AFP UK

Flash flooding caused by torrential rains has killed at least eight people in eastern Kentucky and left some residents stranded on rooftops and in trees, the governor of the south-central US state said Thursday.

The world has been hit by extreme weather events in recent months, incidents that scientists say are an unmistakable sign of climate change.

“This is going to be the worst flooding in recent memory — devastating and deadly,” Governor Andy Beshear told local NBC affiliate WLEX in an interview.

“We’re going to end up with double-digit deaths. Right now, I believe we can confirm at least eight, but that number is increasing, it seems, by the hour.”

The victims include an 81-year-old woman in Perry County.

Beshear said that responders have rescued “between 20 and 30” people by air. Earlier, he described people standing on rooftops or climbing up trees to escape the floodwaters while waiting for rescue.

Many roads resembled rivers, mangled cars littered the landscape and muddy brown floodwaters lapped against the rooftops of low-lying houses in the state’s Appalachian region.

Some areas reported receiving more than eight inches (20 centimeters) of rain in a 24-hour period.

The North Fork of the Kentucky River at Whitesburg, usually one to two feet deep at this time of year, rose to a staggering 20 feet, well above its previous record of 14.7 feet.

The governor said a state of emergency had been declared in half a dozen counties, and four National Guard helicopters have been deployed to help with rescue efforts.

The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife had deployed Zodiac boats to carry out water rescues.

“There’s a lot of people out there who need help,” Beshear told reporters earlier in the day. “And we’re doing the very best we can to reach each and every one of them.

“The situation right now is tough,” he added.

“Hundreds will lose their homes, and this is going to be yet another event that it’s going to take not months, but likely years for many families to rebuild and recover from,” he said.

Beshear said around 25,000 homes were without power statewide, and many were without water.

The National Weather Service said the area was still at risk of flash flooding and warned more heavy rain was expected.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden had been briefed about the flooding.

Jean-Pierre said Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would travel to Kentucky on Friday and report back to the president.

Flash flooding caused by torrential rains has killed at least three people in eastern Kentucky and left some residents stranded on rooftops and in trees, the governor of the southeastern US state said Thursday.

“We’re seeing one of the worst, most devastating flooding events in Kentucky’s history,” Governor Andy Beshear told reporters.

The governor said at least three flood-related deaths had been confirmed so far, including an 81-year-old woman in Perry County, and he expects “double digit deaths.”

“There are a lot of people in eastern Kentucky on top of roofs waiting to be rescued,” Beshear said. “We even have some people in trees hanging on, waiting for rescue.”

Many roads resembled rivers, mangled cars littered the landscape and muddy brown floodwaters lapped against the rooftops of low-lying houses in the state’s Appalachian region.

Some areas reported receiving more than eight inches (20 centimeters) of rain in a 24-hour period.

The North Fork of the Kentucky River at Whitesburg, usually one to two feet deep at this time of year, rose to a staggering 20 feet, well above its previous record of 14.7 feet.

The governor said a state of emergency had been declared in half a dozen counties, and four National Guard helicopters have been deployed to help with rescue efforts.

The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife had deployed Zodiac boats to carry out water rescues.

“There’s a lot of people out there who need help,” Beshear said. “And we’re doing the very best we can to reach each and every one of them.

“The situation right now is tough,” he added.

“Hundreds will lose their homes and this is going to be yet another event that it’s going to take not months, but likely years for many families to rebuild and recover from,” he said.

Beshear said around 25,000 homes were without power statewide and many were without water.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden had been briefed about the flooding.

Jean-Pierre said Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would travel to Kentucky on Friday and report back to the president.

The first skeleton of a Gorgosaurus dinosaur to go under the hammer sold for $6.1 million at auction in New York Thursday, Sotheby’s said.

The specimen is 10 feet tall (three meters) and 22 feet long, and had been expected to fetch between $5 million and $8 million.

“The result places the Gorgosaurus among the most valuable dinosaurs ever sold at auction, and establishes a new benchmark for a Gorgosaurus skeleton,” Sotheby’s said in a statement.

The Gorgosaurus roamed the earth approximately 77 million years ago. 

A typical adult weighed about two tonnes, slightly smaller than its more famous relative, the Tyrannosaurus rex.

Paleontologists say it was fiercer and faster than the T-Rex, with a stronger bite of around 42,000 newtons compared to 35,000.

The skeleton was discovered in the Judith River Formation near Havre, in the US state of Montana in 2018.

The sale marked the first time that Sotheby’s had auctioned a full dinosaur skeleton since it sold Sue the T-Rex in 1997 for $8.36 million.

“Today’s Gorgosaurus came to auction without a name, providing the buyer the exclusive opportunity to name the dinosaur,” Sotheby’s said.

Sotheby’s did not reveal the buyer.

Unlike other countries, the United States does not restrict the sale or export of fossils, meaning the skeleton could end up overseas.

An “exceptional” marine heatwave is gripping the western Mediterranean with surface temperatures up to five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than average, according to experts contacted by AFP. 

Although the record-breaking heatwave that baked northern Europe and Britain this month has subsided, the experts said the persistently hotter-than-normal temperatures in the Mediterranean posed a threat to the entire marine ecosystem.

“This huge marine heatwave began in May in the Ligurian sea” between Corsica and Italy, said Karina von Schuckmann, an oceanographer at the non-profit research group Mercator Ocean International.

It then spread to the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea, she said. 

By July, the heatwave had engulfed the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the Tyrrhenian Sea. 

“The surface temperature anomaly map shows higher than normal values, in the order of +4 to +5C from the east of the Balearic Islands to the east of Corsica,” Mercator said in a statement. 

While humans might find the warmer water temperatures pleasant in the tourist hotspots of the western Mediterranean, the group warned that “ocean warming impacts the entire ecosystem.” 

“It is important to be aware of the possible consequences for local fauna and flora, as well as the occurrence of extreme weather events that could result in natural disasters,” it said.

Von Schuckmann said that unusually warm temperatures could cause irreversible migration for some species and “mass die-offs” for others.

She noted knock-on effects for industries such as tourism and fishing which rely on favourable water conditions.

According to the UN’s climate science body, marine heatwaves have already doubled in frequency globally since 1980.

  

– Die-offs, invasive species – 

Although the Mediterranean only counts for one percent of Earth’s ocean surface area, it contains nearly 20 percent of all known marine species.

A study published this month in the journal Global Change Biology found that the Mediterranean had experienced five consecutive years of mass mortality events between 2015-2019.

France’s CNRS research centre has noted that marine heatwaves in 1999, 2003 and 2006 caused mass die-offs for some species, notably the posidonia, a genus of flowering plants.

“We can predict the main impact will be on fixed organisms such as plants or corals,” said Charles-Francois Boudouresque, a marine ecologist at Aix-Marseille University. 

Some species of fish such as the barracuda could become more abundant in warming northern Mediterranean waters, however.

Boudouresque said some species coming through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea could become problematic “within five to 10 years”.

These include the rhopilema — a herbivore jellyfish — and the rabbit fish, which Boudouresque described as “extremely greedy”.

Already abundant in the eastern Mediterranean, its appearance in western waters would threaten the algae forests that serve as nurseries for myriad varieties of fish. 

Rhopilema can also sting swimmers with enough severity to require hospital treatment.

As there is little governments can do once a marine heatwave takes hold, Von Schuckmann said the best course of action is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to warming.

“Even if we stopped emitting today, the oceans, which contain 90 percent of Earth’s heat, will continue to warm,” she said.

“Since at least 2003 (marine heatwaves) have become more common and in future they will last longer, cover more sea, and be more intense and severe,” said Von Schuckmann.

The city of Berlin started switching off spotlights illuminating its historic monuments as part of a national effort to save energy in the face of Russian gas shortages.

Some 200 buildings and landmarks including Berlin’s red-brick city hall, State Opera House and Charlottenburg Palace will fall dark at night, officials in the German capital said this week.

“Given the war against Ukraine and the energy policy threats by Russia, it’s important that we be as careful as possible with our energy,” the city’s chief official for the environment, Bettina Jarasch, said on Wednesday.

Jarasch of the Green party said that included consumers and industry but also public institutions, calling the move “the right thing to do to make a visible contribution”.

The policy affected six monuments from Wednesday night and will eventually encompass 200 buildings and landmarks along with their 1,400 spotlights over the next four weeks, Jarasch’s office said.

An electrical services firm will shut off 100-120 lights per day without dismantling them, keeping the policy temporary.

The cash-strapped capital will not save money as the labour costs are expected to match the benefit of cutting energy use.

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said this week he wanted to set an example by keeping the facade of his official residence, Bellevue Palace in Berlin’s sprawling Tiergarten park, dark at night. 

– Cold showers –

Several German cities have said they would step up efforts to limit the use of energy, with Hanover in the north announcing plans this week to only offer cold showers at public pools and sports centres.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left-led government has launched a national drive to save energy amid soaring prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the EU agreed this week to reduce Russian gas use across the bloc.

Officials have warned that the Kremlin could cut off supplies this winter in retaliation for biting Western sanctions against Moscow over the war.  

The German efforts include reducing the use of air conditioning, promoting public transport and pushing for more efficient shower heads.

Before the Ukraine war, Germany bought 55 percent of its natural gas from Russia. 

Although the rate had fallen to 35 percent by early June, Europe’s top economy is still heavily dependent on Russia for its energy, and says Moscow is using it as a “weapon”.

On Wednesday, Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom slashed deliveries of gas through the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany to 20 percent capacity from the previous 40 percent. 

An “exceptional” marine heatwave is gripping the western Mediterranean with surface temperatures up to five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than average, according to experts contacted by AFP. 

Although the record-breaking heatwave that baked northern Europe and Britain this month has subsided, the experts said the persistently hotter-than-normal temperatures in the Mediterranean posed a threat to the entire marine ecosystem.

“This huge marine heatwave began in May in the Ligurian sea” between Corsica and Italy, said Karina von Schuckmann, an oceanographer at the non-profit research group Mercator Ocean International.

It then spread to the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea, she said. 

By July, the heatwave had engulfed the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the Tyrrhenian Sea. 

“The surface temperature anomaly map shows higher than normal values, in the order of +4 to +5C from the east of the Balearic Islands to the east of Corsica,” Mercator said in a statement. 

While humans might find the warmer water temperatures pleasant in the tourist hotspots of the western Mediterranean, the group warned that “ocean warming impacts the entire ecosystem.” 

“It is important to be aware of the possible consequences for local fauna and flora, as well as the occurrence of extreme weather events that could result in natural disasters,” it said.

Von Schuckmann said that unusually warm temperatures could cause irreversible migration for some species and “mass die-offs” for others.

She noted knock-on effects for industries such as tourism and fishing which rely on favourable water conditions.

According to the UN’s climate science body, marine heatwaves have already doubled in frequency globally since 1980.

  

– Die-offs, invasive species – 

Although the Mediterranean only counts for one percent of Earth’s ocean surface area, it contains nearly 20 percent of all known marine species.

A study published this month in the journal Global Change Biology found that the Mediterranean had experienced five consecutive years of mass mortality events between 2015-2019.

France’s CNRS research centre has noted that marine heatwaves in 1999, 2003 and 2006 caused mass die-offs for some species, notably the posidonia, a genus of flowering plants.

“We can predict the main impact will be on fixed organisms such as plants or corals,” said Charles-Francois Boudouresque, a marine ecologist at Aix-Marseille University. 

Some species of fish such as the barracuda could become more abundant in warming northern Mediterranean waters, however.

Boudouresque said some species coming through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea could become problematic “within five to 10 years”.

These include the rhopilema, a herbivore jellyfish Boudouresque described as “extremely greedy”, and which could disrupt marine food chains.

Already abundant in the eastern Mediterranean, its appearance in western waters would threaten the algae forests that serve as nurseries for myriad varieties of fish. 

Rhopilema can also sting swimmers with enough severity to require hospital treatment.

Another invasive species is the rabbit fish, which is native to the Red Sea but is increasingly found in the Mediterranean. 

As there is little governments can do once a marine heatwave takes hold, Von Schuckmann said the best course of action is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to warming.

“Even if we stopped emitting today, the oceans, which contain 90 percent of Earth’s heat, will continue to warm,” she said.

“Since at least 2003 (marine heatwaves) have become more common and in future they will last longer, cover more sea, and be more intense and severe,” said Von Schuckmann.

The modern strain of the virus that causes cold sores has been traced back to around 5,000 years ago, with researchers suggesting its spread could have been propelled by the emergence of kissing.

Around 3.7 billion people — the majority of the world’s population — have a life-long infection of the HSV-1 virus behind facial herpes, according to the World Health Organization.

But despite its ubiquity, relatively little has been known about the history of this virus, or how it spread throughout the world.

So an international team of researchers screened the DNA of teeth in hundreds of people from ancient archaeological finds. 

They found four people who had the virus when they died, then sequenced their genomes for research published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

“Using these reconstructed genomes, we were able to determine that the variations of modern strains all trace back to some time in the late Neolithic, early Bronze Age,” said the study’s co-senior author Christiana Scheib of Cambridge University.

“This was a bit surprising because it has been assumed that herpes is something that has co-evolved with humans for a very long time,” she told AFP.

– Never been kissed –

She said that was still true: all primate species have a form of herpes and humans likely had a strain when they first left Africa.

But the research indicated that those earlier strains were replaced by the modern form around 5,000 years ago.

So what brought about that change? The researchers suggested two theories. 

Around 5,000 years ago was a time of great migration from Eurasia into Europe, and that spread could have affected the virus.

The other theory? That was around the time when people starting romantically kissing each other.

“That is definitely one way to change the transferability of a herpes virus,” Scheib said. 

The virus is normally passed by a parent to their child, but kissing would have given it a whole new way to jump between hosts, she said.

“There is some textual evidence starting to show in the Bronze Age of kissing between romantic partners,” Scheib said. 

– ‘Far grander’ –

The researchers said the earliest known record of kissing was a manuscript from South Asia during the Bronze Age, suggesting the custom may have also migrated from Eurasia into Europe.

Kissing “is not a universal human trait,” Scheib pointed out, emphasising that it is difficult to trace exactly when it began — or if it is definitively linked to the spread of HSV-1.

Around 2,000 years ago, the Roman Emperor Tiberius was believed to have attempted to ban kissing at official functions to prevent the spread of herpes.

Co-senior study author Charlotte Houldcroft, also from Cambridge, said that a virus like herpes evolves on a “far grander timescale” than Covid-19, which the world has watched mutate in a matter of months.

“Facial herpes hides in its host for life and only transmits through oral contact, so mutations occur slowly over centuries and millennia,” she said.

“Previously, genetic data for herpes only went back to 1925,” she added, calling for more “deep time investigations” of viruses.

“Only genetic samples that are hundreds or even thousands of years old will allow us to understand how DNA viruses such as herpes and monkeypox, as well as our own immune systems, are adapting in response to each other.”

The city of Berlin started switching off spotlights illuminating its historic monuments as part of a national effort to save energy in the face of Russian gas shortages.

Some 200 buildings and landmarks including Berlin’s red-brick city hall, State Opera House and Charlottenburg Palace will fall in darkness at night, officials in the German capital said this week.

“Given the war against Ukraine and the energy policy threats by Russia, it’s important that we be as careful as possible with our energy,” the city’s chief official for the environment, Bettina Jarasch, said on Wednesday.

Jarasch of the Green party said that included consumers and industry but also public institutions, calling the darkened monuments “the right thing to do to make a visible contribution”.

The policy at first affected six monuments from Wednesday night and will eventually encompass 200 buildings and landmarks and their 1,400 spotlights over the next four weeks, Jarasch’s office said.

An electrical services firm will shut off 100-120 lights per day without dismantling them, keeping the policy temporary.

Thus the cash-strapped capital will not save money as the labour costs are expected to match the benefit of cutting energy use.

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said this week he wanted to set an example by keeping his official residence, Bellevue Palace in Berlin’s sprawling Tiergarten park, dark at night. 

Several German cities have said they would step up efforts to trim the use of power and gas.

The centre-left-led government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for weeks for a national effort to save energy amid soaring prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

German officials have also warned that the Kremlin could cut off supplies this winter in retaliation for biting Western sanctions against Moscow over the war.  

The energy-savings efforts include reducing the use of air conditioning, encouraging use of public transport and pushing the use of more efficient shower heads.

Before the Ukraine war, Germany bought 55 percent of its natural gas from Russia. 

Although the rate had fallen to 35 percent by early June, Europe’s top economy is still heavily dependent on Russia for its energy, which it says Moscow is using as a “weapon”.

On Wednesday, Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom slashed deliveries of gas through the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany to 20 percent of capacity from the previous 40 percent. 

Sea levels are increasing around Britain at a far faster rate than a century ago, while the country is warming slightly more than the global average, leading meteorologists said on Thursday.

Their latest annual State of the UK Climate study — compiled by the country’s meteorological authority, the Met Office — reiterated that recent decades have been “warmer, wetter and sunnier” than those in the 20th century. 

The report covering 2021 comes hot on the heels of a heatwave last week that saw temperatures top 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in England for the first time, setting a record at 40.3C.

The Environment Agency has urged people to use water “wisely” to protect supplies and the environment, after the Met Office said the first half of this year had been among the driest on record.

“The report is very clear that we are seeing a change in our climate, whether that’s temperature, precipitation, sea level rise,” said Liz Bentley, of the Royal Meteorological Society, which publishes the study in its International Journal of Climatology.

The Met Office said in a summary that its latest findings reaffirmed “climate change is not just a problem for the future and that it is already influencing the conditions we experience here at home”. 

Meteorologists noted in the report that sea levels over the last three decades had increased in some places at more than double the rate recorded at the start of the 1900s.

They have risen by around 16.5 centimetres (6.5 inches) since 1990 — approximately three to 5.2 mms each year, compared to 1.5 mms annually in the early part of last century.

This is exposing more areas of coastal land to larger and more frequent storm surges and “wind-driven wave impacts”, the Met Office said.   

– Dramatic change –

Svetlana Jevrejeva of the National Oceanographic Centre said there was evidence that the rises were due to the increased rate of ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Glacier melting around the world and the warming of the ocean were also responsible, she noted, adding that the effect on Britain’s coastline would only grow. 

“The scale, rate and impact will change and it will change dramatically quite soon,” Jevrejeva told the BBC.

The annual study also found that Britain has warmed at a broadly consistent but “slightly higher” rate than global mean temperature rises.

The Met Office’s Mike Kendon, the study’s lead author, said record temperatures, such as last week’s unprecedented heatwave, were “becoming routine rather than the exception”.

“It is telling that whereas we consider 2021 as near-average for temperature in the context of the current climate, had this occurred just over three decades ago it would have been one of the UK’s warmest years on record,” he added.

The UK hosted the UN’s COP26 summit last November, when scores of countries agreed collective measures to try to prevent catastrophic climate change.

But fears are growing that many countries could stall on delivering pledges — including on ending financing fossil fuel projects abroad — as they struggle to replace Russian energy imports.

In Britain, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss — the favourite in a leadership battle to replace outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson — has vowed to axe energy bill levies earmarked for the renewable sector. 

She has insisted that is needed to help people through a worsening cost-of-living crisis.

US climate envoy John Kerry last week warned Britain’s next leader that the commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 cannot be compromised.

“We do not have the luxury of jiggering with the 2050 right now,” he told BBC radio.

Anxious residents slept outside after hundreds of aftershocks rattled the earthquake-hit northern Philippines, locals said Thursday, as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr inspected damage in the region. 

Five people were killed and more than 150 injured when a 7.0-magnitude quake struck the lightly populated province of Abra on Wednesday morning, authorities said.

The death toll rose to six on Thursday when a 59-year-old man was hit by a landslide caused by an aftershock, a local disaster official said.

The powerful quake rippled across the mountainous area, toppling buildings, triggering landslides and shaking high-rise towers hundreds of kilometres away in the capital Manila.

“Aftershocks happen almost every 20 minutes, 15 minutes since yesterday,” said Reggi Tolentino, a restaurant owner in Abra’s provincial capital Bangued.

“Many slept outside last night, almost every family.”

Some families have been given modular tents to stay in. Marcos Jr has urged people to wait for their homes to be inspected before moving back.  

Hundreds of buildings were damaged or destroyed, roads were blocked by landslides, and power was knocked out in affected areas. 

A state of calamity was declared in Abra, which felt the full force of the quake, enabling the government to tap funds for the response effort.

Abra police chief Colonel Maly Cula told AFP the overall damage had been “very minimal”. 

“We don’t have a lot of people in evacuation sites, although many people are staying in the streets because of the aftershocks,” Cula said.

“Abra is back to normal.”

Marcos Jr, who took office last month, arrived in Bangued on Thursday to inspect the damage and discuss the response effort with government, military and disaster officials. 

More than 800 aftershocks have been recorded since the quake hit, including 24 that were strong enough to feel, the local seismological agency said.

Aftershocks were expected to continue for “several weeks”, Renato Solidum, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, told a briefing presided over by Marcos Jr.

There would be “a lot” in the first three days, then “hopefully it will decline afterwards”, he said.

– Tourism operators hit –

In Vigan City, a UNESCO World Heritage site and tourist destination in Ilocos Sur province, centuries-old structures built during the Spanish colonial period were damaged.

Governor Jeremias Singson told TV broadcaster Teleradyo that 460 buildings in the province had been affected, including the Bantay Bell Tower, which partially crumbled.

“Our tourism industry and small business owners were really affected,” Singson said.

After visiting Vigan on Thursday, Senator Imee Marcos, the president’s elder sister, said the damage to old churches in the city was “overwhelming”.  

The Philippines is regularly rocked by quakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

Wednesday’s quake was one of the strongest recorded in the Philippines in recent years and was felt across swathes of Luzon island, the most populous in the archipelago.

In October 2013, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Bohol Island in the central Philippines, killing more than 200 people and triggering landslides.

Old churches in the birthplace of Catholicism in the Philippines were badly damaged. Nearly 400,000 were displaced and tens of thousands of houses were damaged.

The powerful quake altered the island’s landscape and a “ground rupture” pushed up a stretch of earth by about three metres, creating a wall of rock above the epicentre.

In 1990, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in the northern Philippines created a ground rupture stretching over a hundred kilometres.

Fatalities were estimated at more than 1,200, with major damage to buildings in Manila.