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Vast freshwater reserves found beneath salinity-stressed coastal Bangladesh

Despite its tropical climate and floodplain location, Bangladesh—one of the world’s most densely populated nations—seasonally does not have enough freshwater, especially in coastal areas. Shallow groundwater is often saline, a problem that may be exacerbated by rising sea levels.

Rainfall is highly seasonal and stored rainwater often runs out by the end of the dry season. And contamination by naturally occurring arsenic deposits and other pollutants farther inland further depletes supplies of potable water, which can run desperately short during annual dry seasons. According to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, 41% of Bangladeshis do not have consistent access to safe water.

Hoping to ease the crisis, researchers from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School, led an exploration for new freshwater sources along the Pusur River in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta. They recently published their results in the journal Nature Communications.

More eyes on the skies can help planes reduce climate-warming contrails

Aviation’s climate impact is partly due to contrails—condensation that a plane streaks across the sky when it flies through icy and humid layers of the atmosphere. Contrails trap heat that radiates from the planet’s surface, and while the magnitude of this impact is uncertain, several studies suggest contrails may be responsible for about half of aviation’s climate impact.

Pilots could conceivably reduce their planes’ climate impact by avoiding contrail-prone regions, similarly to making altitude adjustments to avoid turbulence. But to do so requires knowing where in the sky contrails are likely to form.

To make these predictions, scientists are studying images of contrails that have formed in the past. Images taken by geostationary satellites are one of the main tools scientists use to develop contrail identification and avoidance systems.

THE BRAVE AND THE COWARDS — SRI Newsletter December 2025

As the geopolitical climate shifts, we increasingly hear warmongering pronouncements that tend to resurrect popular sentiments we naïvely believed had been buried by history. Among these is the claim that Europe is weak and cowardly, unwilling to cross the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. Maturity, according to this narrative, demands rearmament and a head-on confrontation with the challenges of the present historical moment. Yet beneath this rhetoric lies a far more troubling transformation.

We are witnessing a blatant attempt to replace the prevailing moral framework—until recently ecumenically oriented toward a passive and often regressive environmentalism—with a value system founded on belligerence. This new morality defines itself against “enemies” of presumed interests, whether national, ethnic, or ideological.

Those who expected a different kind of shift—one that would abandon regressive policies in favor of an active, forward-looking environmentalism—have been rudely awakened. The self-proclaimed revolutionaries sing an old and worn-out song: war. These new “futurists” embrace a technocratic faith that goes far beyond a legitimate trust in science and technology—long maligned during the previous ideological era—and descends into open contempt for human beings themselves, now portrayed as redundant or even burdensome in the age of the supposedly unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence.

Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on Australia

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) profoundly affects Australian weather, climate, ecosystems and socio-economic sectors. This Review presents the progress made in understanding ENSO teleconnections to Australian weather over the past 40 years, describing the atmospheric dynamics, complexities and impacts of this climate phenomenon.

Westerly jet stream emerges as key driver of mid-latitude hydroclimatic extremes

In recent years, the global climate has become increasingly extreme, with intensifying alternations of droughts and floods—particularly in ecologically vulnerable mid-latitude regions. But what is driving this hydroclimatic variability? Scientists have long debated the underlying mechanisms.

A research team led by Prof. Long Hao from the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, drilled a 300.8-meter-long lacustrine sediment core in the Datong Basin of Shanxi Province, located in mid-latitude East Asia (Northern China). By reconstructing more than 5.7 million years of Earth’s history, the researchers revealed that the “waviness” of the westerly jet stream is the primary driver of mid-latitude climate variability. The study was recently published in Nature Communications.

This sediment core acts as a detailed “climate archive,” documenting precipitation changes over approximately 5.7 million years—spanning the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs. By analyzing chemical indicators within the core, the researchers obtained a high-resolution record of ancient precipitation patterns.

Nearly 7,000 of the world’s 8,808 data centers are built in the wrong climate, analysis find — vast majority located outside optimal temperature range for cooling, 600 in locations considered too hot

Most facilities sit outside the temperature range recommended for efficient operation, as AI growth pushes data centers into hotter regions.

Climate whiplash by 2064: Study projects extreme swings in rainfall and drought for Asia

A climate study led by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), in collaboration with an international research team, reveals that under a high-emission scenario, the Northern Hemisphere summer monsoons region will undergo extreme weather events starting in 2064. Asia and broader tropical regions will face frequent “subseasonal whiplash” events, characterized by extreme downpours and dry spells alternating every 30 to 90 days which trigger climate disruptions with catastrophic impacts on food production, water management, and clean energy systems.

Published in Science Advances under the title “Increased Global Subseasonal Whiplash by Future BSISO Behavior,” the research was co-led by Prof. Lu Mengqian, Director of the Otto Poon Center for Climate Resilience and Sustainability and Associate Professor of the Department of Civil and Environmental at HKUST and Dr. Cheng Tat-Fan, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at HKUST, alongside collaborators from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Sun Yat-Sen University and Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology.

The ‘hobbits’ mysteriously disappeared 50,000 years ago. Our new study reveals what happened to their home

About 50,000 years ago, humanity lost one of its last surviving hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (also known as “the hobbit” thanks to its small stature). The cause of its disappearance, after more than a million years living on the isolated volcanic island of Flores, Indonesia, has been a longstanding mystery.

Now, new evidence suggests a period of extreme drought starting about 61,000 years ago may have contributed to the hobbits’ disappearance.

Our new study, published today in Communications Earth & Environment, reveals a story of ecological boom and bust. We’ve compiled the most detailed climate record to date for the site where these ancient hominins once lived.

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