Spiegel Online: Glaciers are shrinking worldwide — some of them rapidly. Now Chinese researchers have sounded the alarm in their country too, where they say warmer weather and increased precipitation are reducing the size of glaciers. Water shortages and floods could result. Chinese scientists are not known for fearmongering, particularly when it comes to dangers that could [...]

AlertNet: Wearing colourful traditional dresses with silver jewellery and bangles on their arms, the women of Tharparkar district look festive. But the empty earthen pots they carry tell a different story. “Walking for three miles and (hoisting) a … bucket filled with water through a wooden pulley from a 130-feet-deep well twice a day is [...]

Reuters: Rapidly growing megacities in Africa and Asia face the highest risks from rising sea levels, floods and other climate change impacts, says a global survey aimed at guiding city planners and investors. The study by risk analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft, released on Wednesday, comes as the United Nations says the world’s population will [...]

SERVIR lead scientist Dr. Ashutosh Limaye, will be presenting a report on preliminary climate study that shows temperature, precipitation, and runoff changes in the Wangchu Basin, site of a major dam in Bhutan. The area SERVIR studied in cooperation with the University of Oklahoma is the Wangchu Basin in western Bhutan. The basin is a [...]

The Economist: A new analysis of the temperature record leaves little room for the doubters. The world is warming. FOR those who question whether global warming is really happening, it is necessary to believe that the instrumental temperature record is wrong. That is a bit easier than you might think. There are three compilations of [...]

WRR: Recent extreme weather events including floods, heat waves, and droughts present a vivid image of the direction the world is heading. As climate change intensifies, more events like these, combined with longer-term changes in the climate’s average state -including rising seas, melting glaciers, and shifting precipitation patterns— will have profound impacts on people, ecosystems [...]

CDKN Blog: In Malkangiri, one of eastern India’s poorest provinces, lives Mangu Adari. The year before last, Mangu planted paddy, millets, lentils and beans on his two hectares of somewhat unproductive rain-fed farmland. The monsoons arrived early in June, a month in advance, and then the rains stopped for weeks; most seedlings wilted. Last year, once again, the [...]

PakObserver: WHILE Pakistan was still grappling with last year’s devastating floods that marooned one-fifth of the country, it has again been hit by the natural calamity causing devastation of enormous magnitude. According to National Disaster Management Authority, 5.3 million people have been affected by this summer’s heavy rains in 23 districts of Sindh. Of these, [...]

The Nations: A total lack of seriousness when it comes down to the necessary nitty-gritty of dealing with both the existing and potential catastrophic effects of climate change has pushed Pakistan into a fast descending spiral of utter hopelessness right across the board: A situation exacerbated by political shenanigans, human greed and a dangerously escalating [...]

AFP: The UN’s talks on climate change are daft and crippled by finger-pointing and the need for consensus, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, was quoted on Thursday by Le Monde as saying. Nasheed also said emerging economies were as much to blame for global warming as rich nations. In an interview with the [...]

Times of India: An environmental group is asking the Nepal government to consider installing portable toilets on Mount Everest for climbers caught short at the roof of the world. Eco Himal says the thousands of trekkers who set off from the South Base Camp in Nepal each year would do a better job of keeping [...]

MSNBC: The high peaks of the Himalayas may soon be a beacon for adventurous solar power entrepreneurs, suggests a new study that identified the lofty region as having some of the world’s greatest potential to capture energy from the sun. Other regions not traditionally considered hotbeds of solar power potential include the Andes of South [...]

BBC: Stunning images from high in the Himalayas – showing the extent by which many glaciers have shrunk in the past 80 years or so – have gone on display at the Royal Geographical Society in central London. Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya can be seen at the RGS in London [...]

Tree Hugger: Scaling the world’s highest peak normally required months of training and heaps of determination — but now, thanks to a new webcam installed on Mount Everest, anyone with an internet connection can get a taste of life in the clouds without leaving home. Recently, Italian researchers studying global warming in the Himalayas installed [...]

John O’Sullivan: Britain’s major independent television broadcaster today joins major national newspapers in finally accepting that man-made global warming is history. Global cooling is the hot news topic as scientists announce that the planet is stuck in the midst of a prolonged cooling cycle. Britons are being advised to wrap up warm for eleven years, [...]

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE : KATHMANDU, Oct 9: The world´s highest webcam has been installed in the Nepalese Himalayas, beaming live images of Mount Everest back to scientists studying the effects of climate change on the planet´s tallest peak. The solar-powered camera, set at 5,675 metres (18,618 feet) on Kala Patthar, a smaller mountain facing Everest, [...]

Daily Times: President says devastation caused by climatic changes is a wake-up call to search permanent solutions to natural disasters ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari, on Friday, called upon the international community, especially the countries advanced in disaster management, to assist Pakistan in capacity building so that it could meet eventualities caused by natural calamities [...]

The Daily Telegraph: IT’S the webcam that gives a whole new meaning to high definition.  The world’s highest webcam has started broadcasting images of Mt Everest – the world’s tallest mountain. The special camera has been locked on to the side of a nearby peak, Kala Patthar, at a height of 5675m and is powered [...]

BBC: Scientists have begun to predict the animals that may become extinct in the next century because of climate change. Researchers at Brown University in the US have combined predictions of climate change with the geographic ranges of well-studied amphibians. While the animals will try to migrate to areas with more suitable weather, short-term temperature [...]

IDSA: Institutions are often assessed on the basis of their response to crises. The unfolding flood crisis in Sindh draws attention to the state of institutional response to disasters in Pakistan. Ms. Maurvi Memon, a former PML-Q legislator, has alleged that the flood crisis in Sindh was manmade and that the Meteorological Department and Climate [...]

GRAIN: Climate change endangers food security in Himalayan communities such as Dunche, in Nepal’s Rasuwa District. In this photo Tamang women pound and sift wheat. (Photo credit: Minority Rights Group/Jared Ferrie) Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around [...]

Friday Times: What role has climate change played in this year’s flooding? Climate change is the multiplier only – it is bad for everyone, especially the poor but it is even worse for the poor under bad governance. The present flooding in Sindh has affected all 23 districts, almost the entire province. The damage is [...]

Guardian: Former US vice president tells Scottish green conference that evidence from floods in Pakistan and China is compelling. Al Gore, has warned that there is now clear proof that climate changeis directly responsible for the extreme and devastating floods, storms and droughts that displaced millions of people this year. Speaking to an audience of [...]

IPS News: At least 200 million people in the world are in danger of being left without water, because they depend for their supply on glaciers that are melting, although paradoxically the process creates the illusion of plentiful water resources. While the average global temperature has risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last 100 [...]

Environment News Services: Environmentalists are blaming climate change for the unprecedented massive monsoon rains in Pakistan, which so far this year have affected eight million people, claiming 350 lives and damaging 1.3 million homes. Over the past month, the country’s southern region has received the highest monsoon rains ever recorded, local metrological experts confirm. In [...]

New York Times: Rajendra K. Pachauri is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and head of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi, a non-profit focusing on research in the field of energy efficiency and sustainable development. In 2007, under his leadership, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded [...]

KashmirLife: Week the rains stopped just before the water could spill over the banks of  river Jhelum and flood Kashmir. But we are facing the danger of a devastating flood. Can Kashmir save itself? A Kashmir Life report. Given the behavior of the Jhelum river, hydrologists and engineers at the Irrigation and Flood Control would [...]

The News: With Pakistan and India preparing to have next round of talks on Siachen area, the experts opined that both countries need United Nations’ mediation to at least find ways and means to cope with growing environmental challenges in the highest battlefield that have started posing grave threats to people living in this region. [...]

Pabitra Mukhopadhyay:Water as a resource from management perspective needs to be managed in the mountains very differently as compared to plains. This requires handling few uneasy questions. This essay attempts to see water management of the HKH debunked from global culture] If you live in Hindu Kush Himalayas, most likely you have grown stoic to [...]

Dawn: Speakers at a seminar on flood relief measures have said that in the wake of climate change reports, it has become crucial for Pakistan to make special efforts to meet the challenges posed by natural disasters whose frequency has increased over the past few years. They added that this could be done by identifying [...]

Times of India: The Everest climbers of Himachal are concerned about the impact of global warming and blurring charm of Himalayas. Having no obvious purpose, the frequent, unplanned and “commercial” expeditions to the Himalayan peaks are ruining their beauty, they said. With over 19 successful Everest climbers, Himachal being the prime producer of mountaineers, more [...]

Huffington Post: Gardening in a suburban area is more difficult than most people imagine. There are problems with soil quality and plot space, water and weather. But nothing is more menacing than the docile deer. Decades of development left the deer virtually unthreatened by natural predators, and the arrival of humans and their gardens provided [...]

Guardian: Numbers of people displaced by environmental and weather-related disasters likely to increase, Asian Development Bank warns. More than 30 million people were displaced last year by environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, experts have warned, and the problem is only likely to grow worse as climate change exacerbates such problems. Tens of millions more [...]

Scientific American: The mystery of Earth’s missing heat may have been solved: it could lurk deep in oceans, temporarily masking the climate-warming effects of greenhouse gas emissions, researchers reported on Sunday. Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world [...]

Daily Nations: Small-scale tea farmers are highly vulnerable to climate change due to their dependence on one crop, the Tea Research Foundation of Kenya has said. It is urging farmers to consider crop diversification to reduce the danger of complete harvest loss due to weather extremes and pests. According to a joint study by TRFK [...]

Alertnet: Pakistan is expanding its network of glacier monitoring stations in the Himalayas, in an effort to improve understanding of glacier melt and provide better warning of floods. But some experts say it’s not happening fast enough, as the country continues to be hit by disasters. Massive flooding in mid-2010 affected some 20 million people [...]

Vimal Khawas: With the impacts of global warming becoming more apparent, Sikkim Himalaya is perhaps most in tune to the signs of change brought about by climate warming. The people across the towns and villages of Sikkim narrate revealing insights on how global warming is affecting their lives and livelihood. Those who are searching for [...]

Guardian: The world’s newest island makes it on to the map as the Arctic Uunartoq Qeqertaq, or Warming Island, is officially recognised. If you have never heard of Uunartoq Qeqertaq, it’s possibly because it’s one of the world’s newest islands, appearing in 2006 off the east coast of Greenland, 340 miles north of the Arctic [...]

DAWN: Atmospheric scientists on Friday blamed climate change for the unprecedented torrential monsoon rains in Sindh that have caused severe flooding in the 16 districts of Sindh province. “If we look at the frequency and the trend of the extreme weather events impacting Pakistan then it is easy to find its linkage with climate change,” [...]

Alertnet: In the days of yore, farmers forecast the weather by looking at the behaviour of birds. “When sparrows bathe in the dust, it rains,” they would say. But as climate change alters weather patterns in northeast India, it is changing traditional knowledge – and threatening local birds that long have helped farmers control pests [...]

Amrit Banstola: Harsh weather and extreme climatic events are expected to become more common as a result of climate change in Nepal (LI-BIRD, 2006). Extreme weather events such as floods, landslides, heat waves, storms, extreme cold, fires, and droughts are among the well-established consequences of climate change in Nepal. Health conditions like heat stroke, injuries, [...]

PIB India: Modern automatic weather stations have been set up in the North Eastern-States and Sikkim.They are given at Annexe below.To understand the nature of monsoon pattern in these areas, the government launched a high-priority Programme to address the Science issues of Global and Regional Climate Change with a well equipped state-of-the-art Center for Climate [...]

HimalayanTimes: There is un-contestable evidence that human induced climate change is inevitably leading the world to ecological disaster with grave human implications. With steady but sure irreversible impacts on human life and livelihood, the disaster is particularly threatening the most vulnerable developing countries of the world.The question often raised is about the role that the [...]

Coventry Telegraph: A COVENTRY nurse working in Pakistan fears the country could be hit hard by monsoon floods. Neva Khan, who grew up in Coventry and worked as a nurse in Nuneaton, has gone on to become Oxfam’s director in Pakistan. On the anniversary of the worst floods the country has ever seen – estimated [...]

A new website dedicated to mountain weather in more than 9300 (and growing) major summits for climbers and mountaineers, provided for up to 5 different elevations. While this information may be indispensable in planning your ascent, please treat it critically and verify against other sources. Our weather algorithms are thoroughly tested and proven to work [...]

Assam flood situation worsens IBN Live: The swollen Drupromg River has washed away the Rangiya-Jonai-Mukongchelek metre gauge rail tracks affecting movement of trains to neighboring Arunachal Pradesh. Flood water has also entered the Kaziranga National Park in Jorhat district and the Pabitora Wildlife Sanctuary in Morigaon district, homes to the endangered one-horned rhinos. In Sonitpur [...]

The NEWS Pakistan: “I don’t think it is tough to solve the issues of trans-boundary waters between India and Pakistan” said Jordon based Yana Walid Abu-Talib from Eco-peace/Friends of the Earth Middle East. She was in Lahore last week to attend a two day conference on ‘Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management-Managing Risks: Sharing Benefits’ [...]

DAWN: With the prediction of heavy rains in upper parts of the Punjab on Saturday and Sunday, the Met Office issued a weather warning saying that the rains could cause flash floods in the local rivers and streams. According to the Met Office, rains and heavy showers are expected in various parts of the country [...]

Alertnet: A two-year project to upgrade Pakistan’s flood forecasting and early warning systems will enable the South Asian nation to cope better as climate change brings more extreme weather, according to a U.N. expert leading the initiative. The effort to improve Pakistan’s disaster preparedness – a partnership between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural [...]

Alertnet: Scientists tackled the highly debated, and somewhat perplexing, relationship between climate change and weather disasters at the recent launch of a U.S. magazine series on the subject, concluding that an indisputable connection exists between the two. “The link between climate change and extreme weather is not so much theoretical as observational,” Fred Guterl, executive editor [...]

Business Standard: Wrong predictions keep affecting food prices. While predicting the monsoons is a tricky job, the IMD has got it consistently wrong and impacted food prices. The drought of 2009 still haunts the India Meteorological Department (IMD). “It was worse than we initially thought,” says IMD’s Director General Ajit Tyagi. “As the months progressed, [...]

BBC News: Although a normal monsoon has been forecast for South Asia this year, and rains have begun normally in many parts of the region, people are still anxious about the rainy season that lasts for four months. Their anxiety has to do with the uncertainties surrounding the timing of the monsoon in recent years. [...]

Climate change seems to have triggered extreme weather that has wreaked destruction all over the globe during the last decade. After more than 20 years of denial, experts are now convinced that greenhouse emissions are to be blamed for the heavy storms, floods and droughts which have made global headlines. Peter Stott, a leading climate [...]

Independent UK: Scientists to end 20-year reluctance with study into global warming and exceptional weather events. Scientists are to end their 20-year reluctance to link climate change with extreme weather – the heavy storms, floods and droughts which often fill news bulletins – as part of a radical departure from a previous equivocal position that [...]

DAWN: The world’s climate is not only continuing to warm, it is also adding heat-trapping greenhouse gases even faster than in the past, researchers said Tuesday. Indeed, the global temperature has been warmer than the 20th century average every month for more than 25 years, they said at a teleconference. ”The indicators show unequivocally that [...]

Hindu: No indication of any strong weather system developing: IMD The monsoon activity over the country may remain weak for the next two weeks, the India Meteorological Department warned on Friday. Though the seasonal trough, now running close to the foothills of the Himalayas, is likely to shift back southwards to its near normal position [...]

Telegraph India: The weather department has forecast heavy rain for the sub-Himalayan Bengal and Sikkim in the next two days and asked the government to be prepared to meet any eventuality. The warning has been issued at a time a large number of villages in north bengal are under water because of incessant rain for [...]

Scientificamerican: More violent and frequent storms, once merely a prediction of climate models, are now a matter of observation. Part 1 of a three-part series. In North Dakota the waters kept rising. Swollen by more than a month of record rains in Saskatchewan, the Souris River topped its all time record high, set back in [...]

Guardian: Last year was the joint-warmest on record and also the wettest over land, with sea ice levels dropping and drought on the rise The year 2010 may have been the most extreme in terms of weather since the explosion of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1816, when much of the world experienced reduced daylight and [...]

Stanford University News: Large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that by the middle of this century even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years. The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer [...]