AFP UK

Highways and school playgrounds in Beijing were closed Friday due to heavy pollution, as China ramps up coal production and faces scrutiny of its environmental record at make-or-break international climate talks.

World leaders have gathered in Scotland this week for COP26 negotiations billed as one of the last chances to avert catastrophic climate change, though Chinese President Xi Jinping made a written address instead of attending in person.

China — the world’s largest emitter of the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change — has ramped up coal output after supply chains in recent months were roiled by an energy crunch owing to strict emissions targets and record prices for the fossil fuel.

A thick haze of smog blanketed swathes of northern China on Friday, with visibility in some areas reduced to less than 200 metres (yards), according to the country’s weather forecaster.

Authorities in Beijing blamed the pollution on “unfavourable weather conditions and regional pollution spread” as schools in the capital — which will host the Winter Olympics in February — were ordered to stop physical education classes and outdoor activities.

Stretches of highways to major cities including Shanghai, Tianjin and Harbin were closed Friday due to poor visibility.

Pollutants detected Friday morning by a monitoring station at the US embassy in Beijing reached levels defined as “very unhealthy” for the general population.

Levels of small particulate matter, or PM 2.5, which penetrate deep into human lungs and cause respiratory illnesses hovered around 220 — far above the WHO recommended limit of 15.

The smog is likely to persist until at least Saturday evening, according to city officials.

China said earlier this week it had increased daily coal production by more than one million tonnes to ease an energy shortage that had forced factories to close in recent months.

Rapid industrialisation has made China no stranger to air pollution, although severe smog episodes have become less frequent in recent years as authorities have increasingly prioritised environmental protection.

Beijing has pledged to bring emissions of planet-heating carbon dioxide to a peak by 2030 and reduce them to net zero by 2060.

China hit back Wednesday at criticism by Joe Biden, saying “actions speak louder than words” after the US president accused Beijing of not showing leadership to combat climate change.

China generates about 60 percent of its energy from burning coal.

Highways and school playgrounds in Beijing were closed Friday due to heavy pollution, as China ramps up coal production and faces scrutiny of its environmental record at make-or-break international climate talks.

World leaders have gathered in Scotland this week for COP26 negotiations billed as one of the last chances to avert catastrophic climate change, though Chinese President Xi Jinping made a written address instead of attending in person.

China — the world’s largest emitter of the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change — has ramped up coal output after supply chains in recent months were roiled by an energy crunch owing to strict emissions targets and record prices for the fossil fuel.

A thick haze of smog blanketed swathes of northern China on Friday, with visibility in some areas reduced to less than 200 metres (yards), according to the country’s weather forecaster.

Authorities in Beijing blamed the pollution on “unfavourable weather conditions and regional pollution spread” as schools in the capital — which will host the Winter Olympics in February — were ordered to stop physical education classes and outdoor activities.

Stretches of highways to major cities including Shanghai, Tianjin and Harbin were closed Friday due to poor visibility.

Pollutants detected Friday morning by a monitoring station at the US embassy in Beijing reached levels defined as “very unhealthy” for the general population.

Levels of small particulate matter, or PM 2.5, which penetrate deep into human lungs and cause respiratory illnesses hovered around 220 — far above the WHO recommended limit of 15.

The smog is likely to persist until at least Saturday evening, according to city officials.

China said earlier this week it had increased daily coal production by more than one million tonnes to ease an energy shortage that had forced factories to close in recent months.

Rapid industrialisation has made China no stranger to air pollution, although severe smog episodes have become less frequent in recent years as authorities have increasingly prioritised environmental protection.

Beijing has pledged to bring emissions of planet-heating carbon dioxide to a peak by 2030 and reduce them to net zero by 2060.

China hit back Wednesday at criticism by Joe Biden, saying “actions speak louder than words” after the US president accused Beijing of not showing leadership to combat climate change.

China generates about 60 percent of its energy from burning coal.

Workers laying gas pipes on a street in the Peruvian capital Lima stumbled on the remains of a pre-Hispanic gravesite that included 2,000-year-old ceramic burial vessels, an archaeologist said Thursday. 

“This find that we see today is 2,000 years old,” archaeologist Cecilia Camargo told AFP at the site.

“So far, there are six human bodies that we have recovered, including children and adults, accompanied by a set of ceramic vessels that were expressly made to bury them.”  

Experts believe the site in the Lima district of La Victoria may be linked to the culture known as “Blanco sobre Rojo,” or “White on Red,” which settled on the central coast of Peru in the valleys of Chillon, Rimac and Lurin, the three rivers that cross Lima. 

“So far, we have recovered about 40 vessels of different shapes related to the White on Red style,” said Camargo, head of the cultural heritage department at the natural gas company Calidda. 

“Some bottles are very distinctive of this period and style, which have a double spout and a bridge handle,” Camargo said. 

As finds of ancient artefacts and remains occur frequently in Peru, all public service companies that do excavations have in-house archaeologists, including Calidda, a Colombian-funded company that distributes natural gas in Lima and in the neighboring port of Callao.

With science warning that only swift action can avoid cataclysmic global warming, countries already feeling the lash of climate change are demanding that the timetable for updating national carbon-cutting pledges be radically accelerated.

Currently, the nearly 200 nations that submitted voluntary emissions reduction schemes under the 2015 Paris Agreement have agreed to update those plans every five years, a process described as a “ratchet mechanism”.

The first set of revisions came due at the end of 2020, but most were not submitted until this year because of the Covid pandemic. 

China, by far the world’s top carbon polluter, filed its update only last week, and India — the number four emitter — did so at the COP26 summit in Glasgow on Monday.

But even if all national pledges are honoured — a big “if” — Earth’s surface would still warm a “catastrophic” 2.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels, according to the UN, a far cry from the Paris treaty target of 1.5C.  

The next scheduled rendezvous for upping ambition isn’t until 2025.

Sobering projections, however, from the UN’s science authority along with a crescendo of unprecedented heatwaves, flooding and wildfires, strongly suggest this is not soon enough.

Leading the charge for a more compressed timetable is UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“Let’s have no illusions,” he said on the opening day of the talks. 

“If commitments fall short by the end of the COP, countries must revisit their national climate plans and policies. Not every five years. Every year, until keeping 1.5C is assured.”

– A ‘non-paper’ –

The idea got further backing on Thursday from Bangladeshi Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen, who said “major emitters” should raise their 2030 targets at every annual climate conference until they are aligned with the 1.5C goal.

“We’re hoping, expecting, this COP will respond to our demands as a moral compass of the international community,” he said at a press conference.

Various proposals for including a call for nations to review and improve plans to shrink their carbon footprints are already “on the table” in preliminary discussions among negotiators, according several sources at the talks. 

A first draft — known as a “non-paper” in UN climate jargon — could be circulated as early as Friday, they said.

Momentum has been building on the issue.

More than 50 developing countries in the Climate Vulnerable Forum, have called for a pact that would “mandate yearly ambition raising for governments, and especially major carbon emitters for every year through to 2025”.

G20 nations, which account for nearly 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have also indicated an openness to up the pace.  

A communique issued on Sunday at the close of the G20 summit in Rome committed to “further action this decade”, but it was trailed by a string of caveats indicating just how difficult ramping up carbon reduction pledges in the short term is going to be.

“It depends on the language,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at climate policy think tank E3G.

– A non-starter –

“If it sounds like it’s mandatory, then China and other countries will say that is re-interpreting the Paris Agreement — which is correct.”

While signatories are collectively enjoined to reach the treaty’s temperature targets, individual contributions are strictly on a voluntary basis.

A call for yearly updates would also run into a practical problem, analysts pointed out.

It took years of internal wrangling before the European Union succeeded in increasing it’s 2030 target for greenhouse reduction from 40 to 55 percent, compared to 1990 levels.

Trying to do that every year — whether in the EU, the United States or Japan — would be nearly impossible, they suggest.

A more realistic goals would be picking an interim year by which nations would be asked to submit new plans on a voluntary basis.

“Most people have been talking about 2023,” said Meyer.

The Paris Agreement mandates a “stock take” in that year, an accounting exercise to evaluate the effectiveness of efforts to date. 

The best that countries pushing for yearly — or more frequent — updates of carbon reduction plans can hope for, Meyer and other veterans of the UN climate process agree, is something aspirational.

“Anything beyond an encouragement for greater efforts on a voluntary basis would be a non-starter for China, India and Russia,” said a senior diplomat.

In the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster “Armageddon,” Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck race to save the Earth from being pulverized by an asteroid.

While the Earth faces no such immediate danger, NASA plans to crash a spacecraft traveling at a speed of 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph) into an asteroid next year in a test of “planetary defense.”

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is to determine whether this is an effective way to deflect the course of an asteroid should one threaten the Earth in the future.

NASA provided details of the DART mission, which carries a price tag of $330 million, in a briefing for reporters on Thursday.

“Although there isn’t a currently known asteroid that’s on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer.

“The key to planetary defence is finding them well before they are an impact threat,” Johnson said. “We don’t want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed towards Earth and then have to test this capability.”

The DART spacecraft is scheduled to be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10:20 pm Pacific time on November 23 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

If the launch takes place at or around that time, impact with the asteroid some 6.8 million miles from Earth would occur between September 26 and October 1 of next year.

The target asteroid, Dimorphos, which means “two forms” in Greek, is about 525 feet in diameter and orbits around a larger asteroid named Didymos, “twin” in Greek.

Johnson said that while neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth they are ideal candidates for the test because of the ability to observe them with ground-based telescopes.

Images will also be collected by a miniature camera-equipped satellite contributed by the Italian Space Agency that will be ejected by the DART spacecraft 10 days before impact.

– ‘A small nudge’ –

Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the DART spacecraft, said Dimorphos completes an orbit around Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes “just like clockwork.” 

The DART spacecraft, which will weigh 1,210 pounds at the time of impact, will not “destroy” the asteroid, Chabot said.

“It’s just going to give it a small nudge,” she said. “It’s going to deflect its path around the larger asteroid.”

“It’s only going to be a change of about one percent in that orbital period,” Chabot said, “so what was 11 hours and 55 minutes before might be like 11 hours and 45 minutes.”

The test is designed to help scientists understand how much momentum is needed to deflect an asteroid in the event one is headed towards Earth one day.

“We are targeting to be as nearly head on as possible to cause the biggest deflection,” Chabot said.

The amount of deflection will depend to a certain extent on the composition of Dimorphos and scientists are not entirely certain how porous the asteroid is.

Dimorphos is the most common type of asteroid in space and is some 4.5 billion years old, Chabot said.

“It’s like ordinary chondrite meteorites,” she said. “It’s a fine grain mixture of rock and metal together.”

Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, said more than 27,000 near-Earth asteroids have been catalogued but none currently pose a danger to the planet.

An asteroid discovered in 1999 known as Bennu that is 1,650 feet wide will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact is considered very slight.

Four astronauts could leave the International Space Station on Sunday without their replacement team having arrived to take over, NASA announced Thursday, but the timing remains uncertain due to weather conditions.

The four members of the Crew-2 mission, including a French and a Japanese astronaut, are due to return to Earth this month after spending about six months on board the ISS. 

Normally they would have to wait for four other astronauts — three Americans and a German from the Crew-3 mission — to arrive aboard the space station to take their place.

But the takeoff of the next mission’s rocket, which had already been postponed several times and had been rescheduled for this weekend, was once again canceled because of unfavorable weather conditions, NASA said in a statement. 

As a result, the space agency is now considering returning Crew-2 to Earth before Crew-3 launches. 

“The earliest possible opportunity for undocking” the capsule to bring Crew-2 back to Earth would be at 1:05 pm Sunday Florida time (1705 GMT), NASA said. 

A withdrawal opportunity is possible on Monday, NASA added, without giving a specific timetable. 

Once detached from the ISS, the capsule will begin a journey of several hours, the duration of which can vary greatly depending on the trajectory, and will then land off the coast of Florida. 

The closest launch opportunity for the Crew-3 take off is at 9:51 pm on Monday (0151 GMT Tuesday), but only if NASA does not return Crew-2 on Sunday or Monday. 

Crew-3 is scheduled to take off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where astronauts have been in quarantine for days.

“Mission teams will make a final decision on whether to prioritize Crew-3’s launch or Crew-2’s return in the coming days based on the likelihood of favorable conditions,” NASA said. 

The two missions are being carried out by NASA in collaboration with SpaceX, which now provides regular missions to the ISS from the United States.

“These are dynamic and complex decisions that change day by day,” said NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich. 

“The weather in November can be especially challenging.”

Spain’s environment ministry on Thursday unveiled a roadmap for regenerating the stricken Mar Menor, one of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoons that is slowly dying from agricultural pollution. 

The plan would curb some harmful agricultural practices blamed for pushing the lagoon in southeastern Spain to what ecologists have described as “the brink of ecological collapse”.

“The environmental crisis of the Mar Menor is unsustainable, the damage must be stopped immediately,” Environment Minister Teresa Ribera said as she unveiled the 382-million-euro ($440-million) investment plan on a visit to the area. 

In August, millions of dead fish and crustaceans began washing up on the lagoon’s shores, scenes that experts have repeatedly blamed on agricultural pollution. 

They say the sea creatures died due to a lack of oxygen caused by hundreds of tonnes of fertiliser nitrates leaking into the water, triggering a phenomenon called eutrophication which collapses aquatic ecosystems.

The ministry’s plan for 2022-26 includes short- and medium-term steps to slash the contaminants entering the lagoon, ending illegal irrigation practices and revitalising the Mar Menor’s shoreline.

It outlines several environmental regeneration projects to support biodiversity in and around the lagoon, including the creation of a 1.5-kilometre (one mile) buffer zone along the Mar Menor’s shores.

Earlier this year, Ribera accused regional authorities of turning a blind eye to farming irregularities in the Campo de Cartagena, an intensively farmed area surrounding the lagoon.

The new plan involves cracking down on illegal irrigation and cutting off supplies to farms without irrigation rights, reviewing permits for wastewater disposal and monitoring livestock farms. 

Conservation group Ecologists in Action welcomed the central government’s new plan but said it regretted there was not more involvement in the plans from the regional government .

It called for greater coordination between the central, regional and municipal governments, as well as with businesses and civil society to fix the lagoon. 

Earlier this month, ecologists submitted a formal complaint to the EU over Spain’s “continued failure” to protect the Mar Menor, urging the European Commission to take “immediate action”. 

Although the lagoon is protected under various EU directives and the UN environment programme, they said Spain has failed to comply with its legal obligations, taking “only superficial steps” to safeguard the Mar Menor from damaging agricultural practices.

Fossils found deep in a South African cave formed part of a hominid child’s skull, apparently left on an alcove by fellow members of her species 250,000 years ago, scientists said on Thursday.

The latest find adds to the riddle surrounding Homo naledi — a species of Stone Age hominids discovered less than a decade ago in a region called the Cradle of Humankind, named after the stunning fossils unearthed there.

“The real mystery about this child is why she was found where she was,” said Lee Berger, the scientist who led the project. 

“Something amazing was going on in this cave 200,000-300,000 years ago.

Although the researchers refer to the child as “her”, they have not yet determined whether it was a boy or girl.

Researchers rarely find fossilised remains of children, because their bones are too thin and fragile to survive over aeons. 

The child was probably only four to six years old when it died, with baby teeth intact and adult teeth starting to emerge.

Nearly 2,000 fossils have been found in the caves, which scientists have pieced together into partial skeletons of more than two dozen individuals.

The initial discovery revealed in 2015 helped complicate our understanding of human evolution, by showing that Homo sapiens probably lived alongside other species of hominin — the name for hominids that include anatomically modern man.

The newly found 28 skull fragments and six teeth were found even deeper in the cave complex, 12 metres (40 feet) away from the main find, through tiny crevices that required the explorers to literally squeeze between the rocky walls.

– ‘Superman crawl’ – 

Parts of the passage are only 10 centimetres wide.

One section required explorers lie flat and pull themselves through with their hands stretched out ahead in a “Superman crawl”, and then climb over a ridge dubbed the Dragon’s Back, caver Mathabela Tsikoane told AFP.

“For a person that doesn’t cave, it’s very, very difficult,” he said. “You have to literally push yourself through.”

Because of its distance from the other finds, the investigators nicknamed the child Leti, after a seTswana word “letimela” meaning “the lost one.” 

But for Homo naledi, the journey into the cave might have been much easier, as they were smaller than modern humans. 

Their bodies also appeared well adapted to climbing, said Tebogo Makhubela, one of the scientists on the project.

“Homo naledi were just better climbers than us,” he said. “What is difficult for us, might not necessarily have been difficult for them.”

These remains are the first of a child’s skull. No other bones were found, not even a jawbone, and the skull showed no signs of damage — as from a carnivore’s attack.

Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, the self-proclaimed Cradle of Humankind consists of a complex of limestone caves about 50 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of Johannesburg. The latest find was made about 30 metres (100 feet) below ground). 

– Death ritual? –

The researchers speculate that other members of the species may have set the skull there, for reasons that could be linked to rituals around the dead, Berger said. 

He has proposed such a line of thinking for explaining the entire Homo naledi site, as a site for ritual burials.

If further evidence supports that theory, it would mark a dramatic rethinking about the human odyssey. 

Until now, the earliest known hominid rituals associated with death date back to 50,000-100,000 years ago, he said. 

But the latest find could push evidence for this behaviour — a token of grief and possibly belief — back to a quarter of a million years ago.

The discovery was published in two papers in the journal PaleoAnthropology, with 21 researchers from South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and 13 other institutions around the world.

Fossils found deep in a South African cave formed part of a hominid child’s skull, apparently left on an alcove by fellow members of her species 250,000 years ago, scientists said on Thursday.

The latest find adds to the riddle surrounding Homo naledi — a species of Stone Age hominids discovered less than a decade ago in a region called the Cradle of Humankind, named after the stunning fossils unearthed there.

“The real mystery about this child is why she was found where she was,” said Lee Berger, the scientist who led the project. 

“Something amazing was going on in this cave 200,000-300,000 years ago.

Although the researchers refer to the child as “her”, they have not yet determined whether it was a boy or girl.

Researchers rarely find fossilised remains of children, because their bones are too thin and fragile to survive over aeons. 

The child was probably only four to six years old when it died, with baby teeth intact and adult teeth starting to emerge.

Nearly 2,000 fossils have been found in the caves, which scientists have pieced together into partial skeletons of more than two dozen individuals.

The initial discovery revealed in 2015 helped complicate our understanding of human evolution, by showing that Homo sapiens probably lived alongside other species of hominin — the name for hominids that include anatomically modern man.

The newly found 28 skull fragments and six teeth were found even deeper in the cave complex, 12 metres (40 feet) away from the main find, through tiny crevices that required the explorers to literally squeeze between the rocky walls.

– ‘Superman crawl’ – 

Parts of the passage are only 10 centimetres wide.

One section required explorers lie flat and pull themselves through with their hands stretched out ahead in a “Superman crawl”, and then climb over a ridge dubbed the Dragon’s Back, caver Mathabela Tsikoane told AFP.

“For a person that doesn’t cave, it’s very, very difficult,” he said. “You have to literally push yourself through.”

Because of its distance from the other finds, the investigators nicknamed the child Leti, after a seTswana word “letimela” meaning “the lost one.” 

But for Homo naledi, the journey into the cave might have been much easier, as they were smaller than modern humans. 

Their bodies also appeared well adapted to climbing, said Tebego Makhubela, one of the scientists on the project.

“Homo naledi were just better climbers than us,” he said. “What is difficult for us, might not necessarily have been difficult for them.”

These remains are the first of a child’s skull. No other bones were found, not even a jawbone, and the skull showed no signs of damage — as from a carnivore’s attack.

Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, the self-proclaimed Cradle of Humankind consists of a complex of limestone caves about 50 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of Johannesburg. The latest find was made about 30 metres (100 feet) below ground). 

– Death ritual? –

The researchers speculate that other members of the species may have set the skull there, for reasons that could be linked to rituals around the dead, Berger said. 

He has proposed such a line of thinking for explaining the entire Homo naledi site, as a site for ritual burials.

If further evidence supports that theory, it would mark a dramatic rethinking about the human odyssey. 

Until now, the earliest known hominid rituals associated with death date back to 50,000-100,000 years ago, he said. 

But the latest find could push evidence for this behaviour — a token of grief and possibly belief — back to a quarter of a million years ago.

The discovery was published in two papers in the journal PaleoAnthropology, with 21 researchers from South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and 13 other institutions around the world.

Indonesia on Thursday questioned the terms of a deal to end deforestation by 2030 signed by over 100 countries, including the Southeast Asian archipelago, which is home to the world’s third-biggest rainforest.

The nations agreed on the multi-billion-dollar plan at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this week to stop cutting down trees on an industrial scale in under a decade.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the agreement was pivotal to the overarching goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius in a bid to slow global warming.

But two senior Indonesian politicians on Thursday threw Jakarta’s participation into question. One said the deal did not call for a total end to deforestation, and another said it could not halt President Joko Widodo’s development goals.

Indonesia’s deputy foreign affairs minister Mahendra Siregar said on Twitter that describing the deal as a zero-deforestation pledge was “false and misleading”.

Siti Nurbaya Bakar, Indonesia’s environment minister who attended the climate conference in Scotland, said on social media that “forcing Indonesia to zero deforestation in 2030 is clearly inappropriate and unfair”. 

She added that there were multiple ways to define deforestation, and that any deal could not halt economic growth. 

“The massive development of President Jokowi’s era must not stop in the name of carbon emissions or in the name of deforestation,” she said, referring to Widodo by his nickname.

“Indonesia’s natural wealth, including forests, must be managed for its use according to sustainable principles, besides being fair,” she said.

In the declaration signed by Indonesia and over 100 countries, leaders committed “to working collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030 while delivering sustainable development and promoting an inclusive rural transformation”.

Quizzed by reporters, Johnson’s spokesman said he did not see a contradiction in Indonesia’s statements.

“My understanding of what the Indonesian government has said is that they need to be able to continue legal logging and agriculture to support their economic development,” the spokesman said.

“It would be consistent with the pledge — what countries have committed to is to end net deforestation, ensuring that any forest lost is replaced sustainably.” 

Kiki Taufik, a forests campaigner with Greenpeace in Indonesia, regretted that the country’s environment minister supported “large scale developments which clearly have the potential for environmental destruction”.

“If we do not take immediate and substantial action to stop deforestation… we cannot achieve our modest emissions reductions goals”.

Although its rate of deforestation has slowed markedly since 2015, Indonesia’s vast forests are still shrinking.

According to Global Forest Watch, Indonesia in 2001 had 93.8 million hectares (230 million acres) of primary forest — ancient forests which have largely not been disturbed by human activity — an area about the size of Egypt.

By 2020, that area had decreased by about 10 percent.