Climate Science

Order of the National Green Tribunal regarding deterioration of Nayar river, Uttarakhand, 05/06/2025

Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Nayar river is vanishing - a yatra reveals conservation goes beyond science and policy" appearing in ‘The Down To Earth’ dated 03.06.2025. The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Nayar …

Natures fury (editorial)

Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawady delta region of Myanmar and the disastrous earthquake in the Sichuan province in China have each taken a toll of more than 50,000 lives. In each case, the victims were the ordinary people of the two regions in two distinct countries. Those worst hit, in …

The ethics of climate change: Pay now or pay more later?

Weighing our own prosperity against the chances that climate change will diminish the well-being of our grandchildren calls on economists to make hard ethical judgments.

A sprinkle of limestone could help oceans absorb CO2

Grind it down, pour in a sprinkle here and a dash there, and wait for results. That's the recipe for helping the oceans to absorb more of our carbon dioxide emissions: add limestone. It may not only help reduce global warming but could even reinvigorate ailing coral reefs.

Life feels the effects of a changing climate

Climate change is already altering our planet's biology, with only life in Antarctica so far spared its influence. That's the conclusion from an analysis of tens of thousands of individual local studies covering shrinking glaciers, changing river flows, melting permafrost, increased coastal erosion, and warming lakes and rivers. The study, …

Palaeoclimate: Windows on the greenhouse

Data laboriously extracted from an Antarctic ice core provide an unprecedented view of temperature, and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, over the past 800,000 years of Earth's history.

They say they want a revolution

Climatologists have called for massive investment in computer and research resources to help revolutionize modelling capabilities. The eventual aim is to provide probabilistic climate predictions that are as useful, and usable, as weather forecasts. At the end of a four-day summit held last week at the European Centre for Medium-Range …

Killer freeze of 07 illustrates paradoxes of warming climate

Plant ecologists, as well as farmers and gardeners, took note of a particularly harsh turn of the weather in early April, 2007. The

Low-cost capture of CO2

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emanates from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants and other generators and is a greenhouse gas. Existing CO2 capture techniques involve the use of solid materials that lack sufficient stability for repeated use

The next big climate challenge

Few scientific creations have had greater impact on public opinion and policy than computer models of Earth's climate. These models, which unanimously show a rising tide of red as temperatures climb worldwide, have been key over the past decade in forging the scientific and political consensus that global warming is …

Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change

Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperature. Here the authors show that these changes in natural systems since …

Coal mining threatens Meghalaya caves

Even before the caves in Meghalaya can reveal clues to climate change, rampant mining is destroying their wealth. AMARJYOTI BORAH goes deep into the issue Meghalaya carries a bewitching world in its belly. The natural caves found in Jaintia Hills are a storehouse of geological treasures. Rivers and streams flow …

Owner s mine

Regulating mining in Meghalaya is tricky. Since Meghalaya is a Sixth Schedule state, the state government and the mining department do not have a direct control over its mineral resources; it is the tribal people who own the land. Meghalaya is the only state in India where coal mining is …

Seasonal speedup along the western flank of the Greenland ice sheet

It has been widely hypothesized that a warmer climate in Greenland would increase the volume of lubricating surface meltwater reaching the ice-bedrock interface, accelerating ice flow and increasing mass loss. We have assembled a data set that provides a synoptic-scale view, spanning ice-sheet to outlet-glacier flow, with which to evaluate …

How the Sahara became dry

A continuous lake record elucidates how Saharan climate changed gradually from humid to today's desert conditions.

Climate-driven ecosystem succession in the Sahara: The past 6000 years

Desiccation of the Sahara since the middle Holocene has eradicated all but a few natural archives recording its transition from a "green Sahara" to the present hyperarid desert. Our continuous 6000-year paleoenvironmental reconstruction from northern Chad shows progressive drying of the regional terrestrial ecosystem in response to weakening insolation forcing …

The effect of soot on climate

Soot produced by burning coal, diesel, wood and dung causes significantly more damage to the environment than previously thought, according to research published recently. So-called

Poor forecasting undermines climate debate

"Politicians seem to think that the science is a done deal," says Tim Palmer. "I don't want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain." Palmer is a leading climate modeller at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and …

Even climate models have their limits

Let's be clear. The science of climate change and of humanity's role in recent warming is very robust. So concerns about the ability of climate models to predict effects at the local level in no way undermine the case for urgent action to stop climate change happening. (Editorial)

Burying biomass to fight climate change

In a recent paper in the journal Carbon Balance and Management (vol 3, p 1), Ning Zeng, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park calculated that if we buried half of the wood that grows each year, in such a way that it didn't decay, enough …

Fire-derived charcoal causes loss of forest humus

Boreal forests serve as important global sources or sinks of carbon (C) and wildfire is a major driver of C storage in these forests. Although fire releases CO2 to the atmosphere, it also converts plant biomass into forms of black carbon, such as charcoal, that are resistant to microbial attack …

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