AFP UK

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 Thursday.

The annual study — the State of the UK Climate 2021 — found recent decades have been “warmer, wetter and sunnier” than the 20th century.  

It comes hot on the heels of temperatures topping 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in England last week for the first time, setting a record at 40.3C.

“This year’s report continues to show the impact of global temperature rises on the climate in the UK,” the Met Office, the country’s meteorological authority, said in a summary. 

It added the findings were “reaffirming that 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 cms (6.5 inches) since 1990 — approximately three to 5.2mm each year, compared to 1.5 mm 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.   

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 warming of the ocean were also responsible, she noted. 

“As sea levels rise there can be greater impacts from storm surges,” Jevrejeva warned.

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, lead author of the report, 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 COP26 summit last November, when scores of countries agreed collective measures to try to prevent catastrophic climate change.

But fears are growing that many 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, to help people through a worsening cost-of-living crisis.

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 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. 

But in Abra, which felt the full force of the quake, overall damage had been “very minimal”, police chief Colonel Maly Cula told AFP. 

“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 magnitude 7.1 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.

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

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 powerful quake rippled across the mountainous region, 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.”

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

But in Abra, which felt the full force of the quake, overall damage had been “very minimal”, police chief Colonel Maly Cula told AFP. 

“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.”

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

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 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.

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 magnitude 7.1 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 to reach over 1,200, with major damage to buildings in Manila.

President Joe Biden hailed a breakthrough Wednesday in getting a major chunk of his seemingly doomed healthcare and climate crisis agenda through Congress after Senate Democrats overcame divisions.

“This is the action the American people have been waiting for. This addresses the problems of today — high health care costs and overall inflation — as well as investments in our energy security for the future,” Biden said in a statement.

The bill still has some way to go before becoming law but the multi-billion dollar package finally won crucial support from conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. His previous opposition had essentially killed Biden’s ambitious plans, because in the 50-50 Senate, where Republicans rarely back Biden on anything, Democrats can’t afford to lose a single vote.

For Biden, whose approval ratings hover below 40 percent, the truce with Manchin comes as a big political boost ahead of November midterms when his Democratic Party is forecast to lose control of Congress to the Republicans.

If passed, the bill will pour some $369 billion into clean energy and climate initiatives and $64 billion into state-funded healthcare, including a popular measure meant to lower ruinously high prescription medicine prices.

It would be paid for by raising $739 billion, with a major chunk coming from a 15 percent corporate tax rate. An extra $300 billion raised under the plan would go to paying off the federal deficit.

Biden, who has had to abandon even broader scale social and environmental spending ideas, got the good news of a reprieve for this bill on the same day he finished his five days isolating after a Covid-19 infection.

It also comes as Congress moves closer to passing another of his priorities — a $52 billion fund to encourage domestic production of semiconductors, the electronic brains in modern equipment ranging from washing machines to military weapons.

In his statement, Biden said prescription drug prices would drop and healthcare for Americans using the subsidized Affordable Care Act policy would also become $800 a year cheaper.

Funding for clean energy will “create thousands of new jobs and help lower energy costs in the future,” he said.

“We will pay for all of this by requiring big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, with no tax increases at all for families making under $400,000 a year.”

Biden thanked Manchin, an often unpredictable partner in the Senate, for his “extraordinary effort.”

“If enacted, this legislation will be historic, and I urge the Senate to move on this bill as soon as possible, and for the House to follow as well.”

Mankind marks a dubious milestone Thursday, the day by which humanity has consumed all earth can sustainably produce for this year, with NGOS warning the rest of 2022 will be lived in resource deficit.

The date — dubbed “Earth Overshoot Day” — marks a tipping point when people have used up “all that ecosystems can regenerate in one year”, according to the Global Footprint Network and WWF.

“From January 1 to July 28, humanity has used as much from nature as the planet can renew in the entire year. That’s why July 28 is Earth Overshoot Day,” said Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network.

He added: “The Earth has a lot of stock, so we can deplete Earth for some time but we cannot overuse it for ever. It’s like with money; we can spend more than we earn for some time until we’re broke.”

It would take 1.75 Earths to provide for the world’s population in a sustainable way, according to the measure, which was created by researchers in the early 1990s.   

Global Footprint Network said Earth Overshoot Day has fallen ever sooner over the last 50 years.

– Uneven burden –

In 2020, the date moved back three weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before returning to pre-pandemic levels.

The burden is not evenly spread. If everyone lived like an American, the date would have fallen even earlier, on March 13, Wackernagel said.

The two NGOs point the finger at the food production system and its “considerable” ecological footprint.

“In total, more than half of the planet’s biocapacity (55 percent) is used to feed humanity,” the two NGOs said.

“A large part of the food and raw materials are used to feed animals and animals that are consumed afterwards”, said Pierre Cannet of WWF France.

In the EU, “63 percent of arable land… is directly associated with animal production”, he said.

“Agriculture contributes to deforestation, climate change by emitting greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems, while using a significant share of fresh water,” the NGOs said.

Based on scientific advice, they advocate reducing meat consumption in rich countries. 

“If we could cut meat consumption by half, we could move the date of the overshoot by 17 days,” said Laetitia Mailhes of the Global Footprint Network.

“Limiting food waste would push the date back by 13 days, that’s not insignificant,” she added, while one-third of the world’s food is wasted.

Around five percent of people who have had Covid-19 develop long-lasting problems with their sense of smell or taste, a large study said Thursday, potentially contributing to the burden of long Covid.

A lost sense of smell has been a hallmark of contracting coronavirus since the early days of the pandemic, but it has not been clear how often symptoms like this occur — or how long they can last.

Seeking to find out, researchers analysed the findings of 18 previous studies involving 3,700 patients.

In a new study published in the BMJ, they found that six months after contracting the virus, four percent of patients had not recovered their sense of smell. Meanwhile two percent had not recovered their sense of taste.

It was unclear if this represented a full or partial recovery, however.

The researchers estimated that loss of smell may persist in 5.6 percent of patients, while 4.4 percent may not fully recover their sense of taste.

One woman told the researchers that she had not recovered her sense of smell more than two years after contracting Covid.

The researchers said that while most patients should recover their sense of smell and taste within the first three months of getting Covid, “a major group of patients might develop long-lasting dysfunction”.

“That (may require) timely identification, personalised treatment, and long-term follow-up.”

Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London not involved in the research, said it was a “strong and important study”.

“Studies such as this alert us to the hidden burden out there of people suffering with persistent symptoms, but perhaps not having thought it worth contacting the GP on the assumption there wouldn’t be much to be done,” he said.

The research also found that women were less likely to recover these senses than men.

The cause of the disparity is not clear, but the researchers suggested women tend to have better senses of smell and taste in the first place, meaning they have more to lose.

The data did not include which Covid variant the patients contracted. Previous research has indicated that more recent Omicron variants are less likely to lead to smell loss.

Mankind marks a dubious milestone Thursday, the day by which humanity has consumed all earth can sustainably produce for this year, with NGOS warning the rest of 2022 will be lived in resource deficit.

The date — dubbed “Earth Overshoot Day” — marks a tipping point when people have used up “all that ecosystems can regenerate in one year”, according to the Global Footprint Network and WWF.

“From January 1 to July 28, humanity has used as much from nature as the planet can renew in the entire year. That’s why July 28 is Earth Overshoot Day,” said Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network.

He added: “The Earth has a lot of stock, so we can deplete Earth for some time but we cannot overuse it for ever. It’s like with money; we can spend more than we earn for some time until we’re broke.”

It would take 1.75 Earths to provide for the world’s population in a sustainable way, according to the measure, which was created by researchers in the early 1990s.   

Global Footprint Network said Earth Overshoot Day has fallen ever sooner over the last 50 years.

– Uneven burden –

In 2020, the date moved back three weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before returning to pre-pandemic levels.

The burden is not evenly spread. If everyone lived like an American, the date would have fallen even earlier, on March 13, Wackernagel said.

The two NGOs point the finger at the food production system and its “considerable” ecological footprint.

“In total, more than half of the planet’s biocapacity (55 percent) is used to feed humanity,” the two NGOs said.

“A large part of the food and raw materials are used to feed animals and animals that are consumed afterwards”, said Pierre Cannet of WWF France.

In the EU, “63 percent of arable land… is directly associated with animal production”, he said.

“Agriculture contributes to deforestation, climate change by emitting greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems, while using a significant share of fresh water,” the NGOs said.

Based on scientific advice, they advocate reducing meat consumption in rich countries. 

“If we could cut meat consumption by half, we could move the date of the overshoot by 17 days,” said Laetitia Mailhes of the Global Footprint Network.

“Limiting food waste would push the date back by 13 days, that’s not insignificant,” she added, while one-third of the world’s food is wasted.

NASA plans to bring 30 Martian rock samples back to Earth in 2033, the agency said Wednesday — and is sending two small helicopters to help the mission.

The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has so far collected 11 samples as part of its hunt for signatures of ancient life.

But bringing them back for detailed lab study on Earth is proving to be a highly complex task.

Up until now, NASA was planning on sending another rover to Mars to pick up the samples from Perseverance then bring them to a robotic lander equipped with its own rocket, called the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

This in turn would fire the samples into orbit where they would be collected by a European spaceship.

Now, however, the second “Sample Fetch Rover” has been scrapped and Perseverance itself will deliver the precious cargo directly to the lander, which will use a robot arm to extract it.

But since NASA always plans for contingencies, it has a backup plan in case Perseverance becomes immobilized.

The lander, which should launch from Earth in 2028 and land on Mars in mid-2030, will also carry two mini helicopters.

Perseverance brought with it its own helicopter, called Ingenuity, which carried out the first powered flight on another world, and has now made a total of 29 sorties.

The two new helicopters will be a little heavier, equipped with wheels to be able to move on the ground as well, and come with a small arm allowing them to recover the samples.

In this scenario, Perseverance would first drop the samples on the ground, the helicopters would pick them up, then place them next to the ascent vehicle.

The orbiter would be set to return to Earth in the Utah desert in 2033.

The global fight against HIV has stalled from shrinking resources due to Covid-19 and other crises, according to a new report presented at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal, Canada.

Across the world, new HIV infections fell just 3.6 percent between 2020 and 2021, the smallest annual drop since 2016, said the UNAIDS report, titled “In Danger.”

Some 1.5 million new infections occurred last year –- more than a million over global targets of fighting the virus.

“The response to the AIDS pandemic has been derailed by global crises from the colliding pandemics of HIV and Covid, to the war in Ukraine and the resulting global economic crisis,” UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima told reporters.

New infections climbed in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America, in line with trends over several years.

Asia and the Pacific saw a slight rise, bucking previous declines.

Bright spots included western and central Africa — the latter driven largely by Nigeria — and the Caribbean.

“Covid-19 and other instabilities have disrupted health services in much of the world, and millions of students have been out of school, increasing their HIV vulnerability,” the report said.

Globally, 38.4 million people were living with HIV in 2021, with 650,000 deaths from AIDS-related illnesses.

Young women and adolescent girls were disproportionately impacted, with a new infection occurring in this population every two minutes.

Sub-Saharan Africa still accounts for the majority of new infections — 59 percent in 2021 — but that proportion is decreasing as the decline in new cases slows in the rest of the world.

– Fatigue and Ukraine war – 

The report comes as high-income countries are cutting back aid. 

In 2021, international resources available for HIV were six percent lower than in 2010, with bilateral assistance from the United States down 57 percent over the past decade.

The UN says the HIV response in low- and middle-income countries is $8 billion short of the amount needed by 2025.

Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infectious disease official, said he was worried that fatigue over HIV was holding back resource allocation.

“When you have the disease that we have been addressing as a community, now over 40 years, even that alone is a tough sell to keep the enthusiasm up,” he said.

With Covid and monkeypox added to the mix, “people are exhausted with epidemics and pandemics, so I think our challenge is we have to fight twice as hard to get HIV back on the radar screen,” he added.

Andriy Klepikov, executive director of the Alliance for Public Health, an AIDS advocacy group in Ukraine, called for special attention to his country in light of the invasion by Russia.

“Over 100,000 people living with HIV are actually living in areas directly affected by the war,” he said, stressing the need for more funds from the United States’ PEPFAR program for HIV as well as from UNAIDS.

– Racial disparities – 

Seventy percent of cases globally were reported in key populations: sex workers and their clients, men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, and transgender people.

The report also called attention to racial inequality as an exacerbator of HIV risks. 

In the United Kingdom and United States of America, Black people lag white people in declines in new infections. In Australia, Canada and the United States, HIV acquisition rates are higher in Indigenous communities.

The report also showed that access to life-saving treatments is faltering, growing by its slowest rate in over a decade.

Three-quarters of all people living with HIV had access to antiretroviral treatments, but 10 million people do not.

The rate of global new infections has declined since peaking in the mid-1990s, but there is far to go in order to achieve the global goal of ending AIDS by 2030.

“We can end AIDS by 2030, but the curve will not bend by itself,” said Byanyima, urging countries to heed the call to action.

The independent British scientist James Lovelock, who has died on his 103rd birthday, was hugely influential for his Gaia theory that Earth is a single self-regulating system — and later his dire warnings about climate change.  

In a wide-ranging career that lasted more than three quarters of a century, Lovelock worked on viruses, the ozone layer, told NASA there was no life on Mars and helped shape — even sometimes reluctantly — the environmental movement. 

His ideas were often at odds with conventional wisdom — generating admiration and sometimes vilification from his peers. He often had to wait for the world to catch up.

The unorthodox scientist, inventor and author worked in a barn-turned-laboratory for decades, though the price for that freedom was a lack of institutional backing.

On the eve of his 101st birthday in 2020, Lovelock told AFP he was enjoying being in lockdown with his wife in southern England as the coronavirus pandemic swept the country.  

“I grew up as an only child hardly meeting anyone — it isn’t any great hardship for me,” he said, adding that the sunny weather and lack of other people were “maximally desirable”.

Despite his declared antisocial tendencies, Lovelock was unfailingly polite and almost impishly charming.

And as ever forging his own path, he said that the world had “overreacted” to Covid.

“Climate change is more dangerous to life on Earth than almost any conceivable disease,” he said.

“If we don’t do something about it, we will find ourselves removed from the planet.”

– ‘Giant’ –

Born on July 26, 1919, Lovelock grew up in south London between the two World Wars, starting out as a photographic chemist.

In 1948, he earned a PhD in medicine and worked in the virus department of Britain’s National Institute for Medical Research for two decades.

In 1957, he invented the machine used to detect the hole in the ozone layer. 

In the early 1960s, as NASA were determined to find life on Mars, Lovelock was under contract at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California.

But Lovelock told his employers there almost certainly wasn’t any life Mars — then designed an experiment to prove it.

A decade later he announced his Gaia theory, describing Earth as an interconnected superorganism.

At a stroke, it helped redefine how science perceives the relationship between our inanimate planet and the life it hosts.

At first the notion was ridiculed by his peers and was even embraced by “Mother Earth” environmentalists, which further annoyed the hard-nosed empiricist.

By the 1990s, however, the complex interplay of all life forms with the water, air and rocks around them — Earth’s geo-bio-chemical balancing act — was accepted by many as self-evident.

Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said the Gaia theory had galvanised a new generation of prominent Earth system scientists. 

“Our academic careers are all inspired, in one way or another, by James Lovelock,” he told AFP just a few months before the scientist’s death. 

“He was one of the giants on whose shoulders we all stand.”

– Along with Darwin –

Lovelock later became known as something of a prophet of climate doom with his 2006 book “The Revenge of Gaia” and its 2009 sequel “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”, though he later walked back his most dire predictions.

Never one to shy away from unconventional thinking, Lovelock said humanity might be able to buy time with ambitious technological solutions — many of which remain deeply controversial in climate circles.

“Many different ways to keep Earth cool have been suggested,” he mused to AFP in 2020.

“One idea I find attractive is a sunshade in heliocentric orbit” — essentially a giant sun umbrella in space.

While Lovelock was known for his willingness to take an unorthodox position, fellow scientists said that he was also eager to collaborate with others. 

“He will be remembered for his warm, fun-loving personality, his truly innovative thinking, his clarity of communication, his willingness to take bold risks in developing his ideas, and his abilities to bring people together and learn from them,” said Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts Research at Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre. 

In 2020, AFP asked Lovelock what he would most like to be remembered for.

“The concept of the self-regulating Earth, I suppose,” he replied, saying he had his career at NASA to thank for “stumbling” upon Gaia. 

And he was sanguine about the significance of his legacy. 

“It is as important, in its own way, as Darwin’s thoughts on evolution,” he said.

“We are both students of this great system that we happen to live in.”