Pakistan Monday launched its first nationwide anti-polio campaign of the year to immunize children under the age of five against the crippling disease. The move follows a surge in new infections in 2022.

While no new case has been reported in Pakistan so far this year, the highly infectious wild poliovirus paralyzed 20 children last year. That compares to just one infection reported in 2021.

National eradication program officials said that more than 360,000 health workers would deliver polio drops to at least 44.2 million children across 156 districts during the five-day campaign. They noted that children would also be administered an additional vitamin A supplement to boost their immunity against infectious diseases.

The 20 polio cases in Pakistan in 2022 were reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mostly in its violence-hit North Waziristan district on the Afghan border.

An official statement quoted Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif as saying on Sunday the resurgence of cases has raised concerns among Pakistan’s global partners, including the World Health Organization and other stakeholders.

The previous nationwide polio campaign in Pakistan was organized last August but was disrupted by catastrophic floods triggered by erratic summer monsoon rains. Authorities later carried out special polio drives in flood-affected districts and vaccinated children against the virus there.

Pakistan has repeatedly come close to eradicating polio but long-running propaganda in conservative rural areas that the vaccines cause sterility in children, coupled with deadly militant attacks on vaccinators, have set back the mission.

The latest militant attack on a polio team took place earlier this month in Dera Ismail Khan district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, wounding four policemen escorting health workers.

Officials also blame the 2011 killing of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden by the United States military in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad for dealing a serious blow to national polio eradication efforts.

A Pakistani doctor organized a fake vaccination campaign to help the U.S. troops locate the hideout of the fugitive terror leader and kill him. Pakistani authorities later arrested the doctor and a court subsequently sentenced him to 23 years in prison.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where polio continues to cripple children. Afghan officials detected two cases in 2022 and have reported no new ones this year.

The global polio eradication program has identified Pakistan, Afghanistan, parts of Somalia and Yemen as areas where outbreaks are very difficult to control, according to Hamid Jafari, the director of polio eradication for WHO’s eastern Mediterranean region.

“These are countries, and in fact some national areas, that are prone to be affected by repeated polio outbreaks., and these are usually complex countries, countries that have fragile health systems, conflicts, other complex challenges,” Jafari explained in a video statement tweeted Monday.

“Moreover, these countries export polio virus. So, when there is an outbreak in these countries, the neighboring countries are affected because of international spread but also distant international spread,” he added.
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Pakistan launched its first anti-polio campaign of the year Sunday, targeting 44.2 million children under the age of five.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio continues to threaten the health and well-being of children. Polio affects the nervous system of children and ultimately leads to paralysis.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif kicked off the nationwide drive by administering polio drops to children in the capital, Islamabad, saying Pakistan was unfortunately among the few countries that still suffered from the disease.

Twenty cases were reported in the tribal North Waziristan area last year, though the disease was contained among other children through immunization, Sharif said.

Around 44 million children in 156 districts will be immunized.

This includes 22.54 million children in Punjab, 10.1 million in Sindh and 7.4 million in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.

Sharif said his government along with other stakeholders, including U.S. billionaire Bill Gates and the World Health Organization, were effectively contributing to polio eradication in Pakistan.

He gave out appreciation certificates at the launch to front-line polio workers and praised their “invaluable sacrifices.”

Pakistan has witnessed frequent attacks on polio teams and police officers deployed to protect them. Militants falsely claim that vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children. 
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The U.S. has now collected 510 reports of unidentified flying objects, many of which are flying in sensitive military airspace. While there’s no evidence of extraterrestrials, they still pose a threat, the government said in a declassified report summary released Thursday.

Last year the Pentagon opened an office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, solely focused on receiving and analyzing all of those reports of unidentified phenomena, many of which have been reported by military pilots. It works with the intelligence agencies to further assess those incidents.

The events “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its 2022 report.

The classified version of the report addresses how many of those objects were found near locations where nuclear power plants operate or nuclear weapons are stored.

The 510 objects include 144 objects previously reported and 366 new reports. In both the old and new cases, after analysis, the majority have been determined to exhibit “unremarkable characteristics,” and could be characterized as unmanned aircraft systems, or balloon-like objects, the report said.

But the office is also tasked with reporting any movements or reports of objects that may indicate that a potential adversary has a new technology or capability.

The Pentagon’s anomaly office is also to include any unidentified objects moving underwater, in the air, or in space, or something that moves between those domains, which could pose a new threat.

ODNI said in its report that efforts to destigmatize reporting and emphasize that the objects may pose a threat likely contributed to the additional reports.
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Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way’s outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy – almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy.

The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way’s halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence. The furthest of them is 1.08 million light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km (5.9 trillion miles).

These stars, spotted using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain, are part of a category of stars called RR Lyrae that are relatively low mass and typically have low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The most distant one appears to have a mass about 70% that of our sun. No other Milky Way stars have been confidently measured farther away than these.

The stars that populate the outskirts of the galactic halo can be viewed as stellar orphans, probably originating in smaller galaxies that later collided with the larger Milky Way.

“Our interpretation about the origin of these distant stars is that they are most likely born in the halos of dwarf galaxies and star clusters which were later merged – or more straightforwardly, cannibalized – by the Milky Way,” said Yuting Feng, an astronomy doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study, presented this week at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“Their host galaxies have been gravitationally shredded and digested, but these stars are left at that large distance as debris of the merger event,” Feng added.

The Milky Way has grown over time through such calamities.

“The larger galaxy grows by eating smaller galaxies – by eating its own kind,” said study co-author Raja GuhaThakurta, UC Santa Cruz’s chair of astronomy and astrophysics.

Containing an inner and outer layer, the Milky Way’s halo is vastly larger than the galaxy’s main disk and central bulge that are teeming with stars. The galaxy, with a supermassive black hole at its center about 26,000 light years from Earth, contains perhaps 100 billion–400 billion stars including our sun, which resides in one of the four primary spiral arms that make up the Milky Way’s disk. The halo contains about 5% of the galaxy’s stars.

Dark matter, which dominates the halo, makes up most of the universe’s mass and is thought to be responsible for its basic structure, with its gravity influencing visible matter to come together and form stars and galaxies.

The halo’s remote outer edge is a poorly understood region of the galaxy. These newly identified stars are almost half the distance to the Milky Way’s neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

“We can see that the suburbs of the Andromeda halo and the Milky Way halo are really extended – and are almost ‘back-to-back,'” Feng said.

The search for life beyond the Earth focuses on rocky planets akin to Earth orbiting in what is called the “habitable zone” around stars. More than 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, already have been discovered.

“We don’t know for sure, but each of these outer halo stars should be about as likely to have planets orbiting them as the sun and other sun-like stars in the Milky Way,” GuhaThakurta said.
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A new report finds nearly a billion people in the world’s poorer countries are treated for often life-threatening conditions in health care facilities that lack a reliable electricity supply.  A joint report by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the International Renewable Energy Agency, “Energizing Health: Accelerating Electricity Access in Health-Care Facilities,” has just been issued. 

Health officials say electricity access in health care facilities can make the difference between life and death.  

Heather Adair-Rohani is Acting Unit Head, Air Quality, Energy and Health at the World Health Organization.  She says it is critical that health care facilities have a reliable, always functioning electricity supply available.

“Imagine going to a health care facility with no lights, with no opportunity to have a baby warmer functioning,” said Adair-Rohani. “To have medical devices functioning and powered all the time. It’s absolutely fundamental that we have this electricity. This is an often-overlooked infrastructure aspect of health care facilities that are desperately needed to continue to provide care to those most vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries.”

The report finds more than one in 10 health facilities in South Asia and sub-Saharan African countries lack any electricity access.  It adds power is unreliable for half of all facilities in sub-Saharan Africa.  

It notes electricity is needed to power the most basic devices such as lights and refrigeration as well as devices that measure vital signs like heartbeat and blood pressure. It says increasing the electrification of health-care facilities is essential to save lives. 

Adair-Rohani adds it is important to maintain these systems once they are installed to ensure their reliability and functionality.

“Reliable decentralized renewable electricity in health care facilities can really ensure the resilience of climate change for health care facilities so that they can provide care in the most dire circumstances and provides emergency preparedness so that yes, indeed, when there is a hurricane or floods or what have you, they still are able to have some form of power to provide emergency care as needed,” said Adair-Rohani.

Authors of the report say healthcare systems and facilities increasingly are affected by the accelerating impacts of climate change.  They say decentralized sustainable renewable energy solutions are available.  For example, they note solar photovoltaic systems are cost-effective and clean and can be rapidly deployed on site.

The authors say building climate-resilient health care systems can meet the challenges of a changing climate while ensuring the delivery of quality health care services.  

 
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The U.S. Department of the Interior will reform its regulations for the development of wind energy facilities on the country’s outer continental shelf to help meet crucial climate goals, it said in a statement on Thursday.

The proposed rule changes would save developers a projected $1 billion over a 20-year period by streamlining burdensome processes, clarifying ambiguous provisions, and lowering compliance costs, , the statement said.

“Updating these regulations will facilitate the safe and efficient development of offshore wind energy resources, provide certainty to developers and help ensure a fair return to the U.S. taxpayers,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in the release.

The reforms come days after the department named Elizabeth Klein, a lawyer who worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, to head its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), overseeing offshore oil, gas and wind development.

As part of its offshore clean energy program, the BOEM has over the past two years approved the first two commercial scale offshore wind projects in the United States, held three lease auctions including the first-ever sale off the coast of California, and explored extending offshore wind to other areas like the Gulf of Mexico.

The department expects to hold as many as four more auctions and review at least 16 new commercial facilities by 2025, adding more than 22 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy.

In September last year, President Joe Biden’s administration set a goal of having 15 GW of floating offshore wind capacity by 2035 to accelerate development of next-generation floating wind farms in line with its target of permitting 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
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England will ban a range of single-use plastic items such as cutlery, plates and bowls starting in October to limit soaring plastic pollution, Britain’s environment department said Saturday. 

The decision follows a public consultation by the government in which 95% of respondents were in favor of the bans, the department said in a statement. 

“We all know the absolutely devastating impacts that plastic can have on our environment and wildlife,” Environment Secretary Therese Coffey said. “These new single-use plastics bans will continue our vital work to protect the environment.” 

Most plastics can remain intact for centuries and damage oceans, rivers and land where millions of tons end up as waste each year. The United Nations says decades of overuse of single-use plastics has caused a “global environmental catastrophe.” 

The government said it is estimated England uses 2.7 billion items of single-use cutlery, most of which are plastic, a year as well as 721 million such plates, but only 10% end up being recycled. 

England’s ban will also include single-use plastic trays, balloon sticks and some types of polystyrene cups and food containers. 

A ban on supplying plastic straws and stirrers and plastic-stemmed cotton buds came into force in England in 2020. 

Anti-plastic campaign group A Plastic Planet welcomed the latest bans but called for further limitations, especially on sachets. 

“The plastic sachet, the ultimate symbol of our grab and go, convenience-addicted lifestyle, should be the next target … 855 billion sachets are used annually, never to be recycled,” Sian Sutherland, the group’s co-founder, said. 

The British government said it was also considering limiting the use of other commonly littered and “problematic” plastic items, including wet wipes, tobacco filters and sachets. 

Governments worldwide are clamping down on the use of single-use plastic to varying degrees, and a global survey last year found three in four people want single-use plastics to be banned as soon as possible. 
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A Swiss company says it has certifiably extracted CO2 from the air and permanently stored it in the ground — for the first time on behalf of paying customers, including Microsoft.

Climeworks, a startup created in 2009 by two Swiss engineers, said its facility in Iceland had successfully removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and injected it into the ground, where it would very gradually be transformed into rock.

The potential for scaling up remains to be proved.

In its announcement on Thursday, Climeworks said its process had been certified in September by DNV, a Norwegian independent auditor, marking the first time carbon had been permanently captured on behalf of paying corporate clients.

Climeworks counts companies including Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify among the clients who have bought into its future carbon removal services, to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions.

The startup said it hoped “to lead as an example for peers, customers and policy makers alike that are committed to climate action.”

The Paris Agreement, adopted by nearly all the world’s nations in 2015, called for the rise in the Earth’s average temperature to be limited at 1.5 degrees Celsius, which scientists say would keep the impact of climate change at manageable levels.

Many businesses, including fossil fuel companies, rely heavily on carbon offset schemes based on afforestation to compensate for continuing carbon emissions.

But there has been growing interest in the newest carbon dioxide removal method, of which Climeworks is the industry leader: a chemical process known as direct air carbon capture and storage.

In its report last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that regardless of how quickly the world slashes greenhouse gas emissions, it will still need to suck CO2 from the atmosphere to avoid climate catastrophe.

But it remains to be seen whether this can be done at scale.

So far, Climeworks’ direct air capture facility in Iceland, the largest in the world, removes in a year what humanity emits in 3 to 4 seconds.

The company has not divulged how much its clients are paying for the service, and how much CO2 each client wants extracted.
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It was an anomaly detected in the storm of a nuclear reactor so puzzling that physicists hoped it would shine a light on dark matter, one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. 

However, new research has definitively ruled out that this strange measurement signaled the existence of a “sterile neutrino,” a hypothetical particle that has long eluded scientists.  

Neutrinos are sometimes called “ghost particles” because they barely interact with other matter — around 100 trillion are estimated to pass through our bodies every second. 

Since neutrinos were first theorized in 1930, scientists have been trying to nail down the properties of these shapeshifters, which are one of the most common particles in the universe. 

They appear “when the nature of the nucleus of an atom has been changed,” physicist David Lhuillier of France’s Atomic Energy Commission told AFP. 

That could happen when they come together in the furious fusion in the heart of stars like our sun, or are broken apart in nuclear reactors, he said. 

There are three confirmed flavors of neutrinos: electron, muon and tau. 

However, physicists suspect there could be a fourth neutrino, dubbed “sterile” because it does not interact with ordinary matter at all. 

In theory, it would answer only to gravity and not the fundamental force of weak interactions, which still hold sway over the other neutrinos. 

The sterile neutrino has a place ready for it in theoretical physics, “but there has not yet been a clear demonstration that it exists,” he added. 

Dark matter candidate  

So Lhuillier and the rest of the STEREO collaboration, which brings together French and German scientists, set out to find it. 

Previous nuclear reactor measurements had found fewer neutrinos than the amount expected by theoretical models, a phenomenon dubbed the “reactor antineutrino anomaly.” 

It was suggested that the missing neutrinos had changed into the sterile kind, offering a rare chance to prove their existence. 

To find out, the STEREO collaboration installed a dedicated detector a few meters away from a nuclear reactor used for research at the Laue–Langevin institute in Grenoble, France. 

After four years of observing more than 100,000 neutrinos and two years analyzing the data, the verdict was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. 

The anomaly “cannot be explained by sterile neutrinos,” Lhuillier said.  

But that “does not mean there are none in the universe,” he added. 

The experiment found that previous predictions about the amount of neutrinos being produced were incorrect. 

But it was not a total loss, because it offered a much clearer picture of neutrinos emitted by nuclear reactors. This could help not just with future research, but also for monitoring nuclear reactors. 

Meanwhile, the search for the sterile neutrino continues. Particle accelerators, which smash atoms, could offer up new leads. 

Despite the setback, interest could remain high because sterile neutrinos have been considered a suspect for dark matter, which makes up more than a quarter of the universe but remains shrouded in mystery.  

Like dark matter, the sterile neutrino does not interact with ordinary matter, making it incredibly difficult to observe. 

“It would be a candidate which would explain why we see the effects of dark matter — and why we cannot see dark matter,” Lhuillier said.
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The effects of the war in Ukraine are extending beyond Moscow and Kyiv, and may be impacting not only people but also wildlife. VOA’s Bilal Hussain reports from Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir. VOA Mandarin Service contributed to this report.
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The World Health Organization has issued an alert warning against the use of two Indian cough syrups blamed for the deaths of at least 20 children in Uzbekistan.

WHO said the products, manufactured by India’s Marion Biotech, were “substandard” and that the firm had failed to provide guarantees about their “safety and quality.”

The alert, issued Wednesday, comes after Uzbekistan authorities said last month at least 20 children died after consuming a syrup made by the company under the brand name Doc-1 Max.

India’s health ministry subsequently suspended production at the company and Uzbekistan banned the import and sale of Doc-1 Max.

The WHO alert said an analysis of the syrup samples by the quality control laboratories of Uzbekistan found “unacceptable amounts of diethylene glycol and /or ethylene glycol as contaminants.”

Diethylene glycol and ethylene are toxic to humans when consumed and can prove fatal.

“Both of these products may have marketing authorizations in other countries in the region. They may also have been distributed, through informal markets, to other countries or regions,” WHO said.

The products were “unsafe and their use, especially in children, may result in serious injury or death,” it said.

Marion Biotech officials could not be reached immediately for comment.

It is the second Indian drugmaker to face a probe by regulators since October, when the WHO linked another firm’s medicines to a spate of child deaths in Gambia.

Maiden Pharmaceuticals was accused of manufacturing several toxic cough and cold remedies that led to the deaths of at least 66 children in the African country.

The victims, mostly between 5 months and 4 years old, died of acute renal failure.

India launched a probe into Maiden Pharmaceuticals but later said the investigation had found the suspect drugs were of “standard quality.”
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After three years of isolation and financial struggles in Chinese soccer, the country is reopening its borders and economy to the outside world. With it, frustrated fans, financially challenged clubs and unpaid players in the Chinese Super League might receive some long-awaited good news.

The 2022 season was unrecognizable from the 2019 edition, the last before COVID-19 hit. Then the league had an average attendance of over 24,000, the highest in Asia, and a number of big-name foreign imports.

From 2020 onwards, Beijing’s “zero-COVID” policy, designed to stamp out the virus, meant that teams mostly played in empty stadiums at centralized venues. Players were stuck in bio-secure bubbles for months on end and international stars, unable to enter the country, were released from contracts.

It also meant little ticket, broadcast or sponsorship revenue for clubs. In 2021, defending champion Jiangsu FC folded and several other clubs have struggled to pay players.

Opening up the country may not mean a return to the carefree spending of the previous decade, but it is a prerequisite to starting the journey back to pre-pandemic levels. It is reported that clubs will play home and away games in the 2023 season.

“It almost feels like there has been no league in the past three years with delays, months without games and strange schedules,” Shanghai Shenhua supporter Wang Yi told The Associated Press. “Some fans have lost interest, but I think that will change when we can all get together at the stadium again.”

Due to the government’s strict policies, foreign teams were unable to enter the country, forcing China to play 2022 World Cup qualifiers in neutral venues. It finished next to last in its final qualification group, eight points behind Oman. The country was scheduled to host the 2023 Asian Cup in June but last May, Beijing relinquished its staging rights.

“It remains to be seen if and how quickly Chinese football can return to its ambitions and plans of 2019, and prior to that.” Simon Chadwick, professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School, told the AP, adding that state help will be needed.

“It is important that the sport doesn’t just restart, but that it is kick-started . . . there must be a worry that unless both the government and Chinese football commit themselves to refreshing and relaunching it, then the sport could get stuck in the international doldrums.”

The pandemic also exacerbated a downturn in China’s overheated property market. With more than half of the clubs in the top tier owned, at least in part, by real estate companies, it has been a major soccer issue.

Evergrande, the property developer, saw its club Guangzhou, who won eight titles in the previous decade, relegated in December after the team’s stars left and were replaced by young domestic players.

Opening up the country is expected to boost the housing market especially as, in December, Chinese state banks opened up a line of credit worth around $460 billion for real estate companies. It remains to be seen if this will ease the financial strain on clubs.

“One suspects that the Chinese government will be keen to decouple football from its previous unhealthy relationship with property investors,” added Chadwick. “Both sectors need to discover some market discipline whilst being subject to the state’s appropriate guidance.”

For now though, fans just want to go and see their teams play.

“I won’t believe it until it happens,” said Wang. “It is when something disappears that you know how much it means. It will be very exciting.”
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A Chinese company presented a cloned horse to the public Thursday that is the first of its kind born in the country and approved for equestrian sport.

The cloning of competition and thoroughbred horses has been practiced in several countries since the early 2000s, particularly for genetic improvements.

Born last June from a surrogate mother, Zhuang Zhuang was produced by the Beijing laboratory Sinogene and is a clone of a horse imported from Germany.

The black animal is the first from the “warmblood” group of breeds to be born in China and to be officially approved by the China Horse Industry Association.

Warmbloods are generally light horses with a lively temperament.

Equestrian sports, especially show jumping, have been making strides in China in recent years.

But a shortage of high-performance horses and a lag in breeding technologies are limiting growth.

“I spoke with [Chinese] riders who participate in the Olympics. All of them have more than one horse, usually two or three. Each horse costs from a few million to 10 million yuan [$1.5 million],” Mi Jidong, CEO of Sinogene, told AFP. “Cloning can help reduce the price of breeding and raising horses.”

Producing competitive horses in China by cloning should make it less dependent on costly imported animals to supply Chinese equestrian sports.

The world’s first cloned horse was born in Italy in 2003.

Chinese animal cloning companies have made significant progress in recent years, with technologies now relatively mature for sheep, cows, pigs, dogs and cats.
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Last year was one of the the warmest on record, according to data released Thursday by two U.S. government agencies, and was marked by numerous instances of severe weather around the globe, many of which are exacerbated by global warming.

The Earth’s average global surface temperature was 0.86 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average in 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This made it the sixth-warmest year on record by NOAA’s reckoning, and the fifth-warmest by NASA’s. (The discrepancy between the two is the result of a measurement difference of a tiny fraction of a degree.)

The high temperatures in 2022 were particularly remarkable because of the presence of a major weather phenomenon over the Pacific Ocean called La Niña, which drove global temperatures down by approximately 0.06 degrees, Gavin A. Schmidt, chief of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a conference call with journalists.

Russell Vose, chief of the analysis and synthesis branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said the individual rankings of specific years are less important than the overall trend of a warming planet. Each of the past eight years has been among the eight hottest years on record.

“It’s clear that each of the past four decades has been warmer than the decade that preceded it,” said Vose. “There’s really been a steady rise in temperature since at least the 1960s.”

He added, “It’s certainly warmer now than at any time in at least the past 2,000 years, and probably much longer.”

Regional differences

Differences in global surface temperature were not evenly distributed, with some regions experiencing much higher-than-average temperatures, while others had lower temperatures. While Central Europe experienced significantly higher temperatures than normal, for example, the temperatures of the U.S. Midwest were lower than average. The Northern Hemisphere, for example, was 1.1 degrees Celsius above average last year, while the Southern Hemisphere was up only 0.61 degrees.

Asia experienced its second-hottest year on record, as did Europe. In Africa, though, 2022 was only the tenth-hottest year on record. It was the 12th-hottest year recorded in South America, the 15th-hottest in North America and in the top 20 for Oceania.

Much of the increased heat was focused on the polar regions, which led to significant loss of sea ice. In 2022, average sea ice cover in the Antarctic was near record lows, at 10.5 square kilometers. In the Arctic, sea ice covered 10.6 square kilometers, the 11th-lowest total on record.

In addition, average ocean surface temperatures, which are measured up to a depth of 2,000 meters, were the highest on record. The four highest average global ocean temperatures ever recorded have all occurred in the four years since 2019.

Major weather events

Last year also saw a large number of extreme weather events, including crippling droughts in the western U.S., East Africa and much of Europe, while Pakistan, China and Australia all battled devastating floods.

While major storm systems were not more common than average in 2022, North America suffered a series of extremely damaging hurricanes, while East Asia was battered by several destructive typhoons.

The scientists presenting the NOAA/NASA data declined to blame severe weather events specifically on climate change, but they noted that warmer temperatures create conditions that allow storms to become more damaging than they might otherwise be.

‘Flirting’ with 1.5 degrees Celsius

Countries around the world have reached a number of agreements meant to try to keep average global temperature increases limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (a different, lower baseline than the 20th century average cited above).

Vose said the Earth is already “flirting” with a 1.5-degree increase now, adding that it would not be surprising for a single year in the 2020s to top that number. That would not be the same as reaching a multiyear average increase of 1.5 degrees, though.

Schmidt said the Earth’s average temperature currently stands at between 1.1 and 1.2 degrees above the preindustrial average, and is climbing.

He said the current rate of warming is just over 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. If that rate remains unchanged, within 20 years, the global average will hit 1.5 degrees.

However, he added, continued increases are not inevitable.

“Future warming is a function of future emissions of carbon dioxide. So, we as a society, collectively, we still have agency,” Schmidt said. “So, what we are going to do in the future is going to determine what happens in the future. And so, if we continue to emit at the rate that we are emitting right now, then we are going to continue to warm, and we would be pretty much rushing past 1.5. If we collectively reduce emissions quite quickly, then we can avoid the higher temperatures.”

Climate activists frustrated

Climate activists saw Thursday’s report as further confirmation of the dire effects of global warming and the insufficiency of past efforts to slow it.

“It’s a lot of what we already know — just more confirmation,” said Cherelle Blazer, senior director of the International Climate and Policy Campaign at the Sierra Club. “We’re already at 1.1 degrees warming. All the world’s scientists say that we need to stick to 1.5 in order to not see the worst of the climate catastrophe happen. And no one seems to be willing to do what’s necessary to achieve that. I find it very disheartening.”

Blazer said she hopes the NOAA/NASA report will spur the new Congress into action, particularly in efforts to fully implement the many carbon-reduction efforts included in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, to finance the Green Climate Fund, and to take steps to compensate low-income countries for the disproportionate damage they face from global warming.

“I’m hoping that the Biden administration, our new Senate and our new House — our newly elected officials — are ready to roll up their sleeves and stop playing around with people’s lives,” she said.
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