New Delhi, May 1 -- In January 2025, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) declared 2024 as the country's warmest year on record, citing an annual mean surface temperature anomaly of +0.65 C above the long-term average. But a closer look revealed that the actual warming may have breached the 1 C mark - a threshold significant enough to trigger serious concern over rising extreme weather events and biodiversity loss.

How has this possible breach been understated? By quietly altering the benchmark against which warming is measured - the Long Period Average (LPA) - in IMD's annual climate summary, the most authoritative document on the rate at which India is warming today. LPA represents the average temperature over a 30-year period and...