Balkhash, Kazakhstan — Seen from the sky, with its turquoise waters stretching out into the desert expanses in the shape of a crescent, you can see why they call Lake Balkhash the “pearl of Kazakhstan.”

But pollution, climate change and its overuse are threatening the existence of one of the most unique stretches of water in the world.

One side of the Balkhash — the biggest lake in Central Asia after the Caspian Sea — has salt water, but on the other it is fresh. In such a strange environment, rare species have abounded. Until now.

“All the miseries of the Balkhash are right under my eyes,” fisherman Alexei Grebennikov told AFP from the deck of his boat on the northern shores, which sometimes has salty water, sometimes fresh.

“There are fewer and fewer fish. It’s catastrophic; the lake is silting up,” warned the 50-year-old.

A dredger to clear the little harbor lay anchored, rusting and unused, off the industrial town of Balkhack, itself seemingly stuck in a Soviet time warp.

“We used to take tourists underwater fishing. Now the place has become a swamp,” said Grebennikov.

In town, scientist Olga Sharipova was studying the changes.

“The Balkhash is the country’s largest fishery. But the quantity of fish goes down when the water level drops, because the conditions for reproduction are disrupted,” she told AFP.

And its level is now only a meter from the critical threshold where it could tilt toward disaster.

There was an unexpected respite this spring when unprecedented floods allowed the Kazakh authorities to divert 3.3 million cubic meters (872 million gallons) of water to the Balkhash.

The Caspian also got a 6-billion-cubic-meter fill-up.

China ‘overusing’ water

But the few extra centimeters have not changed the long-term trend.

“The level of the Balkhash has been falling everywhere since 2019, mainly due to a decrease in the flow of the Ili River” from neighboring China, said Sharipova.

All the great lakes of Central Asia, also known as enclosed seas, share a similar worrying fate.

The Aral Sea has almost disappeared, and the situation is alarming for the Caspian Sea and Lake Issyk-Kul in neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

Located on dry lands isolated from the ocean, they are particularly vulnerable to disturbances “exacerbated by global warming and human activities,” according to leading science journal Nature.

Rising temperatures accelerate evaporation, as water resources dwindle due to the melting of surrounding glaciers.

These issues are compounded by the economic importance of the Balkhash, which is on the path of a Chinese Belt and Road Initiative project, a massive infrastructure undertaking also known as the New Silk Road.

A 2021 study by Oxford University scientists published in the journal Water concluded the lake’s decline resulted from China’s overuse of the Ili River, which feeds it, for its agriculture, including cotton.

“If the hydro-climatic regime of the Ili for 2020-2060 remains unchanged compared to the past 50 years and agriculture continues to expand in China, future water supplies will become increasingly strained,” the study said.

Beijing is a key economic partner for Kazakhstan, but it is less keen to collaborate on water issues.

“The drafting and signing of an agreement with China on the sharing of water in transborder rivers is a key issue,” a spokesperson for the Kazakh Ministry of Water Resources told AFP.

“The main objective is to supply the volumes of water needed to preserve the Balkhash,” it said.

Heavy pollution

The water being syphoned away adds to “pollution from heavy metals, pesticides and other harmful substances,” authorities said, without citing culprits.

The town of Balkhash was founded around Kazakhstan’s largest copper producer, Kazakhmys.

Holiday makers bathing on Balkhash’s municipal beach have a view of the smoking chimneys of its metal plant.

Lung cancer rates here are almost 10 times the regional average, which is already among the highest in the country, health authorities said.

Despite being sanctioned for breaking environmental standards, Kazakhmys denies it is the main polluter of the lake and has vowed to reduce pollution by renewing its equipment.

“Kazakhmys is carrying out protective work to prevent environmental disasters in the Balkhash,” Sherkhan Rustemov, the company’s ecological engineer, told AFP.

In the meantime, the plant continues to discharge industrial waste into another huge body of water, right next to the lake.
…

…

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Mars and Jupiter are cozying up in the night sky for their closest rendezvous this decade.

They’ll be so close Wednesday, at least from our perspective, that just a sliver of moon could fit between them. In reality, our solar system’s biggest planet and its dimmer, reddish neighbor will be more than 575 million kilometers apart in their respective orbits.

The two planets will reach their minimum separation — one-third of 1 degree or about one-third the width of the moon — during daylight hours Wednesday in most of the Americas, Europe and Africa. But they won’t appear that much different hours or even a day earlier when the sky is dark, said Jon Giorgini of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The best views will be in the eastern sky, toward constellation Taurus, before daybreak. Known as planetary conjunctions, these comic pairings happen only every three years or so.

“Such events are mostly items of curiosity and beauty for those watching the sky, wondering what the two bright objects so close together might be,” he said in an email.

“The science is in the ability to accurately predict the events years in advance.”

Their orbits haven’t brought them this close together, one behind the other, since 2018. And it won’t happen again until 2033, when they’ll get even chummier.

The closest in the past 1,000 years was in 1761, when Mars and Jupiter appeared to the naked eye as a single bright object, according to Giorgini. Looking ahead, the year 2348 will be almost as close.

This latest link up of Mars and Jupiter coincides with the Perseid meteor shower, one of the year’s brightest showers. No binoculars or telescopes are needed.
…

PARIS — Women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics has highlighted the complexity of drafting and enforcing sex eligibility rules for women’s sports and how athletes like Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan are left vulnerable in the fallout.

When eligibility for women’s events has come into question, it often has been a legally difficult process for sports bodies that has risked exposing athletes to humiliation and abuse. In the 1960s, the Olympics used degrading visual tests intended to verify the sex of athletes.

The modern era of eligibility rules are widely known to have started in 2009, after South African 800-meter runner Caster Semenya surged to stardom on the track as an 18-year-old gold medalist at the world championships.

Semenya, the Olympic champion in the 800 meters in 2012 and 2016, is not competing in Paris because she effectively is banned from doing so unless she medically reduces her testosterone. She is, however, still involved in a legal challenge to track’s rules, now into its seventh year.

Here’s a look at sex tests in sports and the complexity they create amid changing attitudes toward gender identity:

What is the criteria for female participation?

Testosterone levels — not XY chromosomes, which is the pattern typically seen in men — are the key criterion of eligibility in Olympic events where the sport’s governing body has framed and approved rules.

That’s because some women, assigned female at birth and identifying as women, have conditions called differences of sex development, or DSD, that involves an XY chromosome pattern or natural testosterone higher than the typical female range. Some sports officials say that gives them an unfair advantage over other women in sports, but the science is inconclusive.

Semenya, whose medical data proved impossible to keep private during her legal cases — has a DSD condition. She was legally identified as female at birth and has identified as female her whole life.

Testosterone is a natural hormone that increases the mass and strength of bone and muscle after puberty. The normal adult male range rises to multiple times higher than for females, up to about 30 nanomoles per liter of blood compared with less than 2 nmol/L for women.

In 2019, at a Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing, track’s governing body argued athletes with DSD conditions were “biologically male.” Semenya said that was “deeply hurtful.”

Semenya’s case played out very publicly before 2021, when gender identity was a big story at the Tokyo Olympics and in society and sports in general. She took oral contraceptives from 2010-15 to reduce her testosterone levels and said they caused a myriad of unwanted side effects: weight gain, fevers, a constant feeling of nausea and abdominal pain, all of which she experienced while running at the 2011 world championships and 2012 Olympics.

Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender.

Why does sex verification testing differ between sports?

Each governing body of an Olympic sport is responsible for drafting its own rules, from the field of play to who is eligible to play.

Women’s boxing came to the Paris Games with effectively the same eligibility criterion — an athlete is female in her passport — as at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 after the International Boxing Association was permanently banned from the Games following decades of troubled governance and longstanding accusations of a thorough lack of normal transparency. Much has happened in the science and debate in those eight years.

Since the Tokyo Games in 2021, track’s World Athletics tightened the eligibility rules for female athletes with DSD conditions. Starting in March 2023, it required them to suppress their testosterone levels below 2.5 nmol/L for six months, commonly through hormone-suppressing treatment, to be eligible to compete.

That was half the level of 5 nmol/L proposed in 2015 for athletes competing at distances from 400 meters to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers).

World Athletics followed another major sport — World Aquatics — in prohibiting transgender women from competing in women’s races if they had undergone male puberty. The International Cycling Union also took this step last year.

The swim body’s world-leading rules additionally require transgender women athletes who did not benefit from male puberty to maintain testosterone levels below 2.5 nmol/L.

World Aquatics is not actively testing junior athletes. The first step for athletes is that national swim federations “certify their chromosomal sex.”

Similarly, soccer’s world body FIFA defers to its national member federations to verify and register the sex of players.

“No mandatory or routine gender testing verification examinations will take place at FIFA competitions,” it said in a 2011 advisory that is still in force and has been under a lengthy review.

Why do governing bodies care about who identifies as female?

Many sports bodies try to balance inclusion for all athletes and fairness to all on the field of play. They also argue that in contact and combat sports, like boxing, physical safety is a key consideration.

In the Semenya case, the judges at the Court of Arbitration for Sport acknowledged in a 2-1 ruling against her that discrimination against some women was “a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means” to preserve fairness.

Male athletes are not required to regulate their natural levels of testosterone, and female athletes who do not have DSD conditions also can benefit.

“The idea that a testosterone test is some kind of magic bullet is actually not true,” International Olympic Committee spokesperson Mark Adams said in Paris as the women’s boxing debate has raged.

What does the IOC require?

The IOC is at times very powerful and at others not at all.

The Switzerland-based organization manages the “Olympic Charter” book of rules, owns the Olympics brand, picks the hosts and helps fund them through the billions of dollars it earns selling the broadcasting and sponsor rights.

The Olympic sports events, however, are run by the individual governing bodies, like FIFA and World Athletics. They codify and enforce their own athlete eligibility and field-of-play rules as well as disciplinary codes.

So when Olympics sports reviewed and updated how they handled sex eligibility issues, including with transgender athletes, the IOC published advice in 2021, not binding rules.

That was the organization’s framework on gender and sex inclusion that recognized the need for a “safe, harassment-free environment” honoring athletes’ identities while ensuring competitions are fair.

Boxing, however, was different, and the consequences have hit hard in Paris.

The IOC has been in a yearslong and increasingly bitter feud with the International Boxing Association, which is now Russian-led, culminating in a permanent ban from the Olympics last year.

For the second straight Summer Games, the Olympic boxing tournaments have been run by an IOC-appointed administrative committee and not a functioning governing body.

In this dysfunction, boxing eligibility rules have not kept pace with other sports, and the issues weren’t addressed ahead of the Paris Games.

At the 2023 world championships, Khelif and Lin were disqualified and denied medals by the IBA, which said they failed eligibility tests for the women’s competition but has given little information about them. The governing body has contradicted itself repeatedly about whether the tests measured testosterone.

In a chaotic press conference Monday in Paris, IBA officials said they did blood tests on only four of the hundreds of fighters at the 2022 world championships and that it tested Khelif and Lin in response to complaints from other teams, apparently acknowledging an uneven standard of profiling that is considered widely unacceptable in sports.

Who is challenging established rules in some sports?

Before Semenya, there was sprinter Dutee Chand of India who went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. She challenged track and field’s initial testosterone rules passed in 2011 as a reaction to Semenya.

A first CAS ruling for Chand in 2015 froze the rules and led to an update in 2018, which was then challenged by Semenya. Her career in the 800 stalled because she refused to take medication to artificially suppress her testosterone levels and was barred from competing at elite events.

Semenya lost at CAS in 2019 but went through Switzerland’s supreme court to the European Court of Human Rights, where she scored a landmark, but not total, win last year.

In May, another ECHR hearing in Semenya’s case was held, and a ruling likely will come next year.

The case could be sent back to Switzerland, maybe even back to CAS in the Olympic home city of Lausanne, Switzerland. Other sports are watching and waiting.
…

LAHAINA, Hawaii — When a deadly wildfire tore through Lahaina on Maui last August, the wall of flames scorched the 151-year-old banyan tree along the historic town’s Front Street. But the sprawling tree survived the blaze, and thanks to the efforts of arborists and dedicated volunteers, parts of it are growing back — and even thriving.

One year after the fire, here’s what to know about the banyan tree and the efforts to restore it.

Why is Lahaina’s banyan tree significant?

The banyan tree is the oldest living one on Maui but is not a species indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands. India shipped the tree as a gift to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries to live in Lahaina. It was planted in 1873, a quarter century before the Hawaiian Islands became a U.S. territory and seven decades after King Kamehameha declared Lahaina the capital of his kingdom.

The tree is widely beloved and fondly remembered by millions of tourists who have visited Maui over the years. But for many others it is a symbol of colonial rule that has dispossessed Native Hawaiians of their land and suppressed their language and culture.

For generations, the banyan tree served as a gathering place along Lahaina’s waterfront. By many accounts, it was the heart of the oceanside community — towering more than 18 meters (60 feet) high and anchored by multiple trunks that span nearly an acre.

The enormous tree has leafy branches that unfurl majestically and offer shade from the sun. Aerial roots dangle from its boughs and eventually latch onto the soil to become new trunks. Branches splay out widely and have become roosting places for choirs of birds.

 

What happened to it during the fire?

The 2023 fire charred the tree and blackened many of its leaves. But it wasn’t the flames so much as the intense heat that dried out much of the tree, according to Duane Sparkman, chair of the Maui County Arborist Committee. As a result of this loss of moisture, about half of the tree’s branches died, he said.

“Once that section of the tree desiccated, there was no coming back,” he said.

But other parts of the tree are now growing back healthy.

How was it saved?

Those working to restore the tree removed the dead branches so that the tree’s energy would go toward the branches that were alive, Sparkman said.

To monitor that energy, 14 sensors were screwed into the tree to track the flows of cambium, or sap, through its branches.

“It’s basically a heart monitor,” Sparkman said. “As we’ve been treating the tree, the heartbeat’s getting stronger and stronger and stronger.”

Sparkman said there are also plans to install vertical tubes to help the tree’s aerial roots, which appear to be vertical branches that grow down toward the ground. The tubes will contain compost to provide the branches with key nutrients when they take root in the soil.

A planned irrigation system will also feed small drops of water into the tubes. The goal, Sparkman said, is to help those aerial roots “bulk up and become the next stabilizer root.” The system will also irrigate the surrounding land and the tree’s canopy.

“You see a lot of long, long branches with hundreds of leaves back on the tree,” Sparkman said, adding that some branches are even producing fruit. “It’s pretty amazing to see that much of the tree come back.”

What other trees were destroyed in the fire?

Sparkman estimates that Lahaina lost some 25,000 trees in the fire.

These included the fruit trees that people grew in their yards as well as trees that are significant in Hawaiian culture, such as the ulu or breadfruit tree; the fire charred all but two of the dozen or so that remained.

Since the blaze, a band of arborists, farmers and landscapers — including Sparkman — has set about trying to save the ulu and other culturally important trees. Before colonialism, commercial agriculture and tourism, thousands of breadfruit trees dotted Lahaina.

To help restore Lahaina’s trees, Sparkman founded a nonprofit called Treecovery. The group has potted some 3,500 trees, he said, growing them in “micro-nurseries” across the island, including at some hotels, until people can move back into their homes.

“We have grow hubs all over the island of Maui to grow these trees out for as long as they need. So, when the people are ready, we can have them come pick these trees up and they can plant them in their yards,” he said. “It’s important that we do this for the families.”
…

…

Almaty, Kazakhstan — Central Asian leaders met in Kazakhstan on Friday seeking to agree on a shared policy on water management in a region where the scarce resource causes frequent disputes.

Interruptions to water supplies are a regular occurrence in the five ex-Soviet Central Asian countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – whose territory is 80% desert and steppe.

Hosting the summit, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said it was “necessary to develop a new consolidated water policy, based on equal and fair use of water and strict fulfilment of obligations,” the presidential website said.

The way water access is shared in the Central Asian states has remained the same since the Soviet era and is fraught with problems: those countries with more water exchange it in return for electricity from the more energy-rich countries.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which have more water than the others, have often clashed over control of supplies.

Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov on Friday called for the creation of a “mutually economically beneficial mechanism for water and energy cooperation,” taking into account “the limited amount of water resources and their importance for the whole region.”

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev emphasized the need to adopt a “regional strategy on the rational use of water resources of cross-border rivers.”

The volume of water in the main Central Asian rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, is expected to continue falling in the years to come, according to experts.

Shortages of water, along with global warming, is compounded by significant waste due to outdated infrastructure.

After three years of tensions, the Central Asian states are now trying to coordinate efforts in numerous areas, particularly water management, amid growing demand for agriculture and energy generation in a region with a population of about 80 million.

Another concern for the Central Asian governments is the construction by the Taliban of the Qosh Tepa Canal to irrigate northern Afghanistan, which could further threaten water supplies.
…

…

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — What should have been a quick trip to the International Space Station may turn into an eight-month stay for two NASA astronauts if they have to switch from Boeing to SpaceX for a ride home.

There’s lingering uncertainty over the safety of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule, NASA officials said Wednesday, and the space agency is split over the risk. As a result, chances are increasing that test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams may have to watch from the space station as their Starliner is cut loose to return to Earth empty.

If that happens, NASA will leave behind two of four astronauts from the next SpaceX taxi flight in late September, with the vacant seats set aside for Wilmore and Williams on the return trip in February. The pair expected to be gone just a week or two when they launched June 5 as Starliner’s first crew.

NASA is bringing in additional experts to analyze the thruster failures experienced by Starliner before it docked. At the same time, NASA is looking more closely at SpaceX as a backup.

At this point, “we could take either path,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s space operations mission chief.

During a recent meeting, “we heard from a lot of folks that had concern, and the decision was not clear,” he said. A final decision is expected by mid-August.

Boeing issued a brief statement following NASA’s news update, repeating its position that the capsule could still safely bring the astronauts home.

“We still believe in Starliner’s capability and its flight rationale,” the company said.

Boeing will need to modify the capsule’s software in case Starliner ends up returning without a crew.

No serious consideration was given to launching a separate SpaceX flight just to retrieve Wilmore and Williams, according to commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

Tests on the ground have replicated the thrust problems, pointing to seals as one culprit. But it’s still not understood how or why those seals swell when overheated and then shrink back to the proper size, Stich noted. All but one of the Starliner’s five failed thrusters have since been reactivated in orbit.

These thrusters are essential for allowing Starliner to back away from the space station following undocking, and for keeping the capsule in the proper position for moving out of orbit.

At the same time, engineers are grappling over helium leaks in Starliner’s propulsion system, crucial for maneuvering. The first leak occurred before liftoff but was deemed isolated and stable. Then more cropped up in flight.

NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX to ferry astronauts to and from the space station after the shuttles retired in 2011. SpaceX flew its first crew in 2020. Boeing stumbled on its first test flight without a crew and then fell further behind after a repeat demo.

Officials repeated their desire for a backup taxi service on Wednesday, A situation like this one could happen again, and “that’s why we want multiple vehicles,” Bowersox said.

The next crew flight will be SpaceX’s 10th for NASA. On Tuesday, it was delayed for a month until late September to allow for extra time to figure out how best to handle Starliner’s return. Three NASA astronauts and one Russian are assigned to the flight, and managers on Wednesday declined to say who might be bumped.
…

GENEVA — Soaring temperatures in July have had detrimental effects on the well-being of hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have found the monthlong extreme heat too hot to handle, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

“The extreme heat, which continued throughout July after a hot June … has had really, really devastating impacts on communities, on people’s health, on ecosystems, also on economies,” WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis told journalists Tuesday in Geneva.

“Extreme heat has a domino effect across society,” she said, noting that the world’s hottest day on recent record was registered on July 22. “All of this is really yet another unwelcome indication, one of many, of the extent that greenhouse gases from human activities are, in fact, changing our climate.”

WMO data show widespread, intense and extended heat waves have hit every continent in the past year and global average temperatures have set new monthly records for 13 consecutive months from June 2023 to June 2024.

“At least 10 countries in the past year have recorded daily temperatures of more than 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit] in more than one location,” Nullis said. “You can well imagine this is too hot for the body to handle.”

WMO reports that Death Valley in California, considered to be the hottest place on Earth, registered an average monthly temperature of 42.5 degrees Celsius (108.5 degree Fahrenheit) at Furnace Creek, “which is a record for the site and possibly the world.”

WMO normally does not measure monthly temperature records. But Randall Cerveny, chief rapporteur for the WMO’s committee for evaluating climate and weather extremes, said ”the record appeared to be reasonable and legitimate.”

While human-induced activity is largely responsible for the long-term warming trend, meteorologists cite above-average temperatures over large parts of Antarctica as another contributing factor.

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, this has resulted in anomalies of more than 10-degrees Celsius above average in some areas, and above-average temperatures in parts of the Southern Ocean.

WMO climate expert Alvaro Silva said two consecutive heat waves that hit Antarctica over the last two years have contributed to record global temperatures.

“The reason is still under research, but it seems to be related with the daily sea ice extent,” he said, noting the Antarctic daily sea ice extent in June 2024 “was the second lowest on record. … This follows the lowest extent that we have in Antarctica in terms of sea ice in 2023.”

Sea ice extent is the surface area of ice covering an ocean at a given time.

Speaking from the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, Silva provided a sobering regional overview of the heat waves and extreme heat events, which are contributing to record global temperatures.

He observed that July was the warmest on record in Asia, while in Africa, he cited record-breaking temperatures in Morocco as having had “an important impact in terms of human health and deaths.”

He said intense heat waves in southern and southeastern Europe have “caused casualties and severe impacts on health.” At the same time, he pointed out that the fallout of heat waves in North America have been quite severe, noting that on August 1, “more than 160 million people, about half of the United States population, were under heat alert.”

WMO officials say evidence of our rapidly warming planet underscores the urgency of the Call to Action on Extreme Heat initiative launched by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres July 25.

In issuing this call, the U.N. chief warned that “Earth is becoming hotter and more dangerous for everyone, everywhere” and this was posing an increased threat to “our socio-economic and environmental well-being.”

WMO officials also stressed the importance of adaptation to climate change as a lifesaving measure, noting that recent estimates produced by WMO and the World Health Organization indicate the global scale-up of heat-health-warning systems for 57 countries alone “has the potential to save an estimated 98,000 lives per year.”

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said bolstering heat early warning systems in line with her agency’s Early Warnings for All Initiative would ensure at-risk populations receive timely alerts so they can take “protective actions.”

But, she emphasized, climate adaptation alone is not enough.

“We need to tackle the root cause and urgently reduce greenhouse gas levels, which remain at record observed levels.”
…

WASHINGTON — Ocean temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef hit their highest level in 400 years over the past decade, according to researchers who warned that the reef likely won’t survive if planetary warming isn’t stopped.

During that time, between 2016 and 2024, the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem and one of the most biodiverse, suffered mass coral bleaching events. That’s when water temperatures get too hot and coral expel the algae that provide them with color and food, and sometimes die. Earlier this year, aerial surveys of over 300 reefs in the system off Australia’s northeast coast found bleaching in shallow water areas spanning two-thirds of the reef, according to Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

Researchers from Melbourne University and other universities in Australia, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, were able to compare recent ocean temperatures to historical ones by using coral skeleton samples from the Coral Sea to reconstruct sea surface temperature data from 1618 to 1995. They coupled that with sea surface temperature data from 1900 to 2024.

They observed largely stable temperatures before 1900 and steady warming from January to March from 1960 to 2024. And during five years of coral bleaching in the past decade — during 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024 — temperatures in January and March were significantly higher than anything dating back to 1618, researchers found. They used climate models to attribute the warming rate after 1900 to human-caused climate change. The only other year nearly as warm as the mass bleaching years of the past decade was 2004.

“The reef is in danger, and if we don’t divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of those great natural wonders,” said Benjamin Henley, the study’s lead author and a lecturer of sustainable urban management at the University of Melbourne. “If you put all of the evidence together … heat extremes are occurring too often for those corals to effectively adapt and evolve.”

Across the world, reefs are key to seafood production and tourism. Scientists have long said additional loss of coral is likely to be a casualty of future warming as the world approaches the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold that countries agreed to try and keep warming under in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Even if global warming is kept under the Paris Agreement’s goal, which scientists say Earth is almost guaranteed to cross, 70% to 90% of corals across the globe could be threatened, the study’s authors said. As a result, future coral reefs would likely have less diversity in coral species — which has already been happening as the oceans have grown hotter.

Coral reefs have been evolving over the past quarter century in response to bleaching events like the ones the study’s authors highlighted, said Michael McPhaden, a senior climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved with the study. But even the most robust coral may soon not be able to withstand the elevated temperatures expected under a warming climate with “the relentless rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,” he said.

The Great Barrier Reef serves as an economic resource for the region and protects against severe tropical storms.

As more heat-tolerant coral replaces the less heat-tolerant species in the colorful underwater rainbow jungle, McPhaden said there’s “real concern” about the expected extreme loss in the number of species and reduction in area that the world’s largest reef covers.

“It’s the canary in the coal mine in terms of climate change,” McPhaden said.
…

Geneva — World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday called an “emergency” meeting of international experts amidst growing worries over the mpox virus.

With mpox spreading outside of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tedros said the WHO emergency committee would meet “as soon as possible” to advise him on “whether the outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern.”

A public health emergency of international concern is the highest alarm the WHO can sound and allows Tedros to trigger emergency responses under the International Health Regulations.

Formerly known as monkeypox, mpox is an infectious disease caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals that can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.

It was first discovered in humans in 1970 in DR Congo, causing fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions.

In May 2022, mpox infections surged worldwide, mostly affecting gay and bisexual men, due to the Clade IIb subclade.

The outbreak led the WHO to declare an international public health emergency (PHEIC), which lasted from July 2022 to May 2023. That outbreak has now largely subsided.

Since September 2023, a different strain of mpox, the Clade Ib subclade, has been surging in DR Congo.

On July 11, Tedros said more than 11,000 cases and 445 deaths had been reported in the giant African state this year, with children the most affected. The disease has since spread to neighboring countries.

A PHEIC has only been declared seven times since 2009: over H1N1 swine flu, poliovirus, Ebola, Zika virus, Ebola again, Covid-19 and mpox. 
…

TOKYO — More than 120 people died of heatstroke in the Tokyo metropolitan area in July, when the nation’s average temperature hit record highs and heat warnings were in effect much of the month, Japanese authorities said Tuesday. 

According to the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s Office, many of the 123 people who died were elderly. All but two were found dead indoors, and most were not using air conditioners despite having them installed. 

Japanese health authorities and weather forecasters repeatedly advised people to stay indoors, consume ample liquids to avoid dehydration, and use air conditioning, because elderly people often think that air conditioning is not good for one’s health and tend to avoid using it. 

It was the largest number of heatstroke deaths in Tokyo’s 23 metropolitan districts in July since 127 deaths were recorded during a 2018 heatwave, the medical examiner’s office said. 

More than 37,000 people were treated at hospitals for heatstroke across Japan from July 1 to July 28, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. 

The average temperature in July was 2.16 degrees Celsius (3.89 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average over the past 30 years, making it the hottest July since the Japan Meteorological Agency began keeping records in 1898. 

On Tuesday, heatstroke warnings were in place in much of Tokyo and western Japan. The temperature rose to about 34 C (93 F) in downtown Tokyo, where many people carried parasols or handheld fans. 

“I feel every year the hot period is getting longer,” said Hidehiro Takano from Kyoto. “I have the aircon on all the time, including while I’m sleeping. I try not to go outside.” 

Maxime Picavet, a French tourist, showed a portable fan he bought in Tokyo. “It works very, very well,” he said. “With this temperature, it’s a necessity.” 

The meteorological agency predicted more heat in August, with temperatures of 35 C (95 F) or higher. 

“Please pay attention to temperature forecasts and heatstroke alerts and take adequate precautions to prevent heatstroke,” it said in a statement. 
…

…

Geneva — The World Health Organization is warning that governments throughout the world are unprepared to combat the global surge of COVID-19, which is putting millions of people at risk of severe disease and death.

“COVID-19 is still very much with us,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told journalists in Geneva Tuesday.

“The virus is circulating in all countries. Data from our sentinel-based surveillance system across 84 countries reports that the percent of positive tests for SARS-CoV-2 has been rising for several weeks,” she said.

Not only is COVID-19 surging in many countries across seasons, she said, but at least 40 Olympic athletes have tested positive in Paris despite efforts by authorities to safeguard the venues against infectious disease circulation.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared an end to the COVID-19 pandemic as an international health threat on May 5, 2023. Since then, the U.N. agency has received scant official information from countries regarding the number of new infections and deaths, as well as other essential information.

That has forced health agency officials to scroll through government websites, looking at ministry of health reports to ascertain monthly trends on hospitalizations linked to COVID-19 infections.

“On the hospitalization rates, we have seen increases in the Americas. We have seen increases in Europe. In recent months, we have seen increases in the Western Pacific,” Van Kerkhove said. “Thirty-five countries out of 234 countries and territories are providing this information. … So about 15% of available countries and territories have that information to share with us.”

Based on wastewater surveillance, WHO officials have determined that circulation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is 2 to 20 times higher than is currently being reported.

“This is significant because the virus continues to evolve and change, which puts us all at risk of a potentially more severe virus that could evade our detection and/or our medical interventions, including vaccinations,” said Van Kerkhove.

Over the last two years, she noted that there has been “an alarming decline in vaccine coverage,” especially among health workers and people over 60, “two of the most at-risk groups.”

“I am concerned,” said Van Kerkhove. “With such low coverage, with such large circulation, if we were to have a variant that was more severe, then the susceptibility of the at-risk populations to develop severe disease is huge. It is huge in every country.”

WHO officials observe that governments and their people have been lulled into a sense of complacency because the impact of COVID-19 is less now than it was during the pandemic. However, they also warn that could change for the worse as the immunity achieved through previous infections, and the protection achieved through vaccination, wears off.

The WHO says countries could and should be doing much more to prevent the current global surge from turning into another full-blown pandemic. The global health agency is urging countries to continue to sharpen their pandemic preparedness, readiness and response systems “to be ready for surges of COVID-19 as well as other emerging and reemerging pathogens,” such as avian influenza H5N1, mpox and dengue.

The WHO recommends that people in the highest risk groups receive a COVID-19 vaccine within 12 months of their last dose. To increase uptake and protection, it recommends people get their COVID-19 shot in tandem with their seasonal flu shot.

“Vaccination with any of the approved vaccines will protect against severe disease and death,” said Van Kerkhove. “It will lower your risk of developing severe disease. It will also lower your risk of developing post-COVID condition,” otherwise known as long COVID.
…

WASHINGTON/SYDNEY — The United States and Australia kicked off high-level talks Tuesday that will focus on China’s “coercive behavior,” as well as the AUKUS nuclear submarine project, mounting tensions in the Middle East and climate change, officials said.

The annual Australia-U.S. AUSMIN talks, taking place in Annapolis, Maryland, include the top defense and diplomatic officials from both nations.

“We’re working together today to tackle shared security challenges, from coercive behavior by the PRC [People’s Republic of China], to Russia’s war of choice against Ukraine, to the turmoil in the Middle East,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.

“And I know that [this] year’s AUSMIN will deliver results for both of our peoples.”

The U.S. and China are at odds on a range of issues, including U.S. support for Taiwan. Another topic will be Chinese military activity in the South China Sea. China claims control over most of the sea, including the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, where U.S. ally the Philippines has maritime claims.

Austin spoke in the wake of a rocket strike on Monday in Iraq that wounded seven U.S. personnel, as the Middle East braced for a possible new wave of attacks by Iran and its allies following last week’s killing of senior leaders of militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defense Minister Richard Marles held meetings in Washington on Monday, a day before the AUSMIN talks.

Marles highlighted the expanding role of a U.S. Marine rotational force in northern Australia and defense industry cooperation.

“We’re seeing America’s force posture in Australia grow really significantly. AUKUS is part of that, but it’s not the only part of that,” Marles said in talks with Austin, according to a statement.

Under the AUKUS program, Washington will sell three nuclear-powered submarines to Australia in the next decade. Wong said there was bipartisan U.S. political support for the program.

U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy told ABC Television that China and climate change — priorities for the Pacific Islands, where the U.S. and Australia are competing with China for security ties — would be discussed.

“Obviously with China being such an important … trading partner and competitor for both of us, that is obviously one of the main topics,” she said.

“We are also talking about what we can do together to fight climate change [and] to help the Pacific Islands to build critical infrastructure to connect them,” she said.

As part of cooperating on environmental and resource issues, Australia will spend $200 million ($130 million U.S.) to upgrade ground station facilities in its remote central desert to process data from NASA’s Landsat Next satellite.

Landsat Next is an earth observation program the U.S. space agency says will provide early warnings on the onset of fires or ice melting. The program is scheduled to be launched in 2030.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the satellite data would also be used to target resource exploration in Australia, as the two nations develop a supply chain for critical minerals.

The U.S. and its allies are seeking to reduce China’s market dominance in rare earths and critical minerals used in electric vehicles and defense technology.
…

HARARE, Zimbabwe — The U.N. World Food Program has faced challenges in raising $400 million for its Southern Africa drought response, collecting just one-fifth of what it needs to help seven countries in the region, a WFP spokesperson said on Tuesday.

The funding environment had become increasingly difficult as drought has dramatically raised the region’s food needs, Thomson Phiri told Reuters.

Southern Africa is experiencing its worst drought in decades, forcing Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe to declare states of disaster. The drought was a result of the El Nino climate phenomenon, which can change world weather patterns, bring extreme seasonal temperatures, rainfall or dry spells and hurt crop yields.

About 70% of the Southern African population that relies on rain-fed agriculture had their harvests “wiped out” by lack of rains, Phiri told Reuters in May.

The WFP aims to use the proceeds raised so far to feed 5.9 million out of 27 million in the region who are food-insecure until the next harvest season in 2025, and had started sourcing white grain from Tanzania, South Africa and Latin America to feed regional communities.

Despite notable donor support, current food needs were “exceptionally high and outpacing available resources,” during a historical drought, Phiri said.

Some donors have had to trim their aid budgets, and “people in places such as Southern Africa are now facing a double whammy where they are reeling both from the historic drought and severe funding cuts,” he said.

The UN’s climate crisis coordinator for the El Nino response, Reena Ghelani, called for urgent action.

“We are very worried,” Ghelani told Reuters last week. “In fact, we are seeing a sharp increase in the number of people going hungry.”

Ghelani warned of a prolonged dry spell and frequent droughts across the region in coming years due to climate change.
…

washington — Twenty years ago on an Indonesian island, scientists discovered fossils of an early human species that stood at about 1.07 meters tall — earning them the nickname “hobbits.”

Now a new study suggests ancestors of the hobbits were even slightly shorter.

“We did not expect that we would find smaller individuals from such an old site,” study co-author Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo said in an email.

The original hobbit fossils date back to between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The new fossils were excavated at a site called Mata Menge, about 27 kilometers from the cave where the first hobbit remains were uncovered.

In 2016, researchers suspected the earlier relatives could be shorter than the hobbits after studying a jawbone and teeth collected from the new site. Further analysis of a tiny arm bone fragment and teeth suggests the ancestors were a mere 6 centimeters shorter and existed 700,000 years ago.

“They’ve convincingly shown that these were very small individuals,” said Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University who was not involved with the research.

The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers have debated how the hobbits – named Homo floresiensis after the remote Indonesian island of Flores – evolved to be so small and where they fall in the human evolutionary story. They’re thought to be among the last early human species to go extinct.

Scientists don’t yet know whether the hobbits shrank from an earlier, taller human species called Homo erectus that lived in the area, or from an even more primitive human predecessor. More research – and fossils – are needed to pin down the hobbits’ place in human evolution, said Matt Tocheri, an anthropologist at Canada’s Lakehead University.

“This question remains unanswered and will continue to be a focus of research for some time to come,” Tocheri, who was not involved with the research, said in an email.
…