion US dollar proposal to save tropical forests in more than 10 countries.
"It would be a huge addition to protecting forests,'' says Steve Schwartzman, the director of tropical forest policy at the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund.
Trees soak up greenhouse gas, and their destruction is responsible for almost a fifth of global emissions each year. The plan is to reward investors, for instance by letting them earn carbon-emission credits in return for saving trees, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
The newspaper cites American Electric Power Co for saying that forest preservation may be cheaper than funding carbon capture and storage - a process that captures carbon dioxide from industrial and power plants and stores it away from the atmosphere by different means.
However, there is no guarantee that the proposal will be adopted, the newspaper reports. Delegates have met for four days without approving a draft for 10 billion dollars in general climate aid proposed for all developing nations.
Source: http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2934
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, UN negotiators are preparing a 25 billion US dollar proposal to save tropical forests in more than 10 countries.
"It would be a huge addition to protecting forests,'' says Steve Schwartzman, the director of tropical forest policy at the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund.
Trees soak up greenhouse gas, and their destruction is responsible for almost a fifth of global emissions each year. The plan is to reward investors, for instance by letting them earn carbon-emission credits in return for saving trees, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
The newspaper cites American Electric Power Co for saying that forest preservation may be cheaper than funding carbon capture and storage - a process that captures carbon dioxide from industrial and power plants and stores it away from the atmosphere by different means.
However, there is no guarantee that the proposal will be adopted, the newspaper reports. Delegates have met for four days without approving a draft for 10 billion dollars in general climate aid proposed for all developing nations.
Source: http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2934
Backwards step for forest deal
A proposal aimed at saving the world's tropical forests suffered a setback Sunday, when negotiators at the UN climate talks ditched plans for faster action on the problem because of concerns that rich countries aren't willing to finance it.
Destruction of forests — burning or cutting trees to clear land for plantations or cattle ranches — is thought to account for about 20 percent of global emissions. That's as much carbon dioxide as all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.
So a deal on deforestation is considered a key component of a larger pact on climate change being negotiated in Copenhagen.
On Sunday, language calling for reducing deforestation 50 percent by 2020 was struck from the text being considered. And the document only mentions financing without saying how much would go to the more than 40 developing nations in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
The Europeans want to put in a shorter-term goal, "and the rain forest nations are saying that we are happy to have a goal as long as it's balanced by appropriate funding ... which is missing from the text," said Federica Bietta, the deputy director of the Coalition for Rain Forest Nations. The group represents most of the countries that could take part in a forest scheme.
Antonio Gabriel La Vina, the lead negotiator in the forest talks and author of the latest draft, downplayed the changes and said it was a compromise between those who wanted hard targets and those who didn't.
Environmentalists earlier this month hailed the forest talks as one area where negotiations were progressing and some suggested they could serve as a catalyst to inking a larger climate deal here in Copenhagen.
But they have fallen victim to the same bickering between rich and poor nations which has slowed progress on the wider agreement. There are still no firm figures on financing or cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the larger agreement.
Source: http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2968
Destruction of forests — burning or cutting trees to clear land for plantations or cattle ranches — is thought to account for about 20 percent of global emissions. That's as much carbon dioxide as all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.
So a deal on deforestation is considered a key component of a larger pact on climate change being negotiated in Copenhagen.
On Sunday, language calling for reducing deforestation 50 percent by 2020 was struck from the text being considered. And the document only mentions financing without saying how much would go to the more than 40 developing nations in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
The Europeans want to put in a shorter-term goal, "and the rain forest nations are saying that we are happy to have a goal as long as it's balanced by appropriate funding ... which is missing from the text," said Federica Bietta, the deputy director of the Coalition for Rain Forest Nations. The group represents most of the countries that could take part in a forest scheme.
Antonio Gabriel La Vina, the lead negotiator in the forest talks and author of the latest draft, downplayed the changes and said it was a compromise between those who wanted hard targets and those who didn't.
Environmentalists earlier this month hailed the forest talks as one area where negotiations were progressing and some suggested they could serve as a catalyst to inking a larger climate deal here in Copenhagen.
But they have fallen victim to the same bickering between rich and poor nations which has slowed progress on the wider agreement. There are still no firm figures on financing or cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the larger agreement.
Source: http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2968
What consequences can we expect, and what can we do?
Many of the effects of global warming have been well-documented. It is the precise extent that is difficult to predict.
Predicting the consequences of global warming is one of the really difficult tasks for the world’s climate researchers. Firstly, because the natural processes that cause precipitation, storms, increases in sea level and other expected effects of global warming are dependent on many different factors. Secondly, because it is difficult to predict the size of the emissions of greenhouse gases in the coming decades, as this is determined to a great extent by political decisions and technological breakthroughs.
Many of the effects of global warming have been well-documented, and observations from real life are very much consistent with earlier predictions. It is the precise extent that is difficult to predict. Among the effects that can be predicted are:
More droughts and more flooding:
When the weather gets warmer, evaporation from both land and sea increases. This can cause drought in areas of the world where the increased evaporation is not compensated for by more precipitation. The extra water vapor in the atmosphere has to fall again as extra precipitation, which can cause flooding other places in the world.
Less ice and snow:
Glaciers are shrinking rapidly at present. The trend is for the ice to melt faster than estimated in the IPCC’s latest report. In areas that are dependent on melt water from mountain areas, this can cause drought and a lack of drinking water. According to the IPCC, up to a sixth of the world’s population lives in areas that will be affected by this.
More extreme weather incidents:
The warmer climate will most probably cause more heatwaves, more cases of heavy rainfall and also possibly an increase in the number and/or severity of storms.
Rising sea level:
The sea level rises for two reasons. Partly because of the melting ice and snow, and partly because of the thermal expansion of the sea. Thermal expansion takes a long time, but even an increase in temperature of two degrees Celsius is expected, in due time, to cause a rise in the water level of almost a metre.
In order to get an idea of the extent of the consequences, researchers typically work with scenarios that show various possible developments.
Source: http://en.cop15.dk/climate+facts/what+consequences+can+we+expect
Predicting the consequences of global warming is one of the really difficult tasks for the world’s climate researchers. Firstly, because the natural processes that cause precipitation, storms, increases in sea level and other expected effects of global warming are dependent on many different factors. Secondly, because it is difficult to predict the size of the emissions of greenhouse gases in the coming decades, as this is determined to a great extent by political decisions and technological breakthroughs.
Many of the effects of global warming have been well-documented, and observations from real life are very much consistent with earlier predictions. It is the precise extent that is difficult to predict. Among the effects that can be predicted are:
More droughts and more flooding:
When the weather gets warmer, evaporation from both land and sea increases. This can cause drought in areas of the world where the increased evaporation is not compensated for by more precipitation. The extra water vapor in the atmosphere has to fall again as extra precipitation, which can cause flooding other places in the world.
Less ice and snow:
Glaciers are shrinking rapidly at present. The trend is for the ice to melt faster than estimated in the IPCC’s latest report. In areas that are dependent on melt water from mountain areas, this can cause drought and a lack of drinking water. According to the IPCC, up to a sixth of the world’s population lives in areas that will be affected by this.
More extreme weather incidents:
The warmer climate will most probably cause more heatwaves, more cases of heavy rainfall and also possibly an increase in the number and/or severity of storms.
Rising sea level:
The sea level rises for two reasons. Partly because of the melting ice and snow, and partly because of the thermal expansion of the sea. Thermal expansion takes a long time, but even an increase in temperature of two degrees Celsius is expected, in due time, to cause a rise in the water level of almost a metre.
In order to get an idea of the extent of the consequences, researchers typically work with scenarios that show various possible developments.
Source: http://en.cop15.dk/climate+facts/what+consequences+can+we+expect
Friday, 11 December 2009
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
IT´S ALL ABOUT THE STARS
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. The new deep view also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe's history.
The image was taken in the same region as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), which was taken in 2004 and is the deepest visible-light image of the universe. Hubble's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even deeper into the universe, because the light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.
This image was taken by the HUDF09 team, that was awarded the time for the observation and made it available for research by astronomers worldwide. In just three months, 12 scientific papers have already been submitted on these new data.
The photo was taken with the new WFC3/IR camera on Hubble in late August 2009 during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time. Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-IR wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye.
SOURCE: NASA
STARS
The Stars are bright tonight
And I am walking nowhere
I guess I will be alright
Desire gets you nowhere
And you are always right
I thought you are so perfect
Take you as you were
Have you as you were
Take you as you were
I'll love you just the way you are
I'll have you just the way you are
I'll take you just the way you are
Does anybody love the way they are
Aaa Aaa Aaa
The Stars are bright tonight
A distance is between us
And I will be OK
The worst I've ever seen us
And still I have my weaknesses
Still I have my strength
And still I have my ugliness
But I, I, I
I'll love you just the way you are
I'll have you just the way you are
I'll take you just the way you are
Does anybody love the way they are
Aaaa Aaaa Aaaa Aaaa Aaaaa
I'll love you just the way you are
I'll have you just the way you are
I'll take you just the way you are
Does anybody love the way they are
Aaaa Aaaa Aaaa Aaaa Aaaa Aaaa Aaaa
Star, Star
SONG BY THE CRANBERRIES
Monday, 7 December 2009
Friday, 4 December 2009
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