Muzaffarnagar
Category: Agriculture
- Muzaffarnagar is hosting a first-of-its-kind Gur Mahotsav (jaggery festival) at the end of this month.
- The event is being organised under the State government’s ‘one district, one product’ scheme, in partnership with private players, and will focus on issues such as packaging and marketing of jaggery and sugarcane juice, more efficient prototypes and working models of crushers and ways to increase the production of organic gur.
- Muzaffarnagar is the biggest mandi (marketplace) of gur in Asia.
West Nile fever
Category: Sc/tech
- There has been cases of West Nile fever in Kozhikode go unnoticed.
- 80% of the infected people do not show any symptoms.
- Human infection is most often the result of bites from infected mosquitoes of the Culex genus. Mosquitoes become infected when they feed on infected birds, which circulate the virus in their blood for a few days.
World Economic Situation and Prospects
Category: International
- The United Nations (UN) has lowered its forecast for India’s GDP growth in 2019-20 to 7.1% from its estimate in January of 7.5%, citing an overall slowdown in global growth.
- The UN said this in its World Economic Situation and Prospects.
- The report said that the global economy is experiencing a broad-based growth slowdown led by slowing industrial production coupled with the weakening of international trade activity due in large part to the unresolved trade disputes between the U.S. and China.
Carbon dioxide
Category: Environment
- On May 11, global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was measured to have crossed the 415 parts per million (ppm) mark for the first time.
- For several thousand years, the carbon dioxide concentration remained constant around 270-280 ppm, before the industrial revolution began to slowly push it up.
- When direct measurements began at the Mouna Loa observatory in 1958, concentrations were around 315 ppm.
- It took nearly 50 years for it to reach 380 ppm, a mark first breached in 2004, but thereafter the growth has been rapid.
- The first full-day average of more than 400 ppm was achieved on May 9, 2013; two years later, in 2015, even the annual average exceeded 400 ppm.
- Currently, the carbon dioxide concentration is growing at more than 2 ppm per year, and scientists say the growth rate is likely to reach 3 ppm a year from this year.
- It remained almost flat between 2014 and 2016, and increased by 1.6% in 2017 and about 2.7% in 2018. In 2018, the global emission of carbon dioxide was estimated at 37.2 billion tonnes.
- The rapid rise in the atmospheric concentrations, however, is due to the fact that carbon dioxide has a very long lifespan in the atmosphere, between 100 and 300 years. So, even if the emissions were to miraculously reduce to zero all of a sudden, it would have no impact on the atmospheric concentrations in the near term.
- About half of emitted carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants and oceans, leaving the other half to go into the atmosphere.
- A special report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year said the world needed to achieve net zero emissions of all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide, by 2050 to keep alive any realistic chances of restraining the temperature rise to within 1.5ºC. The net zero needs to be achieved by 2075 to attain the 2ºC target.
- Net zero is achieved when the total emissions is neutralised by absorption of carbon dioxide through natural sinks like forests, or removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through technological interventions.
