-The Times of India NEW DELHI: El Nino is likely to hit rains in India but the country may escape an overall drought, private weather company Skymet said in the first forecast by any agency about this year's monsoon. Rainfall in the season is likely to be below normal at 94% of the long range average, it said. Releasing its assessment some 10 days before the official India Meteorological Department's monsoon prediction,...

-Deccan Herald India stares at an agriculture loss worth Rs 42,000 crore ($7 billion) by 2030, due to the dangerous consequences of climate change, says the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest report. The loss will mostly be on account of a sharp drop in wheat productivity because of the heat stress in the Indo-Gangetic plains, which produce almost 90 million tonnes of wheat annually. Ranging from Punjab and...

-DNA The Indian political class is completely disengaged with the environment because the issue does not get votes. And the poor, who will be the most affected by climate change, are mostly unaware about it, though it is an existential issue for our country. In William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, a series of bizarre events happen in Rome before Caesar's assassination, leading a soothsayer to warn him: "Beware the ides of...

-The Business Standard Hailstorms may cause Rs 12k-cr crop damage, El Niño a bigger worry India's hope rally will be at risk if El Niño actually strikes this year. Even if a reformist government comes to power in May, global weather forecasts seem to suggest India is faced with the prospect of an erratic rainfall, as a result of the waters of the Pacific Ocean warming (known as the El Niño effect). It...

-The Times of India HYDERABAD: India's states will see more intense unpredictable freak weather in the coming days, warned climate change scientists, days after huge chunks of hail killed at least 10 people and wounded scores in Andhra Pradesh and hail storms this week destroyed cropland across Karnataka and Maharashtra. "The key word is these extreme events will increase under climate change and we near to gear up quickly to counter it...