AFP UK

Chinese authorities have ordered dozens of coal mines to expand production amid a nationwide energy crunch, state media reported Friday.

Dozens of mines in China’s Inner Mongolia, a major coal producing region, were instructed to increase their capacity by more than 98 million tonnes in an official notice not released to the public, the state-run Securities Times reported.

Nearly 60 percent of China’s energy-hungry economy is fuelled by coal, and the country has struggled to wean itself from the fuel despite its pledge to become carbon neutral by 2060.

China has been hit by widespread power cuts that have forced factories to delay production as businesses are ordered to minimize energy usage.

Record coal prices, state electricity price controls and tough emissions targets have combined to squeeze the power supply, pushing over a dozen provinces and regions to announce curbs on energy usage in recent months.

The 72 mines in Inner Mongolia were asked to “accelerate the release” of production capacity, the official Securities Times said, citing the current supply crunch as a likely factor behind the order.

China’s coal supply has been disrupted by the pandemic, under pressure from tough emissions targets and squeezed by a drop in coal imports exacerbated by a trade tiff with Australia.

Earlier this month, coal prices hit a record high.

Meanwhile China’s power needs in the first half of the year exceeded pre-pandemic levels, according to the National Energy Administration, as demand for factory goods picked up with the rest of the world emerging from Covid lockdowns.

Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng had recently warned fuel companies to make sure there is enough fuel to keep the country running, according to Bloomberg News.

Unusually powerful sandstorms have left at least six people dead in Sao Paulo in recent weeks, local media said, as southeastern Brazil grapples with severe drought.

Scenes of huge orange dust clouds rumbling across the countryside — with winds of up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) an hour — have been seen at least three times since the end of September, terrifying residents in urban and rural areas of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais states.

The six people killed in Sao Paulo were victims of falling trees and houses and other direct consequences of the storms, local media reported.

“In some ways, they’re a common occurrence, but not of this magnitude that we’ve seen in 2021,” meteorologist Estael Sias of the Brazilian weather channel Metsul told AFP of the storms.

“It’s the result of a long period of a lack of rain, high temperature and low humidity,” she explained.

After the dry season, rain arrives, usually accompanied by wind storms.

“The wind gusts come in contact with the sandy ground and churn up into the atmosphere pollution, waste and the leftovers from fires, which also happen during the dry period,” Sias said. 

The strong storms “can’t be separated from climate change,” he said. 

“In this century, every year has had record temperatures. There is more heat in the atmosphere, which has just been transformed into energy for extreme (weather) events: rain, storms, floods, but also drought, cold and heat, what has just been unleashed with events like these dust storms,” Sias said.

Such storms, which can be frequent in desert regions, can reach thousands of meters into the sky, be up to 160 kilometers wide and last for several hours, according to Sias.

In addition to dealing with extreme drought, the mostly agricultural region also has large open areas uncovered by vegetation, which also leaves land vulnerable to soil being caught up in high winds. 

Brazil is facing its worst drought in 91 years, which has led to a critically low water level in hydroelectric reserves in the central-western and southern parts of the country, driving up electricity costs.

Three national US monuments will have their protected status restored Friday, continuing Joe Biden’s efforts to roll back the environmental policies of his predecessor.

Under Donald Trump protections around natural areas — often home to endangered species or archaeological sites — were rolled back, outraging conservationists and Native American communities.

“President Biden will sign three proclamations restoring protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments,” the White House said Thursday.

Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante will return to its original size of 1.87 million acres, after Trump cut about 45 percent of its land in 2017. Bears Ears will actually expand under Biden’s plans.

In maritime areas — Northeast Canyons and Seamounts — the capture of red crabs and American lobsters will be slowly reduced under new fishing protections, until the practice is banned there from September 2023. 

Biden will sign the orders on Friday, US media reported.

The areas are home to more than 100,000 archaeological sites, including rock art that is at least 5,000 years old and the remains of 21 previously unknown dinosaur species.

Pacific island leaders have urged industrialised nations to bring plans for real action, not good intentions, to upcoming climate talks, painting a grim picture of the environmental horrors they face.

Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said low-lying Pacific states were bearing the brunt of global warming’s impact and their voices must be heard at UN-brokered climate negotiations in Glasgow next month.

“For our sake and all of humanity’s, small island developing states will use the full measure of our moral authority against major emitters who refuse to arrive in Glasgow with strong commitments,” he told an EU-backed virtual summit late Thursday.

The summit, known as COP26, will bring together representatives from 196 countries and the European Union for the biggest climate conference since landmark talks in Paris in 2015.

Bainimarama said it must result in solid commitments to swiftly meet the ambitious goal set in Paris of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

The Fijian leader also demanded the phasing out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, saying Glasgow could not end in “a litany of good intentions”. 

“The consequences of inaction are unthinkable,” he said.

“The loss of entire islands, as well as vast stretches of coastline from Lagos to Venice to Miami, the coastal belt of Bangladesh.

“Mass climate-driven migration, wildfire seasons in arid regions that incinerate homes, farms, ecosystems and an unimaginable loss of biodiversity — the of list horrors goes on.”

Marshall Islands President David Kabua said it was difficult for those not on the frontline of the crisis to understand how “urgent, pressing and unavoidable” climate change was in the Pacific.

“My country and this region needs the world to recognise that this cannot wait,” he said.

“We face the most difficult questions — which islands to preserve, what happens when our people are forced to move against their will, how will we preserve our culture?

“We need a signal from the rest of the world, particularly the large emitters, that our voices and our needs are being heard.”

Samoa’s Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, who took office as the country’s first female prime minister in late July, said climate change was the greatest threat facing her people.

“We are already experiencing intense and frequent tropical cyclones and droughts, increased heavy precipitation and floods, ocean warming and acidification,” she said.

“The impacts are detrimental to our health, wellbeing, livelihoods and way of life.”

Images from Mars reveal how water helped shape the Red Planet’s landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will guide the search for evidence of ancient life, a study said Thursday.

In February, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, where scientists suspected a long-gone river once fed a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta visible from space. 

The study in Science analysed high-resolution images captured by Perseverance of the cliffs that were once the banks of the delta. 

Layers within the cliffs reveal how its formation took place. 

NASA astrobiologist Amy Williams and her team in Florida found similarities between features of the cliffs seen from the crater floor and patterns in Earth’s river deltas.

The shape of the bottom three layers showed a presence and steady flow of water early on, indicating Mars was “warm and humid enough to support a hydrologic cycle” about 3.7 billion years ago, the study says. 

The top and most recent layers feature boulders measuring more than a metre in diameter scattered about, probably carried there by violent flooding. 

But it is the fine-grained sediment of the base layer that will likely be the target of sampling for signs of long-extinct life — if it existed — on Mars.

The findings will help researchers figure out where to send the rover for soil and rocks that may contain precious “biosignatures” of putative Martian life forms. 

“From orbital images, we knew it had to be water that formed the delta,” Williams said in a press release. 

“But having these images is like reading a book instead of just looking at the cover.”

Finding out whether life may have existed on Mars is the main mission of Perseverence, a project that took decades and cost billions of dollars to develop.

– ‘Profound’ mission –

Over the course of several years, the multi-tasking rover will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be eventually sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for lab analysis.

Last month mission scientists announced Perseverance had collected two rock samples in Jezero that showed signs they were in contact with groundwater for a long period.

Their hope is that the samples might at one point have hosted ancient microbial life, evidence of which could have been trapped by salt minerals.

Learning that Mars might once have harboured life would be one of the most “profound” discoveries ever made by humanity, Williams said.

She also expressed wonder at having a window onto an ancient river system on another planet. 

“It’s really eye-opening to see something no one on Earth has ever seen before,” she said.

Perseverance landed on February 18, and the study looks at long-distance images it captured during its first three months on Mars.

About the size of an SUV, it is equipped with 19 cameras, a two metre (seven foot) long robotic arm, two microphones, and a suite of cutting-edge instruments.

One of them is called the SuperCam, a tool that laser-zaps rocks from a distance in order to study their vapour with a device that reveals their chemical composition. 

It took seven months for Perseverance to travel from Earth to Mars with its sister craft Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter whose rotors have to spin five times faster than Earth versions to get lift in the far-less-dense atmosphere. 

The plan is for the rover to cross the delta, then the ancient lake shore, and finally explore the edges of the crater. 

Unusually powerful sandstorms have left at least six people dead in Sao Paulo in recent weeks, local media said, as southeastern Brazil grapples with severe drought.

Scenes of huge orange dust clouds rumbling across the countryside — with winds of up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) an hour — have been seen at least three times since the end of September, terrifying residents in urban and rural areas of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais states.

The six people killed in Sao Paulo were victims of falling trees and houses and other direct consequences of the storms, local media reported. 

“In some ways, they’re a common occurence, but not of this magnitude that we’ve seen in 2021,” meteorologist Estael Sias of the Brazilian weather channel Metsul told AFP of the storms.

“It’s the result of a long period of a lack of rain, high temperature and low humidity,” he explained. 

After the dry season, rain arrives, usually accompanied by wind storms. 

“The wind gusts come in contact with the sandy ground and churn up into the atmosphere pollution, waste and the leftovers from fires, which also happen during the dry period,” Sias said. 

The strong storms “can’t be separated from climate change,” he said. 

“In this century, every year has had record temperatures. There is more heat in the atmosphere, which has just been transformed into energy for extreme (weather) events: rain, storms, floods, but also drought, cold and heat, what has just been unleashed with events like these dust storms,” Sias said. 

Such storms, which can be frequent in desert regions, can reach thousands of meters into the sky, be up to 160 kilometers wide and last for several hours, according to Sias. 

In addition to dealing with extreme drought, the mostly agricultural region also has large open areas uncovered by vegetation, which also leaves land vulnerable to soil being caught up in high winds. 

Brazil is facing its worst drought in 91 years, which has led to a critically low water level in hydroelectric reserves in the central-western and southern part of the country, driving up electricity costs.

Images from Mars reveal how water helped shape the Red Planet’s landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will guide the search for evidence of ancient life, a study said Thursday.

In February, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, where scientists suspected a long-gone river once fed a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta visible from space. 

The study in Science analysed high-resolution images captured by Perseverance of the cliffs that were once the banks of the delta. 

Layers within the cliffs reveal how its formation took place. 

NASA astrobiologist Amy Williams and her team in Florida found similarities between features of the cliffs seen from the crater floor and patterns in Earth’s river deltas.

The shape of the bottom three layers showed a presence and steady flow of water early on, indicating Mars was “warm and humid enough to support a hydrologic cycle” about 3.7 billion years ago, the study says. 

The top and most recent layers feature boulders measuring more than a metre in diameter scattered about, probably carried there by violent flooding. 

But it is the fine-grained sediment of the base layer that will likely be the target of sampling for signs of long-extinct life — if it existed — on Mars.

The findings will help researchers figure out where to send the rover for soil and rocks that may contain precious “biosignatures” of putative Martian life forms. 

“From orbital images, we knew it had to be water that formed the delta,” Williams said in a press release. 

“But having these images is like reading a book instead of just looking at the cover.”

Finding out whether life may have existed on Mars is the main mission of Perseverence, a project that took decades and cost billions of dollars to develop.

– ‘Profound’ mission –

Over the course of several years, the multi-tasking rover will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be eventually sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for lab analysis.

Last month mission scientists announced Perseverance had collected two rock samples in Jezero that showed signs they were in contact with groundwater for a long period.

Their hope is that the samples might at one point have hosted ancient microbial life, evidence of which could have been trapped by salt minerals.

Learning that Mars might once have harboured life would be one of the most “profound” discoveries ever made by humanity, Williams said.

She also expressed wonder at having a window onto an ancient river system on another planet. 

“It’s really eye-opening to see something no one on Earth has ever seen before,” she said.

Perseverance landed on February 18, and the study looks at long-distance images it captured during its first three months on Mars.

About the size of an SUV, it is equipped with 19 cameras, a two metre (seven foot) long robotic arm, two microphones, and a suite of cutting-edge instruments.

One of them is called the SuperCam, a tool that laser-zaps rocks from a distance in order to study their vapour with a device that reveals their chemical composition. 

It took seven months for Perseverance to travel from Earth to Mars with its sister craft Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter whose rotors have to spin five times faster than Earth versions to get lift in the far-less-dense atmosphere. 

The plan is for the rover to cross the delta, then the ancient lake shore, and finally explore the edges of the crater. 

Standing on a boat bobbing gently in the Red Sea, Egyptian diving instructor Mohamed Abdelaziz looks on as tourists snorkel amid the brilliantly coloured corals, a natural wonder now under threat from climate change. 

“If they disappear, we’ll disappear with them,” he says of the vibrant corals on the reef, a species-rich ecosystem just below the turquoise waters that is beloved by diving enthusiasts worldwide.

Coral reefs — often dubbed the “rainforests of the oceans” for their rich biodiversity — are under threat everywhere as rising sea temperatures and acidification cause catastrophic “bleaching” events.

Along with pollution and dynamite fishing, global warming wiped out 14 percent of the world’s coral reefs between 2009 and 2018, says a new survey by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the biggest ever carried out. 

Some studies have suggested that many species of coral in the Red Sea — which is also bordered by the Saudi peninsula, Sudan and Eritrea — are unusually heat-resistant, but local professionals say they have already witnessed the damage. 

“We can see the effects of global warming before our eyes,” said Islam Mohsen, 37, another local diving instructor at the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh. 

“We can see the coral discolouring and turning white.”

– Biodiversity hotspots –

Coral reefs cover only a tiny fraction — 0.2 percent — of the ocean floor, but they are home to at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants.

The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden boast the most biologically diverse coral reef communities outside of Southeast Asia.

The Red Sea — with just over five percent of the world’s coral reefs — is home to 209 types of coral, according to Egypt’s environment ministry. 

The new global survey said that live hard coral cover in the region fluctuated over recent decades but declined overall, from 36.1 percent in 1997 to 34.3 percent in 2019.

Causes for the degraded reefs varied by location but included tourism activities, coastal development, land runoff and overfishing, the report said.

Steps have been taken in Egypt to protect reefs and marine life that are crucial to the local tourism sector.

Egypt’s Chamber of Diving and Water Sports — which oversees 269 diving centres and over 2,900 professional divers — has protected fragile areas with buoys to keep boats from mooring.

It has also suspended beginners’ diving classes in some areas to allow damaged reefs to recover. 

But the largest looming threat, far harder to fix, is global warming.

– Marine heatwaves –

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions, shielding land surfaces but generating huge, long-lasting marine heatwaves.

These are pushing many species of corals past their limits of tolerance.

“When the temperature of the ocean goes up, it absorbs more carbon dioxide, which creates carbonic acid,” said Cairo-based climate change consultant Katherine Jones.

“So not only will the temperature increase, but the PH level will change too,” affecting all animals with shells, she said. “We will lose a lot of wildlife, and the ecosystem will be changing in a way that affects us as humans in terms of resources.

“The coral reefs are nurseries to baby fish and a feeding ground to bigger fish … it’s an essential part of the ecosystem.”

Sharm El-Sheikh hosted a United Nations agencies conference in 2018 that called for the protection of coral reefs “before it’s too late”. 

Egypt also plans to host the Climate Conference of the Parties (COP27) in November next year.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that up to 90 percent of coral reefs “may be gone by mid-century” even if the rise in temperatures stabilises below 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

Jones warned that, as things stand now, climate change and its impacts can no longer be reversed — only slowed — to prevent the worst consequences.

“Even if humans completely disappear from Earth tomorrow or we stopped producing any kind of emissions,” she said, “the temperature will continue to rise by itself.”

Images from Mars reveal how water helped shape the Red Planet’s landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will guide the search for evidence of ancient life, a study said Thursday.

In February, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, where scientists suspected a long-gone river once fed a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta visible from space. 

The study in Science analysed high-resolution images captured by Perseverance of the cliffs that were once the banks of the delta. 

Layers within the cliffs reveal how its formation took place. 

NASA astrobiologist Amy Williams and her team in Florida found similarities between features of the cliffs seen from the crater floor and patterns in Earth’s river deltas.

The shape of the bottom three layers showed a presence and steady flow of water early on, indicating Mars was “warm and humid enough to support a hydrologic cycle” about 3.7 billion years ago, the study says. 

The top and most recent layers feature boulders measuring more than a metre in diameter scattered about, probably carried there by violent flooding. 

But it is the fine-grained sediment of the base layer that will likely be the target of sampling for signs of long-extinct life — if it existed — on Mars.

The findings will help researchers figure out where to send the rover for soil and rocks that may contain precious “biosignatures” of putative Martian life forms. 

“From orbital images, we knew it had to be water that formed the delta,” Williams said in a press release. 

“But having these images is like reading a book instead of just looking at the cover.”

Finding out whether life may have existed on Mars is the main mission of Perseverence, a project that took decades and cost billions of dollars to develop.

– ‘Profound’ mission –

Over the course of several years, the multi-tasking rover will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be eventually sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for lab analysis.

Last month mission scientists announced Perseverance had collected two rock samples in Jezero that showed signs they were in contact with groundwater for a long period.

Their hope is that the samples might at one point have hosted ancient microbial life, evidence of which could have been trapped by salt minerals.

Learning that Mars might once have harboured life would be one of the most “profound” discoveries ever made by humanity, Williams said.

She also expressed wonder at having a window onto an ancient river system on another planet. 

“It’s really eye-opening to see something no one on Earth has ever seen before,” she said.

Perseverance landed on February 18, and the study looks at long-distance images it captured during its first three months on Mars.

About the size of an SUV, it is equipped with 19 cameras, a two metre (seven foot) long robotic arm, two microphones, and a suite of cutting-edge instruments.

One of them is called the SuperCam, a tool that laser-zaps rocks from a distance in order to study their vapour with a device that reveals their chemical composition. 

It took seven months for Perseverance to travel from Earth to Mars with its sister craft Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter whose rotors have to spin five times faster than Earth versions to get lift in the far-less-dense atmosphere. 

The plan is for the rover to cross the delta, then the ancient lake shore, and finally explore the edges of the crater. 

Brazil’s oil auction ended in disappointment on Thursday, with the government selling offshore drilling rights in only five out of 92 blocks on offer.

The dismal results reflected the weakened state of the oil industry during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as environmental concerns, according to experts.

The auction brought in just 37.14 million reais ($6.7 million) compared to the $2 billion raised at the previous auction held in October 2019, before the pandemic started.

Crucially, in a win for environmental activists, no offers were made for the blocks in the northeastern Potiguar Bay, which is close to the Fernando de Noronha and Rocas Atoll archipelagos, the former a UNESCO World Heritage site and the latter a biological reserve.

Around 50 protesters demonstrated in front of a hotel in Rio de Janeiro where the auction took place, notably against the projects’ risks to traditional fishing.

One demonstrator carried an iconic AFP photograph of an oil-stained Brazilian boy following an oil spill off the coast of northeast Brazil in 2019.

All the five blocks were bought by Royal Dutch Shell. They are located in the southeastern Santos Bay, close to the oil-rich pre-salt layer on Brazil’s coast.

Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras, usually very active at auctions, made no bids.

Rodolfo Saboia, the director of the National Oil Agency, which organized the auction, insisted the result was “positive” given how hard the industry has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We cannot call it a failure, we couldn’t expect all the blocks to find a buyer,” he said.

But Fernanda Delgado, a researcher at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, told AFP that “everyone expected there to be interest in more areas.”

The lack of bids was because companies “did not want to take the political risk or environmental risk,” Delgado added.