This October was the hottest on record globally, 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial average for the month — and the fifth straight month with such a mark in what will now almost certainly be the warmest year ever recorded.

October was a whopping 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the previous record for the month in 2019, surprising even Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European climate agency that routinely publishes monthly bulletins observing global surface air and sea temperatures, among other data.

A three-year drought that has left millions of people in Syria, Iraq and Iran with little water wouldn't have happened without human-caused climate change, a new study found.

The west Asian drought, which started in July 2020, is mostly because hotter-than-normal temperatures are evaporating the little rainfall that fell, according to a flash study Wednesday by a team of international climate scientists at World Weather Attribution.

A wildfire abetted by storm winds in eastern Spain has burned some 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) of land and forced the evacuation of 850 people from four towns, officials said Friday.

Some 200 firefighters and army emergency unit soldiers were deployed to try to extinguish the day-old blaze near the eastern town of Montitxelvo. The regional government of Valencia said it hoped five water-carrying planes and helicopters would be deployed in the operation.

New Delhi's government shut primary schools and banned polluting vehicles and construction work in an attempt to reduce the worst haze and smog of the season, which has posed respiratory problems for people and enveloped monuments and high-rise buildings in and around India's capital.

Authorities deployed water sprinklers and anti-smog guns to control the haze and many people used masks to escape the air pollution. The city government announced a fine of 20,000 rupees ($240) for drivers found using gasoline and diesel cars, buses and trucks that create smog, typically models 10 to 15 years old.

Huge ash columns erupted from Eurasia's tallest active volcano Wednesday, forcing authorities to close schools in two towns on Russia's sparsely populated Kamchatka Peninsula.

The eruptions from the Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano sent ash as high as 13 kilometers (8 miles) above sea level, officials said.

In a little more than five years – sometime in early 2029 – the world will likely be unable to stay below the internationally agreed temperature limit for global warming if it continues to burn fossil fuels at its current rate, a new study says.

The study moves three years closer the date when the world will eventually hit a critical climate threshold, which is an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1800s.

A wildfire is suspected to have killed a man, destroyed more than 50 homes and razed 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of farm and scrubland in eastern Australia, authorities said on Tuesday.

Firefighters have been battling the blaze that has scorched the Queensland state town of Tara for more than a week.

On a steep mountainside where walls of flames torched the forest on their way toward Lake Tahoe in 2021, blackened trees stand in silhouette against a gray sky.

"If you can find a live tree, point to it," Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, said touring damage from the Caldor Fire, one of the past decade's many massive blazes.

Hurricane Otis slammed into Mexico's southern Pacific coast as a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane early Wednesday, bringing dangerous winds and heavy rain to Acapulco and surrounding towns, stirring memories of a 1997 storm that killed dozens of people.

A strong Category 2 storm by Wednesday morning, the hurricane was expected to continue to weaken quickly in Guerrero state's steep mountains. But the 5 to 10 inches (13 to 25 centimeters) of rain forecast, with as much as 15 inches (38 centimeters) possible in some areas, raised the threat of landslides and floods.

Tensions from the war in Gaza could help accelerate the move away from planet-warming fossil fuels like oil and gas and toward renewable energy, electric cars and heat pumps — similar to how sharp increases in the price of oil during the 1970s unleashed efforts to conserve fuel, the head of the International Energy Agency said.

"Today we are again facing a crisis in the Middle East that could once again shock oil markets," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. That comes on top of the stress on energy markets from Russia's cutoff of natural gas to Europe over its invasion of Ukraine, he said.