Science
by AFP Staff Writers
New Delhi (AFP) Jan 14, 2026
Indian writer Amitav Ghosh has long chronicled the entangled histories of empire, trade and migration.
But his recent work focuses on what he considers the most urgent concern: the accelerating unravelling of the natural world and the moral legacy left for the future.
Author of “The Great Derangement”, “The Glass Palace” and the forthcoming “Ghost-Eye”, Ghosh speaks bluntly about our headlong rush towards disaster while treating the Earth as an inert resource rather than a living world.
“Sadly, instead of shifting course, what we’re actually doing is accelerating towards the abyss,” he told AFP from a bookshop in New Delhi. “It’s like people have lost their minds.”
“We’re hurtling down that path of extractivism,” he said. “Greenwashing rhetoric has been completely adopted by politicians. And they’ve become very skilled at it.”
His latest novel, a mystery about reincarnation, also touches on ecological crisis, with the “ghost-eye” of its title symbolising the ability to perceive both visible and invisible alternatives.
– ‘Little joys’ –
Despite his subject matter, Ghosh manages to resist writing from a place of unrelenting grief.
“You can’t just write in the tone of tragic despair,” he said, calling himself “by nature, sort of a buoyant person”.
“One has to try and find the little joys that the world offers,” the 69-year-old said.
For Ghosh, one of those joys arrives each week, when his nine-month-old grandson comes to visit.
The baby is central to Ghosh’s motivation to pen another manuscript, one that will remain sealed for nearly a century as part of the Future Library project.
“I think what I’m going to end up doing is writing a letter to my grandson”, he said.
“In an earlier generation, young people would ask their parents, ‘What were you doing during the war?'” he said.
“I think my grandson’s generation will be asking, ‘What were you doing when the world was going up in flames?’ He’ll know that I was thinking about these things.”
Ghosh will submit his manuscript this year as part of Norway’s literary time capsule, joining works by Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Elif Shafak and others to be sealed until 2114.
– Mysterious world –
“It’s an astonishingly difficult challenge,” he said, knowing his book will be read when the world “will be nothing like” today.
“I can’t really believe that all the structures we depend on will survive into the 22nd century,” he said.
“We can see how quickly everything is unravelling around us,” he added.
That change is fuelling the world’s “increasingly dysfunctional politics”, he said.
The younger generations “see their horizons crashing around them,” he said. “And that’s what creates this extreme anxiety which leads, on the one hand, to these right-wing movements, where they’re filled with nostalgia for the past, and on the other hand, equally, it also fuels a certain left-wing despair.”
Born in Kolkata in 1956, Ghosh rose to prominence with novels such as “The Shadow Lines” and “The Calcutta Chromosome”, and later the acclaimed Ibis Trilogy.
He holds India’s highest literary honour, the Jnanpith Award, won numerous international prizes, including France’s Prix Medicis Etranger, and is regularly tipped as a possible Nobel winner.
But he is wary of overstating literature’s capacity to change history.
“As a writer, it would be really vainglorious to imagine that we can change things in the world,” he said, while accepting that young activists tell him they are “energised” by his books.
Ghosh keeps writing, not out of faith that words can halt catastrophe, but because they can inspire different kinds of thought.
His involvement with the Future Library embodies that impulse: a grandfather’s attempt to speak honestly from a burning world.
“We have to restore alternative ways of thinking about the world around us, of recognising that it’s a world that’s filled with mystery,” he said. “The world is much, much stranger than we imagine.”
US cuts in funding risk climate research ‘blind’ spots: EU monitors
Brussels, Belgium (AFP) Jan 14, 2026 –
US President Donald Trump’s planned science funding cuts could create blind spots in climate research but his policies did not impact a closely-watched annual report on global warming, officials from the EU’s climate monitor told AFP.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service releases monthly and annual reports on the state of the climate, which partly rely on data from US government agencies.
Its latest Global Climate Highlights report, published Wednesday, concluded that 2025 was the third hottest year on record after all-time highs in 2023 and 2024.
Copernicus uses billions of satellite and weather observations from land and at sea, including from US agencies, with records dating back many decades.
“The US is still a reliable supplier of data for forecasts,” Florian Pappenberger, the director general of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which operates Copernicus, told AFP.
“At the moment we have seen … no operational impact” from the announced cuts, he said.
Pappenberger, however, voiced concern about the potential loss of any data in the future.
“Losing observations is a worrying thing for any weather forecaster because the availability and the quantity of observations is directly linked to the quality of weather forecasts,” he said.
“The worry is that you stop an existing observation system and therefore don’t have the data for a future exercise of creating these types of reports.”
Trump has pursued deep cuts to federal climate science and Earth-observation funding, including programs that contribute data to international monitoring networks.
US lawmakers have drafted 2026 spending bills that would reject Trump’s cuts to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), but the legislation has not yet been finalised.
Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said coordination with NASA and NOAA “has continued all the same” but potential US cuts are “a risk we need to consider”.
The United States, for example, is a major financial contributor to an international ocean data program, which consists of robotic floats that drift under water for days and resurface to beam information to satellites.
“If we lose deep ocean observation, this will make us blind for a number of years,” Buontempo told AFP.
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Buenos Aires, Argentina (AFP) Jan 11, 2026
Forest fires in southern Argentina have scorched more than 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) this week, authorities said, though rain began falling in parts of Patagonia on Sunday to the relief of residents.
The largest blaze, burning since Monday near the small town of Epuyen in the Andes, has charred some 11,980 hectares, the Chubut provincial fire service said in a statement.
Another fire of unspecified size is burning nearby in the Los Alerces National Park.
Firefighters are also battling t … read more
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