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Does the concept vary from season to season in the mind of the mass? By Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi Geologist. Total northern hemisphere is reeling under cold wave. Most part of the area is under thick cover of ice and snow. People are being killed due to severe cold waves. Lakes are freeze; leaves are drooping down due to the loads of the snow. Every where its white cover. Where there is no snow cold waves are showing impact on the population. Agriculture fields are under threat of frost bite. In India scores of people have been killed due to chilling wind and dropping of temperature. People like me are not able to understand whether we are moving towards global cooling or we are passing through major global warming period.   When ever I talk about global warming concept today people are confused. They ask questions, why you are talking about global warming when it’s too cold. They are not easily accepting the concept of warming in chilling cold. It’s totally opposite in peak warm s...

By 2050, groundwater pumping will cause a global sea level rise of about 0.8 millimeters per year. by Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi Slowly but surely, the sea level continues to rise. Recent research suggests this increase is also driven by the exploitation of underground water by humans that eventually flowed into the sea. Climate change, with its associated melting ice caps and shrinking glaciers, is the usual suspect when it comes to explaining rising sea levels. But a recent study now shows that human water use has a major impact on sea-level change that has been overlooked. Science community was shocked by the claim that 42% of the sea-level rise of the past decades is due to groundwater pumping for irrigation purposes. What could this mean for the future – and is it true? Global warming is melting glaciers and causing sea levels to rise. The volume of water is also expanding because of heat. This ‘thermal expansion’ contributes significantly to the surge in the sea levels. But there ...

There is a general relationship between leaf shape and the climate. by Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi.  Fig.1 Leaf of tropical areas having drip tip for water run off. How could the shape of plant leaves indicate temperature, you ask? Surprisingly, they do so very well. There is a general relationship between leaf shape and the climate. In 1978 Jack Wolfe, of the United States Geological Survey, put the relationship on a quantitative footing. Using data for present –day forests in eastern Asia, he showed that there is a remarkable correlation between the mean annual temperature and the shapes of the leaves. The particular features of leaves that seem to be most distinctive in this regard is the nature of the leaf margin. In tropical areas, where temperatures and precipitation are high, leaves tend to be large and have smooth edges, without serrations, and they often have a narrow, elongated tip-sometimes referred to as a drip tip (Fig.1.)- that facilitates water runoff. In contrast, leave...