Over the 12 years that Baburam Giri has worked as a hotel cook in the village of Dhampus - a major tourist draw with its views of the towering Annapurna mountain range - winters have become less snowy. “The snowfall we had five years ago was more than 2 feet deep - but we didn’t have significant snowfall after that,” lamented Giri, standing at his stove at the Hotel Yama Sakura. With hotels across the world feeling the financial pain of travel restrictions to curb the coronavirus pandemic, Giri said his central Nepal community was relying mainly on Nepali tourists, who come every year drawn by the wintry weather. But this year, the bare ground means few visitors. “Many domestic and local tourists come to this area to play in the snow whenever there is snowfall,” Giri told ...
Read MoreTag: global warming
South India recorded highest minimum temperature in 121 years in the month The minimum temperature recorded in the country in January was the warmest for the month in 62 years, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Monday. South India was particularly warm. The month was the warmest in 121 years, with 22.33 degrees Celsius in south India, followed by 22.14 degrees Celsius in 1919 and 21.93 degrees Celsius in 2020 as the second and third warmest months. Central India was the warmest (14.82 degrees Celsius) in the last 38 years after 1982 (14.92 degrees Celsius), while 1958 with 15.06 degrees Celsius was the warmest in the 1901-2021 period. However, the maximum temperatures in January were below normal, the IMD said. !function(e,t,c,a){if(!e.fwn&&(a="fw...
Read MoreAt least 125 missing after the glacier break in Chamoli, water rises again in night
At 125 labourers working at the Rishiganga power project are missing after a portion of Nanda Devi glacier broke off in Tapovan area of Joshimath in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district on Sunday morning and damaged the Rishiganga dam on Alaknanda river. After the incident, experts have once again started questioning rampant construction of hydro-power projects on the various tributaries of Ganges in the region. The water level in the Dhauli Ganga river surged up once again on Sunday night under the impact of the glacial burst during the day, creating panic among people living in the area. The sudden surge in the water level in the Dhauli Ganga at around 8 pm prompted authorities to suspend rescue operations underway at a project site in the vicinity of the river for the time being. Rescue e...
Read MoreWarming Arctic at the frontier of climate insight and risk, experts say
The environmental transformation happening in the Arctic is key to understanding the potential global impacts of climate change, an Alaska Native leader and a polar explorer told the Reuters Next conference on Monday. With climate change warming the Arctic twice as fast as the overall planet, newly possible commercial activities have also raised questions about responsibility and risk at the top of the world, an insurance expert said. FILE PHOTO: Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise ship navigates through floating ice in the Arctic Ocean, September 15, 2020. Picture taken with a drone. REUTERS/Natalie Thomas/File Photo Native peoples’ observations of changes in the Arctic - such as diseases in fish, or shifts in the time of year when mountain snow melts - are key to understanding how clim...
Read MoreArctic warming cascades through ocean and over land Greenhouse gas emissions reached a new high last year, putting the world on track for an average temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius, a U.N. report showed on Wednesday. The report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) - the latest to suggest the world is hurtling toward extreme climate change - follows a year of sobering weather extremes, including rapid ice loss in the Arctic as well as record heat waves and wildfires in Siberia and the U.S. West. On Monday, researchers at Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the hottest-ever November on record. Meanwhile, The Arctic region has had its second-warmest year since 1900, continuing a pattern of extreme heat, ice melt and environmental transf...
Read MoreResidents of a coastal township on Australia’s World Heritage-listed Fraser Island were told to evacuate on Sunday as a bushfire approached. Since it was sparked by an illegal campfire seven weeks ago, the blaze has blackened half the island off Australia’s north eastern coast, which is part of the Great Barrier Reef and famed for its tropical rainforest on sand dunes, and inland lakes. Residents of Happy Valley had a small reprieve after the blaze lessened in intensity on Sunday afternoon, Queensland state emergency services commissioner Greg Leach told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Aerial view of an area affected by a bushfire on Fraser Island (K'gari), Queensland, Australia December 5, 2020 in this picture obtained from social media. Save Fraser Islands Dingoes Inc ...
Read MoreThe sun is setting on the lake and thousands of cranes perform a mating dance, bobbing their black and white heads while flapping large grey wings and hopping on long legs. Like every winter, the red-crowned Eurasian birds are back on Israel’s Hula Lake - some for a stop-over en route from Russia, Finland and Estonia to Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, and others here for the entire cold season. This year, however, some of the 100,000 cranes flew in a little late, with global warming a possible reason for the delay. Cranes taking off from a field in the Hula Valley National Park. Photo: Itamar Grinberg “The first birds arrive at the end of September. This year it was two weeks late. One of the reasons, we think, is because September was very warm and they had no reason to move to the sou...
Read MoreLast month was the world’s hottest September on record, with unusually high temperatures recorded off Siberia, in the Middle East, and in parts of South America and Australia, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Wednesday. Extending a long-term warming trend caused by emissions of heat-trapping gases, high temperatures this year have played a major role in disasters from fires in California and the Arctic to floods in Asia, scientists say. “As we go into an even warmer world, certain extremes are likely to happen more often and be more intense,” Copernicus senior scientist Freja Vamborg told Reuters, pointing to heat waves and periods of intense rain as examples of this. Globally, September was 0.05 degrees Celsius warmer than the same month in 2019...
Read MoreSnow trout, the iconic cold water fish species found in Himalayan rivers, would lose their habitat by 16 per cent in the next 30 years and by over 26 per cent by 2070, a new climate change study by the government’s Wildlife Institute of India has found. The study -- ‘Is There Always Space at The Top’-- was published in the ‘Ecological Indicators’, a journal of high international repute based at the Netherlands, on September 6. The study indicates that most of the lower altitude streams across the Himalayas would be rendered unsuitable for the existence of snow trout with the rise in temperatures. An ensemble of 72 statistical models across the Himalayas, the study -- authored by Wildlife Institute of India (WII) scientists Aashna Sharma, Vineet Kumar Dubey, Jeyaraj Antony Joh...
Read MoreGlaciers in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh are melting at a "significant" rate, according to a first-of-its-kind study which used satellite data to find that over 1,200 glaciers in the Himalayan region saw an annual reduction in mass of 35 centimetres (cm) on average between 2000 and 2012. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, was carried over the Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh region, including areas across the Line of Control (LoC) and Line of Actual Control (LAC), and in all 12,243 glaciers were studied for thickness and mass changes. "In general, it was observed that the glaciers in the Pir Panjal range are melting at the higher rate—more than one metre per year—while as the glaciers in the Karakoram range are melting relatively at slower rate, around 10 cms per yea...
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