Explore Business Standard
Weather
The world warmed to yet another monthly heat record in January, despite an abnormally chilly United States, a cooling La Nina and predictions of a slightly less hot 2025, according to the European climate service Copernicus. The surprising January heat record coincides with a new study by a climate science heavyweight, former top NASA scientist James Hansen, and others arguing that global warming is accelerating. It's a claim that's dividing the research community. January 2025 globally was 0.09 degrees Celsius (0.16 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than January 2024, the previous hottest January, and was 1.75 degrees Celsius (3.15 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was before industrial times, Copernicus calculated. It was the 18th month of the last 19 that the world hit or passed the internationally agreed upon warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. Scientists won't regard the limit as breached unless and until global temperatures stay
At least 242 million children in 85 countries had their schooling interrupted last year because of heatwaves, cyclones, flooding and other extreme weather, the United Nations Children's Fund said in a new report Friday. UNICEF said it amounted to one in seven school-going children across the world being kept out of class at some point in 2024 because of climate hazards. The report also outlined how some countries saw hundreds of their schools destroyed by weather, with low-income nations in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa hit especially hard. But other regions weren't spared the extreme weather, as torrential rains and floods in Italy near the end of the year disrupted school for more than 900,000 children. Thousands had their classes halted after catastrophic flooding in Spain. While southern Europe dealt with deadly floods and Asia and Africa had flooding and cyclones, heatwaves were the predominant climate hazard shuttering schools last year, UNICEF said, as the earth recorded its .
The government wants to establish a solid framework to continue the work of district agrometeorological units (DAMUs) which until now had been operating in an ad-hoc manner, Ministry of Earth Sciences secretary M Ravichandran has said. PTI reported in August last year that the government plans to revive the network of DAMUs, which provided detailed block-level weather-related information to lakhs of farmers in the country until the India Meteorological Department (IMD) directed their closure earlier this month following instructions from Niti Aayog. "As part of the pilot project, the Earth Sciences Ministry and the Agriculture Ministry provided weather information to farmers. Agricultural meteorologists in DAMUs analyze how weather conditions will affect crops. Their primary role is to offer advice to farmers. The system functioned well, but it should not remain ad-hoc; it needs to be made permanent," Ravichandran told PTI. He said the government wants to establish a solid framework
The world experienced an average of 41 more days of extreme heat in 2024 due to climate change, a new report said on Friday. According to the European climate agency Copernicus, 2024 is set to end as the warmest year on record and the first year with a global average temperature 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. A yearly review report by two groups of climate scientists -- World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central -- said the world saw an average of 41 more days of dangerous heat in 2024. Small island developing states were hit the hardest, with their people experiencing over 130 additional hot days. The scientists identified 219 extreme weather events in 2024 and studied 29 of them. They found that climate change contributed to at least 3,700 deaths and displaced millions in 26 extreme weather events. "It is likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens or hundreds of thousands,"