Extreme heat scorches Europe, world

ROME, Italy - Swathes of Europe baked Tuesday in a heatwave trailed by wildfires and health warnings, as parts of Asia and the United States also suffered under extreme weather.

Firefighters battled blazes in parts of Greece and the Canary Islands and Spain issued heat alerts, while some children in Italy's Sardinia were warned away from sports for safety reasons.

In the United States, the city of Phoenix broke a 49-year-old record with its 19th consecutive day of temperatures of 43.3 Celsius (110 Fahrenheit) or higher, weather officials said.

"You can't be in the street, it's horrible," said Lidia Rodriguez, 27, in Madrid.

From the Washington to Beijing, authorities have warned in recent days of the health dangers of the extreme heat, urging people to drink water and shelter from the sun.

Several local temperature records were broken in southern France, the weather service there said.

Meteo France said a record 29.5 C (85 F) had been reached in the Alpine ski resort of Alpe d'Huez, which sits at an altitude of 1,860 metres (6,100 ft), while 40.6 C (105F) had been recorded for the first time in Verdun in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

In a stark reminder of the effects of global warming, the UN's World Meteorological Agency (WMO) said the trend of heatwaves "shows no signs of decreasing".

"These events will continue to grow in intensity, and the world needs to prepare for more intense heatwaves," John Nairn, a senior extreme heat advisor at the WMO told reporters in Geneva.

Wildfires and scorching heat

Northwest of the Greek capital Athens, columns of smoke loomed over the forest of Dervenohoria, where one of several fires around the capital and beyond was still burning.

Still burning was a forest fire by the seaside resort of Loutraki, where the mayor said 1,200 children had been evacuated Monday from holiday camps.

In the Canary Islands, some 400 firefighters battled a blaze that has ravaged 3,500 hectares of forest and forced 4,000 residents to evacuate, with authorities warning residents to wear face masks outside due to poor air quality.

Temperatures were unforgiving in Italy and in Spain, where three regions were put under hot weather red alerts.

The Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily have been on watch to possibly surpass a continent-wide record of 48.8C (nearly 120F), recorded in Sicily in August 2021.

At Lanusei, near Sardinia's eastern coast, a children's summer camp was restricting beach visits to the early morning and forbidding sports, teacher Morgana Cucca told AFP.

In the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, pharmacist Teresa Angioni said patients were complaining of heat-related symptoms.

"They mainly buy magnesium and potassium supplements and ask us to measure their blood pressure, which is often low," Angioni said.

Many throughout Italy sought escape by the sea, including outside Rome, where the midday heat hit 40C (104F).

"Certainly it's better at the beach, you can at least get a little wind from the sea. It's not even possible to remain in the city, too hot," said Virginia Cesario, 30, at the Focene beach near the capital.

Climate change impact

Tens of millions of Americans experienced dangerous heat levels on Tuesday.

In the town of San Angelo, Texas, where temperatures were expected to reach 104-108F (40-42C), the National Weather Service said it was "running out of ways to say that it's gonna be hot out there today."

"With temperatures across the area likely topping the 105 mark yet again, we implore you to continue to practice heat safety and try to stay as cool," the agency said on Twitter.

And in Arizona, the mercury at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport again reached 110F on Tuesday, breaking the previous record of 18 consecutive days at or above that temperature, set in 1974.

The heat waves across Europe and the globe are "not one single phenomenon but several acting at the same time," said Robert Vautard, director of France's Pierre-Simon Laplace climate institute.

"But they are all strengthened by one factor: climate change."

Heat record in China

In parts of Asia, record temperatures have triggered torrential rain.

Nearly 260,000 people were evacuated in southern China and Vietnam before a typhoon made landfall late Monday, bringing fierce winds and rain but  weakening to a tropical storm by Tuesday.

The record-setting heat came as US climate envoy John Kerry met with Chinese officials in Beijing, as the world's two largest polluters revive stalled diplomacy on reducing planet-warming emissions.

Speaking Tuesday at Beijing's Great Hall of the People with China's top diplomat Wang Yi, Kerry called for "global leadership" on climate issues.

Agence France-Presse

China premier pledges: ‘We will make our skies blue again’

BEIJING — Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged Sunday to make the country’s skies blue again and “work faster” to address pollution caused by coal burning.

His words to delegates at the opening of the annual National People’s Congress highlight how public discontent has made reducing smog, the most visible of China’s environment problems, a priority for the leadership.

In a report to China’s ceremonial legislature, Li said that “people are desperately hoping for” faster progress to improve air quality. “We will make our skies blue again,” he declared to almost 3,000 delegates in the Great Hall of the People.

He said the government intends over the next year to step up work to upgrade coal-fired power plants to achieve ultra-low emissions and energy conservation, and prioritize the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid.

Building on publicly available real-time and hourly readings from coal plants and other factories, Li said: “All key sources of industrial pollution will be placed under round-the-clock online monitoring.”

Environmental groups welcome the disclosure of such data because it allows the public to directly supervise the emissions of plants in their areas.

Lauri Myllyvirta of Greenpeace said they had expected the government to announce a speeding up of measures because air pollution is supposed to hit targets this year that were laid down in 2013. They include a 25-percent reduction in the density of fine particulate matter — a gauge of air pollution — in Beijing and the surrounding region from 2012 levels.

“It will require very dramatic steps to achieve those targets for this year,” Myllyvirta said.

He said they also hoped to see a measurable target for reducing wasted wind and solar-power generation capacities, “because that’s when different parts of the government will be really held accountable for integrating wind and solar fully into the grid.”

Li also said the government would ramp up efforts to deal with vehicle emissions by working faster to take old vehicles off the roads and encourage the use of clean-energy cars.

He said that they will “strictly enforce” environmental laws and regulations and that officials who do a poor job in enforcing the law or respond inadequately to worsening air quality will be held “fully accountable,” without giving details. Local officials have often been lax at enforcing regulations on companies that contribute to economic growth in their areas.

Official data show an improvement in China’s air quality since 2013, when the government brought out its air pollution action plan. However, residents in cities including Beijing still regularly breathe in levels of pollution several times higher than the recommended safe limit, and use apps to monitor air quality./rga

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Warming report sees violent, sicker, poorer future

WASHINGTON  — Starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies. They’re likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report forecasts.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report next March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income. A leaked copy of a draft of the summary of the report appeared online Friday on a climate skeptic’s website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft.

“We’ve seen a lot of impacts and they’ve had consequences,” Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “And we will see more in the future.”

Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe’s poorest people.
“Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger,” the report says. “Climate change will exacerbate poverty in low- and lower-middle income countries and create new poverty pockets in upper-middle to high-income countries with increasing inequality.”

For people living in poverty, the report says, “climate-related hazards constitute an additional burden.”

The report says scientists have high confidence especially in what it calls certain “key risks”:

—People dying from warming- and sea rise-related flooding, especially in big cities.
—Famine because of temperature and rain changes, especially for poorer nations.
—Farmers going broke because of lack of water.
—Infrastructure failures because of extreme weather.
—Dangerous and deadly heat waves worsening.
—Certain land and marine ecosystems failing.

“Human interface with the climate system is occurring and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems,” the 29-page summary says.

None of the harms talked about in the report is solely due to global warming nor is climate change even the No. 1 cause, the scientists say. But a warmer world, with bursts of heavy rain and prolonged drought, will worsen some of these existing effects, they say.

For example, in disease, the report says until about 2050 “climate change will impact human health mainly by exacerbating health problems that already exist” and then it will lead to worse health compared to a future with no futher warming.

If emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas continue at current trajectories, “the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year will compromise normal human activities including growing food or working outdoors,” the report says.

Scientists say the global economy may continue to grow, but once the global temperature hits about 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now, it could lead to worldwide economic losses between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income.

One of the more controversial sections of the report involves climate change and war.

“Climate change indirectly increases risks from violent conflict in the form of civil war, inter-group violence and violent protests by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks,” the report says.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the international study team, told the AP that the report’s summary confirms what researchers have known for a long time: “Climate change threatens our health, land, food and water security.”

The summary went through each continent detailing risks and possible ways that countries can adapt to them.

For North America, the highest risks over the long term are from wildfires, heat waves and flooding. Water — too much and too little — and heat are the biggest risks for Europe, South America and Asia, with South America and Asia having to deal with drought-related food shortages. Africa gets those risks and more: starvation, pests and disease. Australia and New Zealand get the unique risk of losing their coral reef ecosystems, and small island nations have to be worried about being inundated by rising seas.

Field said experts paint a dramatic contrast of possible futures, but because countries can lessen some of the harms through reduced fossil fuel emissions and systems to cope with other changes, he said he doesn’t find working on the report depressing.

“The reason I’m not depressed is because I see the difference between a world in which we don’t do anything and a world in which we try hard to get our arms around the problem,” he said.

source: business.inquirer.net

Earth Hour

BACOLOD CITY (PIA) — The Earth Hour Core group recently met to discuss activities for the ceremonial switching off of light for one hour on March 31.

The theme for this year is “I Will If You Will,” a line that dares each one to respond to the theme’s message, thereby forming a network of people and organizations committed to the worldwide goal of counteracting the effects of global warming.

Colegio San Agustin Dean of Engineering Department Doctor Felicidad Altalaguire explained that the “60+” in the logo represents the 60 minutes or more of turning off the non-essential lights in businesses and households.

The core group is seeking partners and volunteers to make the occasion more meaningful by their presence or in other ways they can help the Earth Hour prime movers.

Altalaguire said that Earth Hour is a non-political endeavor and that everyone is welcome to join.

It was agreed that the center of activities will be on the grounds of SM City Bacolod where participating groups and organizations will converge after the initial activities.

The Philippine Institute of Civil Engineers will also hold a nationwide synchronized coastal clean-up with its local chapter here to clean-up seashore areas of Barangay Punta, Taytay, she added.

source: mb.com.ph