Month: October 2025

Human-driven climate change has intensified wildfire seasons across the Americas making fires up to 30 times larger than they would have been in a pre-industrial climate, according to a major new international report. The State of Wildfires 2025 study, led by scientists from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), the UK Met Office, the University of Leicester, the University of East Anglia, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), paints a grim picture of how warming temperatures are fueling unprecedented fire activity. Between March 2024 and February 2025, wildfires scorched 3.7 million square kilometres of land worldwide an area larger than India. Over 100 million people were affected, and global damages reached $215 billion. Fires released more ...

Surface ruptures caused by earthquakes can tear through the ground, damaging pipelines, roads, dams, and power plants. While engineering solutions can reduce some risks, experts say the best protection remains avoiding construction directly across active faults. A new article in Reviews of Geophysics revisits the evolution of Probabilistic Fault Displacement Hazard Assessments (PFDHAs), a scientific method that helps predict and quantify surface rupture hazards. Fault displacement happens when an earthquake ruptures the Earth’s surface, shifting the ground horizontally or vertically by several meters. Such movements can severely damage critical infrastructure built across faults, making it essential to understand where and how these ruptures might occur. PFDHAs estimate the likelihoo...

Global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels surged faster in 2024 than in any year since records began a stark warning that the Amazon rainforest, once a powerful carbon sink, is faltering under pressure. A new satellite analysis by researchers from the University of Edinburgh reveals that the Amazon absorbed far less CO₂ in 2024, contributing to the record global rise of 3.73 parts per million (ppm) well above the long-term average. This finding comes from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2), a satellite launched in 2014 that has transformed how scientists monitor CO₂ across the planet. Yet, despite being fully operational and capable of running until 2040, OCO-2 now faces shutdown due to proposed NASA budget cuts. Since the 1950s, CO₂ concentrations have climbed from 315 ...

LONDON – The decades-old environmental mantra "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is a form of "corporate gaslighting" that shifts blame for the climate crisis from polluters to individuals, according to a new analysis published in The Conversation. The author a scholar-activist argues that true change requires adopting a more radical set of principles focused on systemic issues: Regulation, Redistribution, and Reparations. The core critique states that corporate public relations campaigns have successfully convinced the public to focus on their personal environmental footprint, thereby distracting them from structural, policy-driven change that would threaten corporate profits. The analysis highlights that emissions under the average person direct control account for less than 20% of total glo...

New Australian research has effectively debunked claims that individual fossil fuel projects are too small to impact global warming, linking each new investment in coal and gas extraction to measurable increases in global temperatures. Published in the Nature journal Climate Action the research led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century and involving climate scientists from six Australian universities focuses on the Scarborough gas project in Northwest Australia. Measurable Warming and Significant Impacts The study found that the Scarborough project alone, with its estimated output of 876 million tonnes Mt of CO2 emissions, is projected to cause an increase of approximately 0.00039^C in global temperature. While this temperature increase may seem s...

GUWAHATI/NEW DELHI – India latest monsoon season has proven that climate change is transforming the life-giving rains into a destructive force, characterized by longer dry spells and more extreme, intense downpours. Although the total rainfall for the season was only 8% above normal, this modest figure masked a pattern of devastating local events across the country. The Indian summer monsoon, which provides about 80% of India annual rainfall, arrived a week early this year the fastest onset in 16 years. However this early start quickly transitioned into a pattern of severe erratic weather that caused widespread destruction: Key Disaster Events Across India • Himalayan Cloudburst: The Himalayan village of Dharali was nearly washed away after a cloudburst in early August. The result...

BENGALURU – The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) new Environmental Accounting on Forest 2025 report, which attempts to quantify the value and condition of India's forests as "natural capital," has been heavily criticized by conservationists and former forest officials for fundamental ecological blind spots. Experts argue that the report inherits the same weaknesses of the biennial India State of Forest Report (ISFR) by failing to account for forest fragmentation, the primary cause of biodiversity loss, and by entirely omitting massive land-use changes under the Forest Rights Act (FRA). Overlooking Fragmentation and Degradation Praveen Bhargav, a former member of the National Board for Wildlife, stated that forests are "living systems, not static assets" ...

New Australian research has effectively debunked claims that individual fossil fuel projects are too small to impact global warming, linking each new investment in coal and gas extraction to measurable increases in global temperatures. Published in the Nature journal Climate Action the research led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century and involving climate scientists from six Australian universities focuses on the Scarborough gas project in Northwest Australia. Measurable Warming and Significant Impacts The study found that the Scarborough project alone, with its estimated output of 876 million tonnes Mt of CO2 emissions, is projected to cause an increase of approximately 0.00039^C in global temperature. While this temperature increase may seem sm...

A new study published in Hydrological Processes challenges the common assumption that Himalayan glaciers are the primary source of the Ganga river flow, concluding instead that groundwater aquifers are the main source of the river summer flow as it crosses the plains. The research led by Dr. Abhayanand Singh Maurya of the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee is the first comprehensive isotope study to show this relationship. While glacier and snowmelt contribute significantly in the upstream, mountainous regions, their importance diminishes beyond the Himalayan foothills. Groundwater as the Primary Source in the Plains The study found that in the densely populated Indo-Gangetic Plains, groundwater discharge increases the river volume by about 120% compared to its volume at its ...

BENGALURU – India maiden solar mission, Aditya-L1, has commenced its scientific operations, capturing its first high-energy data on solar flares just weeks after successfully reaching its destination orbit. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced that the spacecraft Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS) instrument has recorded its initial data since being fully commissioned. The data captured is crucial to understanding the mechanisms behind solar flares intense bursts of radiation from the Sun and their impact on Earth. Key Data and Observations SoLEXS is designed to monitor the Sun X-ray emissions in the soft X-ray band (1-30 keV), which are a key indicator of solar activity. ● The instrument successfully captured data corresponding to a recent {M-class...