AFP UK

Opposition leaders and former mining communities on Friday lashed out at Prime Minister Boris Johnson for joking that former leader Margaret Thatcher’s coal mine closures had given Britain a head start in fighting climate change.

Thatcher, in power from 1979 to 1990, fought a bitter battle with coal miners in the 1980s, delivering the unionised industry’s death knell by closing over 100 mines, devastating communities in northern England, South Wales and Scotland.

A year-long walkout against closure plans by miners in 1984-85 was one of the defining moments of her premiership, eroding union power and accelerating her free-market reforms.

Johnson made the comments on a visit to an offshore wind farm in Scotland on Thursday, as he talked about the changes in Britain’s energy mix ahead of convening the UN’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November.

“Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether,” he said.

Johnson’s spokesman on Friday refused to apologise, saying “the prime minister recognises the huge impact and pain closing coal mines had in communities across the UK”.

But the quip risks backfiring with voters in former mining heartlands of northern England, who switched from Labour to his Conservatives in the last general election in 2019, largely over Brexit.

Newspapers also seized on the comment, with the traditionally Labour-supporting Daily Mirror headlining its front page “Johnson is the pits”.

– ‘Out of touch’ –

Labour party leader Keir Starmer said: “Boris Johnson’s shameful praising of Margaret Thatcher’s closure of the coal mines, brushing off the devastating impact on those communities with a laugh, shows just how out of touch he is with working people.”

Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford, also of Labour, told BBC radio the comments were “crass and offensive”, saying the closures caused “incalculable” damage to local communities.

Johnson failed to meet First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on his two-day visit to Scotland, where feelings still run high against the Tories because of Thatcher’s policies.

Sturgeon said communities across Scotland were “utterly devastated by Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry”.

She has repeatedly criticised Johnson for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic response and his refusal to allow a second referendum on Scottish independence.

Alan Mardghum, secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association in northeast England, said Johnson was guilty of showing “utter contempt” and of rewriting history.

“The wilful annihilation of the coal industry caused social and economic devastation in our communities that is still felt to this day,” he said.

“The Thatcher government increased coal imports to more than 40 million tonnes a year, often mined by child labour in the developing world.” 

Grahame Morris, a Labour MP in County Durham, said Thatcher’s assault on mining “had nothing to do with saving the environment”.

“It was an assault on a way of life, on trade unions and on communities that did not fit with Thatcher’s free-market brand of conservatism that worshipped money, speculation, the City of London and greed over community and society.”

Greece’s raging fires claimed their first victim on Friday after a punishing week-long heatwave, while neighbouring Turkey came under rising pressure over its handling of its own devastating wildfires.

Greece and Turkey have been fighting blaze upon blaze over the past week, hit by the region’s worst heatwave in decades, a disaster that officials and experts have linked to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change. 

A UN draft report seen by AFP has warned that the Mediterranean region, which it called a “climate change hotspot,” will be hit by fiercer heatwaves, droughts and fires supercharged by rising temperatures.

On Friday, a 38-year-old man from Ippokrateio, a town north of Athens hit by giant flames, died in hospital after being hit by a falling electric pole as he was riding a moped, the health ministry said, the first victim of the fires in Greece.

In Turkey, some eight people have been killed and dozens more hospitalised.

– ‘Powder keg’ –

“Our country is facing an extremely critical situation,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said late Thursday, putting six out of 13 regions in the country under high alert.

“We’re facing unprecedented conditions after several days of heatwave have turned the country into a powder keg.”

North of Athens, a fierce blaze ate through vast areas of pine forest, forcing yet more evacuations of villages overnight and blowing thick, choking smoke all over the Greek capital.

In the small town of Afidnes, 30 kilometres north of the capital (12 miles), firefighters were seen standing on their truck in the dead of night, dousing flames that leapt high above them.

In the morning, the fires had made way for desolation — burnt cars, trees, and houses destroyed. 

In nearby Krioneri, the fire scorched homes, businesses and factories.

“The fire in uncontrollable,” said resident Vassiliki Papapanagiotis. “I don’t want to leave, my whole life is here.”

Part of a motorway linking Athens to the north of the country has been shut down as a precaution.

– Foreign help –

Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias said that out of 99 fires reported on Thursday, 56 were still active.

At least 450 Greek firefighters were fighting the blaze.

Around 82 French firefighters — both military and civilian — arrived on Thursday evening, a French official said. 

France was also due to send two water-bombing planes, as was Sweden, while Romania was to dispatch 112 firefighters and 23 vehicles and Switzerland three helicopters, a spokesman for the Greek firefighters told AFP.

Israel, too, is planning to send back-up.

In neighbouring Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

According to the presidency, 208 fires have flared up since July 28, and 12 were still ablaze on Friday.

More evacuations took place on Friday in five Turkish provinces, including tourist hotspots Antalya and Mugla, according to NTV.

– ‘Treachery’ –

The Turkish government is also facing pressure after the opposition referred to a report which showed only a fraction of the budget for forest fire prevention had been spent.

The General Directorate of Forestry (OGM) spent only 1.75 percent of nearly 200 million Turkish lira ($23 million) allocated for forest fires in the first six months of 2021, main opposition party MP Murat Emir said, referring to numbers apparently from the state agency’s own report, which he submitted in a parliamentary question.

“This is a situation that one could go as far as to describe as treachery,” he told AFP.

Events like these will become even worse, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a draft report due out next year seen by AFP.

The draft predicts that temperatures across the Mediterranean are likely to rise faster than the global average in the decades to come. 

“Every heatwave occurring today is made more likely and more intense by human-caused climate change,” Friederike Otto, associate director at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, told AFP. 

Extreme heat is the most pressing threat facing the Mediterranean region as heatwaves “are by far the deadliest extreme events in Europe,” he said.

“Climate change is forcing Mediterranean landscapes into a flammable state more regularly by drying out vegetation and priming it to burn,” said Matthew Jones, research fellow at the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

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Wariness and outright hostility to vaccines did not start with Covid-19, they date back to the 18th century when the first shots were given. 

From real fears sparked by side-effects, to fake studies and conspiracy theories, we take a look at anti-vax sentiment over the ages:

– 1796: First jab, first fears –

Smallpox killed or disfigured countless millions for centuries before it was eradicated in 1980 through vaccination.

In 1796 the English physician Edward Jenner came up with the idea of using the milder cowpox virus on a child to stimulate immune response after he noticed milkmaids rarely got smallpox.

The process — coined “vaccinus” by Jenner (from cow in Latin) — was successful, but from the outset it provoked scepticism and fear. 

Before Jenner a riskier method of inoculation known as “variolation” existed for smallpox, introduced to Europe from Ottoman Turkey by the English writer and wit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 

– 1853: Mandatory shot –

In Britain the smallpox vaccine became compulsory for children in 1853, making it the first-ever mandatory jab and triggering strong resistance. 

Opponents objected on religious grounds, raised concerns over the dangers of injecting animal products, and claimed individual freedoms were being infringed.

A “conscience clause” was introduced in 1898 allowing sceptics to avoid vaccination.

– 1885: Pasteur and rabies –

At the end of the 19th century, the French biologist Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine against rabies by infecting rabbits with a weakened form of the virus.

But again the process sparked mistrust and Pasteur was accused of seeking to profit from his discovery.

– 1920s: Vaccines heyday –

Vaccines flourished in the 1920s — shots were rolled out against tuberculosis with the BCG in 1921, diphtheria in 1923, tetanus in 1926 and whooping cough in 1926.

It was also the decade that aluminium salts began to be used to increase the effectiveness of vaccines. 

But more than half a century later these salts became the source of suspicion, with a condition causing lesions and fatigue called macrophagic myofasciitis thought to be caused by them.

– 1998: Fake autism study –

A study published in the top medical journal The Lancet in 1998 suggested there was a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella shot known as the MMR vaccine. 

The paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was revealed years later to be a fraud and retracted by the journal, with Wakefield struck off the medical register.

Despite subsequent studies demonstrating the absence of any such link, the bogus paper is still a reference for anti-vaxxers and it left its mark.

Measles killed 207,500 people in 2019, a jump of 50 percent since 2016 with the World Health Organization warning that vaccine coverage is falling globally.

– 2009: Swine flu scare –

The discovery in 2009 of “Swine flu”, or H1N1, caused by a virus of the same family as the deadly Spanish flu, caused great alarm.

But H1N1 was not as deadly as first feared and millions of vaccine doses produced to fight it were destroyed, fuelling mistrust towards vaccination campaigns.

Matters were made worse by the discovery that one of the vaccines, Pandemrix, raised the risk of narcolepsy.

Of 5.5 million people given the vaccine in Sweden, 440 had to be compensated after developing the sleep disorder.

– 2020: Polio conspiracy theories –

Eradicated in Africa since August 2020 thanks to vaccines, polio is still a scourge in Pakistan and Afghanistan where the disease, which causes paralysis in young children, remains endemic.

Anti-vaccine conspiracy theories have allowed it to continue to destroy lives.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned vaccine campaigns, calling them a Western plot to sterilise Muslim children.

The Mediterranean will be hit by ever fiercer heatwaves, drought and fires supercharged by rising temperatures, according to a draft United Nations assessment seen exclusively by AFP that warns the region is a “climate change hotspot”.

The assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — to be published next year — details the future impacts that carbon pollution will have on the region, which this week sweltered in above-average temperatures while Greece and Turkey battle record-breaking blazes.

The Mediterranean’s more than half-a-billion inhabitants face “highly interconnected climate risks,” says a chapter dedicated to the region in a draft of the IPCC’s Working Group II report on climate impacts, due for official release in February 2022. 

“Reasons for concern include sea-level rise related risks, land and marine biodiversity losses, risks related to drought, wildfire, alterations of water cycle, endangered food production, health risks in both urban and rural settlements from heat, and altered disease vectors,” is its grim assessment. 

The draft predicts that temperatures across the Mediterranean are likely to rise faster than the global average in the decades to come, threatening the region’s vital agriculture, fisheries and tourism sectors. 

Tens of millions more inhabitants will face heightened risk of water shortages, coastal flooding and exposure to potentially deadly extreme heat, it warns. 

Depending on how quickly humanity reins in its greenhouse gas emissions, some Mediterranean regions could see rain-fed crop yields decrease by 64 percent, the draft predicts.

Currently, 71 percent of the Middle East and North Africa region’s GDP is exposed to high or very high water stress, and 61 percent of its population, it says.

The burnt area of forests in Mediterranean Europe is projected to increase by up to 87 percent if Earth’s average surface temperature warms two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and as much as 187 percent in a 3C-hotter world.

Global heating has seen the planet warm 1.1C so far.

While not predicted to be the region of the world worst affected by rising temperatures, the IPCC draft identifies the Mediterranean as a “climate change hotspot”.

The most comprehensive assessment of climate impacts ever assembled concludes that only a scenario in which global warming is limited to below 2C — the core target of the 2015 Paris Agreement — “is likely to maintain coastal settlements, cultural heritage sites, land and ocean ecosystems in a viable state in most parts of the (Mediterranean) basin”.

– More likely, more intense – 

Although individual fires such as those in Greece and Turkey are hard to blame directly on warmer temperatures, heatwaves and drought caused by climate change are increasing their probability.

“Every heatwave occurring today is made more likely and more intense by human-caused climate change,” Friederike Otto, associate director at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, told AFP. 

“Heatwaves are the type of extremes where climate change is really a game changer and it is a major way how climate change has manifested for years already.” 

Otto, who is co-lead of the World Weather Attribution service that measures climate change’s impacts on weather events, said extreme heat was the most pressing threat facing the Mediterranean region as heatwaves “are by far the deadliest extreme events in Europe”.

The IPCC draft predicts that up to 93 million more people in the northern Mediterranean could face high or very high heat stress by mid-century. 

Depending on how aggressively humanity draws down greenhouse gas emissions, the risk of heat-related death for elderly people in the Middle East and North Africa will be between three and 30 times higher by century’s end, it shows. 

– Heat threat –

Climate models project warming across the Mediterranean region about 20 percent higher than global averages, according to the draft. 

Southern Europe is currently in the grips of a crippling heatwave with near-record temperatures.

Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, said that when it came to disasters such as fire or flooding, there were practical steps that governments and planners could take to mitigate risk. 

These include building less on flood- or fire-prone regions, better forest management, and creating easy, robust escape plans for when things go wrong. 

“Heat is different. Climate change is pushing us into areas where we cannot survive,” he told AFP.

“To survive this level of heat, the only option is 24/7 indoor cooling and people cannot afford that. We’re going to get power outages. The only way is stopping human-caused climate change.”

– ‘Substantially increasing’ risk – 

Matthew Jones, research fellow at the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the average number of days where the Mediterranean faces extreme fire weather conditions had roughly doubled since the 1980s.

“Climate change is forcing Mediterranean landscapes into a flammable state more regularly by drying out vegetation and priming it to burn,” he said.

Air quality has sharply dipped in burning regions of Greece and Turkey, and pollution from the blazes had reached as far as Cyprus, according to Mark Parrington, senior scientist at the EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. 

With the population set to reach 657 million by 2050 in Mediterranean areas vulnerable to extreme events, more people are likely to be affected in the future.

“Even if humans were not changing the climate, the risk of these sorts of disasters would be ever-present and substantially increasing,” said Kelman. 

“We are putting more people and property in harm’s way and we are not training people to be able to deal with atypical environmental events like fires, floods and droughts.”

France’s wine output this year will go on record as one of the worst in history, if not the worst, after severe spring frosts devastated vines, the agriculture ministry said on Friday.

France, the world’s second-largest wine producer after Italy, is likely to see its production drop between 24 and 30 percent in 2021, taking it to a “historically low” level, the ministry said.

It is already certain to fall below output seen in 1991 and 2017, the two most recent years of disastrous harvests amputated by bouts of late frost.

“For now, it looks like the yield will be comparable to that of 1977, a year when the the vine harvest was reduced by both destructive frost and summer downpours,” the ministry said.

Several nights of frost in early April caused some of the most damage in decades to crops and vines across the country, including its best-known and prestigious wine-producing regions from Bordeaux to Burgundy and the Rhone valley to Champagne

Overall output, also affected by an onslaught of mildew prompted by heavy summer rains, is projected to come at in between 32.6 and 35.6 million hectolitres, the ministry said.

As well as wine producers, growers of kiwis, apricots, apples and other fruit have been badly hit along with farmers of other crops such as beet and rapeseed.

Apricot production is headed for its worst year in more than four decades, the ministry said, falling by half from its average seen over the previous five years. 

Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie has called the frost attack “probably the greatest agricultural catastrophe of the beginning of the 21st century”.

Some scientists say that climate change has sharply increased the odds of such events happening again.

World Weather Attribution, an international organisation that analyses the link between extreme weather events and global warming, said in a study in June that a warmer climate had increased the probability of an extreme frost coinciding with a growing period by 60 percent.

Opposition leaders on Friday condemned Prime Minister Boris Johnson as “crass and offensive” for joking that former leader Margaret Thatcher’s coal mine closures had given Britain a head start in fighting climate change.

Thatcher, in power from 1979 to 1990, fought a bitter battle with the coal mining industry in the 1980s, delivering its death knell by closing over 100 mines, devastating communities in northern England and South Wales.

A year-long walkout against closure plans by miners in 1984-85 was one of the defining moments of her premiership, eroding union power and triggering her free market reforms.

Johnson made the comments on a visit to an offshore windfarm in Scotland on Thursday, as he talked about the changes in Britain’s energy mix.

“Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether,” he said.

But the quip risks backfiring with voters in former mining heartlands of northern England, who switched from Labour to his Conservatives in the last general election in 2019, largely over Brexit.

Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader in Westminster, said: “Boris Johnson’s shameful praising of Margaret Thatcher’s closure of the coal mines, brushing off the devastating impact on those communities with a laugh, shows just how out of touch he is with working people.”

Wales’ First Minister Mark Drakeford, of Labour, told BBC radio the comments were “crass and offensive”, saying the closures caused “incalculable” damage to local communities.

Johnson failed to meet First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on his two-day visit to Scotland, where feelings still run high against the Tories because of Thatcher’s policies.

Under Thatcher, heavy industry and coal mining declined, while Scots widely opposed her introduction of a controversial flat-rate per capita “poll tax” in the late 1990s.

Sturgeon said communities across Scotland were “utterly devastated by Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry”.

She has repeatedly criticised Johnson for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic response and his refusal to allow a second referendum on Scottish independence.

Hundreds of firefighters battled a blaze on the outskirts of Athens on Friday as dozens of fires raged in Greece in what the prime minister dubbed a “critical situation,” while neighbouring Turkey came under increasing pressure over its handling of wildfires.

Greece and Turkey have been fighting blaze upon blaze over the past week, hit by the worst heatwave in decades, a disaster that officials and experts have linked to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.

French firefighters arrived in Greece on Thursday night to help, while Switzerland, Sweden, Romania and Israel are due to send back-up.

“Our country is facing an extremely critical situation,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said late Thursday, putting six out of 13 regions in the country under high alert.

“We’re facing unprecedented conditions after several days of heatwave have turned the country into a powder keg.”

Some 30 kilometres (19 miles) north of Athens, a fierce blaze ate through vast areas of pine forest, forcing yet more evacuations of villages overnight and blowing thick, choking smoke all over the Greek capital.

In the small town of Afidnes, firefighters were seen standing on their truck in the dead of night, dousing flames that leapt high above them.

Part of a motorway linking Athens to the north of the country has been shut down as a precaution.

– Foreign help –

Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias said that out of 99 fires reported on Thursday, 57 were still active during the night, notably on the island of Evia where monks who refused to leave their monastery had been forcibly evacuated.

Around 82 French firefighters — both military and civilian — arrived on Thursday evening, a French official said. 

France was also due to send two water-bombing planes, as was Sweden, while Romania was to dispatch 112 firefighters and 23 vehicles and Switzerland three helicopters, a spokesman for the Greek firefighters told AFP.

Israel, too, said it is planning to dispatch an aircraft carrying 15 firefighters and a large cargo of flame retardant.

Given the extreme danger, the Greek authorities have issued a blanket ban on any visits to forests, national parks or nature spots until Monday.

“If some people still doubt if climate change is real, let them come and see the intensity of phenomena here,” Mitsotakis said Thursday while inspecting the ruins where the first Olympic Games were held in ancient times, also threatened by flames.

The blazes also forced the government of North Macedonia to declare a 30-day state of emergency and the defence ministry in its Balkan neighbour Albania to declare the situation “critical” because of the threat to village homes.

– Erdogan under fire –

In Turkey, 208 fires have lit up since July 28, and 12 were still ablaze on Friday, according to the Turkish presidency.

Eight people have died and dozens have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of the country.

In one particularly critical event earlier this week, winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said an initial inspection conducted after the flames had been doused showed “no serious damage to the main units in the plant”.

The government is facing rising pressure after the opposition referred to a report which showed only a fraction of the budget for forest fire prevention had been spent.

The General Directorate of Forestry (OGM) spent only 1.75 percent of nearly 200 million Turkish lira ($23 million) allocated for forest fires in the first six months of 2021, main opposition party MP Murat Emir said, referring to numbers apparently from the state agency’s own report, which he submitted in a parliamentary question.

“This is a situation that could one could go as far as to describe as treachery,” he told AFP.

Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

The government has defended itself by blaming the Turkish Aeronautical Association, which Erdogan said at the weekend had not been able to update its fleet and technology.

The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third decade.

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From a distance, the black cliffs appear featureless, scorched by a blazing desert sun. But up close, the basalt reveals engravings of giraffe, ostrich and antelope made 7,000 years ago.

These masterful works, etched onto stone in northern Djibouti, are among the most important examples of rock art in the Horn of Africa, a region rich in archaeological heritage and the birthplace of humanity.

Stretching three kilometres (almost two miles), some 900 panels at Abourma depict in wonderful relief prehistoric life in these parts, dramatic scenes of early man confronting wildlife, and droving cows.

But these centuries-old images, rendered by flint onto igneous rock, also offer a valuable record of a bygone era — and a land drastically reshaped by millennia of climate change.

The wildlife illustrated are still found today on Africa’s plains and grasslands, but not in Djibouti, a harsh desert landscape where water and greenery have been scarce for thousands of years.

“Today, Abourma is something of a cemetery because we don’t have these animals here anymore. At the time, they roamed here because Djibouti was covered in forest,” said Omar Mohamed Kamil, a young tour guide who takes visitors to Abourma.

“In Abourma… we are a little removed from civilisation. We are in the prehistory, we are living in prehistory.”

– Millennia upon millennia – 

This treasure trove lies a six-hour drive away from the capital, Djibouti City, then a further one hour on foot over a craggy expanse of boulders.

It would be all-but impossible to find were it not for Ibrahim Dabale Loubak, a camel breeder and Abourma’s custodian, who claims to “know every stone, every nook and cranny” of this rocky massif.  

The 41-year-old is from the Afar community, a historically nomadic people who wandered the arid fringes of Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and have known about the carvings for generations.

“Our grandfathers told our fathers and then our fathers told it to us,” said Loubak, a traditional turban and cloth skirt cladding his slim figure. 

Despite this local wisdom — and roughly 70 centuries of existence — Abourma was not visited by archaeologists until 2005.

It was Loubak who guided the first French team to the site, trailed by a caravan of camels bringing food, sleeping quarters, and other essential equipment including a generator for the remote investigation.

Archaeologist Benoit Poisblaud, who was part of the team, still evokes with wonder the “extraordinary site”, not found anywhere else in the region that he studied as a 25-year-old researcher.

“Abourma is a continuity, over several millennia, of passages, engravings, made by very different people: hunters, pastoralists, and those after… Thousands upon thousands of representations,” he said.

The oldest carvings predate the birth of Christ by 5,000 years, while newer examples were painted around two millenia ago, he said.

– Desert custodians –  

Africa boasts a wealth of archaeological sites, but few, especially rock art, have been fully studied, said Emmanuel Ndiema, head of archaeology at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi.

“Up to now, as we speak, we still get reports about sites here in Kenya, not even elsewhere,” he said, estimating that just 10-20 percent of archaeological troves in sub-Saharan Africa had been properly researched.

This risks the universal value and preservation of these finds, experts say, which if nurtured could in time attract tourists and history buffs, generating much-needed government revenue.

However, greater visibility comes with its own potential cost for heritage.

Abourma, for example, receives so few visitors there are no fences, barricades or rules or any kind for those who make the journey to this vast, hidden-away expanse.

Loubak, however, is not too worried about threats to these millennia-old artworks, with eyes everywhere reporting the slightest disturbances or outsider presence.

“Nobody can come here without my knowledge,” he said.

Evacuation orders were widened Thursday as California’s biggest wildfire raged through the state’s tinder-dry landscape, laying waste to hundreds of square miles (kilometers).

The Dixie Fire is already the sixth biggest in the state’s history, and was still spreading thanks to gusting winds and record-low humidity.

This week it all-but wiped out the historic mining town of Greenville, a settlement of a few hundred people dating back to the mid-1800s Gold Rush.

“I’d say the majority of downtown Greenville is completely destroyed,” tweeted wildfire photographer Stuart Palley, sharing images of the devastation. 

“My heart is broken for this beautiful little town.”

The Dixie Fire — just one of a welter of blazes wracking the western United States — has been raging in the dry forests of northern California since mid-July, part of a global warming climate crisis that has brought sweltering heat and an alarming drought to the region.

It has now engulfed around 500 square miles (1,300 square kilometers). Almost a fifth of that area was added overnight Wednesday into Thursday.

The blaze is so big that it has been generating its own weather system.

“We did everything we could,” California fire department spokesman Mitch Matlow told reporters. “Sometimes it’s just not enough.”

Images taken by an AFP photographer in Greenville showed the fire’s heat had bent street lights to the ground, with only a few structures still standing.

A gas station, a hotel and a bar were destroyed, as well as many buildings that were more than a century old.

The fire swept through the town on Wednesday afternoon, where the impact was devastating, said Jake Cagle, incident management team operations section chief.

He said firefighters were struggling with those not obeying evacuation orders, leading to their having to divert time and resources to rescue people in the path of the flames, even as they tried to deal with an extraordinary blaze. 

“We have firefighters who are getting guns pulled out on them, because people don’t want to evacuate,” he said Thursday.

“It was a very tough day for all of our resources — there’s stuff out there that we didn’t want to see,” said Cagle.

– ‘Explosively’ –

Almost 5,000 personnel are involved in the battle to tame the blaze. 

But very low humidity and a parched landscape were offering ideal conditions for the fire to rage.

Control lines established by firefighters were breached overnight, with the fire growing “explosively” in places, according to incident commanders.

Authorities issued yet more evacuation orders on Thursday, telling residents of the towns of Taylorsville and Westwood that they needed to flee.

By late July, the number of acres burned in California was up more than 250 percent from 2020 — itself the worst year of wildfires in the state’s modern history.

The Dixie Fire has evoked painful memories of the Paradise Fire, the deadliest blaze in California’s recent history.

Faulty power lines sparked the inferno, which swept through the northern town of Paradise in 2018, killing 86 people. Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest energy utility firm, was deemed responsible.

PG&E equipment is again being blamed for the Dixie Fire, after a tree fell on a power conductor the day the blaze began.

The utility announced in late July it will bury 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) of power lines in a massive bid to prevent its equipment from igniting more deadly wildfires.

Greenville itself is no stranger to fire disasters. A catastrophic blaze destroyed much of the town in 1881, and several major infernos have threatened residents in the intervening 140 years.  

Squirrels’ acrobatic leaps across treetops depend on complex split-second calculations and inventive “parkour” maneuvers to stick tricky landings, a new study in the journal Science said Thursday.

Scientists at UC Berkeley designed obstacle courses to better understand how the bushy-tailed rodents gauge and adjust their movements on the fly, as they dart away from predators and avoid potentially fatal falls.

The hope is that the research could one day help to build more agile robots with better decision-making skills.

“Squirrels have a combination of traits that make them very interesting: one being their acrobatic nature, their biomechanics and their powerful muscles that they can use to leap many times their body length,” lead author Nathan Hunt told AFP.

“The other is their cognitive capabilities, they have great memories, they’re highly creative animals, and they’re really good at problem solving.”

The team used peanuts to lure wild fox squirrels on the edge of campus to their experiments.

Perches were set up to simulate tree branches, forcing the squirrels to jump gaps of varying distances in order to receive their treats. 

The scientists were keen to learn how the animals would negotiate a critical trade-off: Moving towards the end of a perch reduced leaping distance, but compromised stability and jumping force as the launch platform became more wobbly.

It turned out the squirrels preferred to launch from the base of the perch, particularly when the branches were bendier. In fact, the bendiness of the branch was six times more critical than the gap distance in their decision making.

Throughout the experiments, none of the squirrels ever fell, because they used a variety of strategies — and their sharp claws — to recover from imperfect landings.

If they jumped too far, they would swing over the target perch and perform a roll around it to stick the landing.

If they jumped short, they swung underneath the perch before pulling themselves up.

But the most surprising innovation came when the squirrels didn’t aim for the target branch directly at all, instead bouncing off an adjacent wall to make the most challenging leaps, akin to parkour.

When squirrels are chased by hawks, their escapes come down to a matter of centimeters (inches), which is probably why they evolved to become so nimble, said Hunt.

While the research might one day further the field of robotics, it’s also something people can appreciate when they see squirrels in parks or in their gardens, said Hunt.

“It’s a fun thing to communicate this research because people watch squirrels in their backyard all the time. Actually, as I just sit in my backyard and watch them, I come up with other ideas for experiments that I’d like to do.”