AFP

By the time Pakistani schoolboy Saeed Ali arrived at hospital in one of the world’s hottest cities, his body was shutting down from heatstroke.

The 12-year-old collapsed after walking home from school under the burning sun, his day spent sweltering in a classroom with no fans.

“A rickshaw driver had to carry my son here. He couldn’t even walk,” the boy’s mother Shaheela Jamali told AFP from his bedside.

Jacobabad in Pakistan’s arid Sindh province is in the grip of the latest heatwave to hit South Asia -– peaking at 51 degrees Celsius (124 Fahrenheit) at the weekend.

Canals in the city — a vital source of irrigation for nearby farms — have run dry, with a smattering of stagnant water barely visible around strewn rubbish.

Experts say the searing weather is in line with projections for global warming.

The city is on the “front line of climate change”, said its deputy commissioner Abdul Hafeez Siyal. “The overall quality of life here is suffering.”

Most of the one million people in Jacobabad and surrounding villages live in acute poverty, with water shortages and power cuts compromising their ability to beat the heat.

It leaves residents facing desperate dilemmas.  

Doctors said Saeed was in a critical condition, but his mother –- driven by a desire to escape poverty –- said he would return to school next week.

“We don’t want them to grow up to be labourers,” Jamali told AFP, her son listless and tearful at her side.

Heatstroke –- when the body becomes so overheated it can no longer cool itself –- can cause symptoms from lightheadedness and nausea to organ swelling, unconsciousness, and even death.

Nurse Bashir Ahmed, who treated Saeed at a new heatstroke clinic run by local NGO Community Development Foundation, said the number of patients arriving in a serious condition was rising.

“Previously, the heat would be at its peak in June and July, but now it’s arriving in May,” Ahmed said.

Labourers forced to toil in the sun are among the most vulnerable.

Brick kiln workers ply their trade alongside furnaces that can reach up to 1,000 degrees Celsius.

“The severe heat makes us feel like throwing up sometimes, but if I can’t work, I can’t earn,” said Rasheed Rind, who started on the site as a child.

– ‘Water mafias’ –

Life in Jacobabad is dominated by attempts to cope with the heat.

“It’s like fire burning all around. What we need the most is electricity and water,” said blacksmith Shafi Mohammad.

Power shortages mean only six hours of electricity a day in rural areas and 12 in the city.

Access to drinking water is unreliable and unaffordable due to scarcity across Pakistan and major infrastructure problems.

Khairun Nissa gave birth during the heatwave, her last days of pregnancy spent wilting under a single ceiling fan shared between her family of 13.

Her two-day-old son now occupies her spot under its feeble breeze.

“Of course I’m worried about him in this heat, but I know God will provide for us,” said Nissa. 

Outside their three-room brick home, where the stench of rotting rubbish and stagnant water hangs in the air, a government-installed water tap runs dry.

But local “water mafias” are filling the supply gap.

They have tapped into government reserves to funnel water to their own distribution points where cans are filled and transported by donkey cart to be sold at 20 rupees (25 cents) per 20 litres.

“If our water plants weren’t here, there would be major difficulties for the people of Jacobabad,” said Zafar Ullah Lashari, who operates an unlicensed, unregulated water supply.

– ‘Nothing we can do’ –

In a farming village on the outskirts of the city, women wake up at 3am to pump drinking water all day from a well –- but it is never enough.

“We prefer our cattle to have clean drinking water first, because our livelihood depends on them,” said Abdul Sattar, who raises buffaloes for milk and sale at market.

There is no compromise on this, even when children suffer skin conditions and diarrhoea.

“It is a difficult choice but if the cattle die, how would the children eat?” he said.

Pakistan is the eighth most vulnerable country to extreme weather caused by climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index compiled by environmental NGO Germanwatch.

Floods, droughts and cyclones in recent years have killed and displaced thousands, destroyed livelihoods and damaged infrastructure. 

Many people choose to leave Jacobabad in the hottest months, leaving some villages half empty.

Sharaf Khatoon shares a makeshift camp in the city with up to 100 people surviving on a few meagre rupees that male family members earn through menial labour.

They usually relocate the camp in the hottest months, 300 kilometres away to Quetta, where temperatures are up to 20 degrees Celsius cooler. 

But this year they will leave late, struggling to save the money for the journey. 

“We have headaches, unusual heartbeats, skin problems, but there is nothing we can do about it,” said Khatoon.

Professor Nausheen H. Anwar, who studies urban planning in hot cities, said authorities need to look beyond emergency responses and think long term.

“Taking heatwaves seriously is important, but sustained chronic heat exposure is particularly critical,” she said.

“It’s exacerbated in places like Jacobabad by the degradation of infrastructure and access to water and electricity which compromises people’s capacity to cope.”

– ‘Battlefield’ –

Along a dried up canal filled with rubbish, hundreds of boys and a handful of girls in Jacobabad pour into a school for their end-of-year exams.

They gather around a hand pump to gulp down water, exhausted even before the day begins.

“The biggest issue we face is not having basic facilities — that’s why we experience more difficulties,” said headteacher Rashid Ahmed Khalhoro.

“We try to keep the children’s morale high but the heat impacts their mental and physical health.”

With extreme temperatures arriving earlier in the year, he appealed to the government to bring forward summer vacations, which normally begin in June.

A few classrooms have fans, though most do not. When the electricity is cut just an hour into the school day, everyone swelters in semi-darkness.

Some rooms become so unbearable that children are moved into corridors, with youngsters frequently fainting.

“We suffocate in the heat. We sweat profusely and our clothes get drenched,” said 15-year-old Ali Raza.

The boys told AFP they suffered from headaches and frequent diarrhoea but refused to skip lessons.

Khalhoro said his students are determined to break out of poverty and find jobs where they can escape the heat. 

“They are prepared as though they are on a battlefield, with the motivation that they must achieve something.”

After some four years probing Mars’ interior, NASA’s InSight lander will likely retire this summer as accumulated dust on its solar panels saps its power. 

The lander will, however, leave behind a legacy of data that will be tapped by scientists around the world for years to come, helping to improve our understanding of planet formation, NASA said, while announcing on Tuesday the imminent end to InSight’s science operations. 

Equiped with an ultra-sensitive seismometer, InSight recorded more than 1,300 “marsquakes,” including a magnitude 5 quake on May 4, the largest so far. 

But around July, the seismometer will be turned off. 

The lander’s energy level will then be checked about once a day, and some pictures may still be taken. Then by the end of 2022, the mission will be completely stopped.

The cause: the accumulation over months of Martian dust on the lander’s two solar panels, each measuring about seven feet (2.2 meters) wide. 

InSight, which is already running on only a tenth of the energy it had at the beginning, will soon find its batteries drained.

The speed at which dust accumulated corresponded more or less to what had been estimated by NASA.

The lander got a new lease on life around a year ago, when its robotic arm was put to new and unplanned use to remove some dust from the solar panels, extending the mission.  

The maneuver — employed six times successfully — saw the arm use dust itself to clear the panels, as it scooped up some martian soil and gently dropped onto the robot so the dirt was blown across the solar panels, clearing parts of their surface.

Adding something to the lander specifically to clean the panels was forgone due to costs, explained Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during a press conference Tuesday.

Such a mechanism would leave “less to put into the science instruments,” he said.

– ‘Treasure trove’ –

InSight, one of four missions currently on the Red Planet — along with the US rovers Perseverance and Curiosity, and China’s Zhurong — arrived on Mars in November 2018.

Its seismometer, made in France, has since paved the way for great advances.

“The interior was kind of just a giant question mark,” said Banerdt, who has worked on the InSight mission for more than a decade.

But thanks to InSight, “we’ve been able to map out the inside of Mars for the very first time in history.”

Seismic waves, varying based on the materials they pass through, offer a picture of the interior of the planet.

For example, scientists were able to confirm that the core of Mars is liquid and to determine the thickness of the Martian crust — less dense than previously thought and likely consisting of three layers.

The magnitude 5 quake in early May was much larger than all those previously recorded and close to what scientists thought would be the maximum on Mars, though it would not be considered a huge tremor on Earth.

“This quake is really going to be a treasure trove of scientific information when we get our teeth into it,” Banerdt said.

Earthquakes are in particular caused by plate tectonics, he explained. But, they can also be triggered when the Earth’s crust moves due to temperature anomalies caused by its mantle. 

It is this type of vibration that scientists think they are dealing with on Mars.

Not all of InSight’s scientific operations have gone smoothly, however, such as when its heat probe had trouble being successfully buried below the surface to take the planet’s temperature because of the composition of the soil where the robot landed.

Regardless, in light of the seismometer’s success, NASA is considering using the technique elsewhere in the future, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

“We’d really like to set up a complete network on the moon to really understand what’s going on there.”

An increasing number of unidentified flying objects have been reported in the sky over the past 20 years, a top US defense official told lawmakers Tuesday in the first public hearing on UFOs in half a century.

“Since the early 2000s we have seen an increasing number of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft or objects in military controlled training areas and training ranges and other designated airspace,” Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval intelligence, told a House security panel.

Bray attributed the rise to efforts by the US military to “destigmatize the act of reporting sights and encounters” as well as to technological advances. 

However, he said the Pentagon had detected nothing “that would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin” behind these phenomena.

On the other hand, Brey also did not definitively rule out that possibility. 

“We’ve made no assumptions about what this is or isn’t,” Bray said.

In June 2021, US intelligence had already claimed in a long-awaited report that there was no evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials in the skies, while acknowledging that they had no explanation for dozens of phenomena observed by military pilots. 

Some could be explained by the presence of drones or birds creating confusion in the radar systems of the US military. 

Others could stem from tests of military equipment or technologies carried out by other powers, such as China or Russia. 

The US military and intelligence are primarily interested in determining whether these aerial objects may be linked to threats against the United States.

“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat. And they need to be treated that way,” said Democratic Representative Andre Carson of Indiana, who was chairing the panel holding the hearing. 

Pollution caused some 9 million people to die prematurely in 2019, according to a new global report published Wednesday, with experts raising alarm over increasing deaths from breathing outside air and the “horrifying” toll of lead poisoning.    

Human-created waste in the air, water and soil rarely kills people immediately, but causes instead heart disease, cancer, respiratory problems, diarrhoea and other serious illnesses.  

The Lancet Commission on pollution and health said the impact from pollution on global health remains “much greater than that of war, terrorism, malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, drugs and alcohol”. 

Pollution is an “existential threat to human health and planetary health, and jeopardises the sustainability of modern societies,” it added.

In general, the review found, air pollution — accounting for a total of 6.7 million deaths globally in 2019 — was “entwined” with climate change because the main source of both problems is burning fossil fuels and biofuels.  

“If we can’t manage to grow in a clean and green way, we’re doing something terribly wrong,” said the report’s lead author Richard Fuller, of the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, adding that chemical pollution also harms biodiversity — another major global threat. 

“These things are terribly connected and strategies to deal with one have ripple effects all the way through,” he said.

Overall, one in six premature deaths globally — or nine million — were caused by pollution, a figure unchanged since the last assessment in 2015. 

Researchers noted a reduction in mortality linked to indoor air pollution, unsafe drinking water and inadequate sanitation, with major improvements seen in Africa.  

But early deaths associated with industrialisation — outdoor air and chemical pollution — are on the rise, particularly in southern and eastern Asia. 

Ambient air pollution caused some 4.5 million deaths in 2019, according to the study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, compared with 4.2 million in 2015 and just 2.9 million in 2000. 

Chemical pollution is also increasing, with lead poisoning alone causing 900,000 deaths. Even that, the report warned, is likely a “substantial undercount” in light of new research suggesting there is no safe level of exposure.

– Harmful to children –

Algeria banned lead in petrol in 2021, the last country to do so. 

But people continue to be exposed to the toxic substance, largely due to unregulated recycling of lead-acid batteries and e-waste. Contaminated culinary spices are also a culprit.   

“The fact that lead is getting worse, mostly in poorer countries, and ramping up in terms of the number of deaths, is horrifying,” said Fuller.

Heart disease is the cause of almost all early deaths from exposure to lead, which hardens arteries, said Fuller. 

But elevated lead levels in blood — estimated to affect hundreds of millions of children — also harm brain development and are linked to serious losses of cognitive function. 

The report said lead is also linked to a spike in behavioural disorders and diminished economic productivity, with global economic losses estimated at almost $1 trillion annually. 

In Africa, economic losses from lead-related IQ loss are equivalent to about four percent of gross domestic product, while in Asia it amounts to two percent. 

– Silent killer –

Overall, excess deaths due to pollution have led to economic losses totalling $4.6 trillion in 2019, or around six percent of global economic output, researchers said.

Low- and middle-income countries are by far the most affected, with more than 90 percent of deaths in these regions.

There is also increasing evidence of pollution crossing national boundaries in wind, water and the food chain.  

Wealthier nations that have reduced domestic outdoor air pollution effectively “displace” it overseas to countries with higher levels of manufacturing, the report said.

Prevailing global winds transport air pollution from east Asia to North America, from North America to Europe, and from Europe to the Arctic and central Asia. 

Meanwhile, cereals, seafood, chocolate and vegetables produced for export in developing countries can be contaminated as a result of soil and water polluted with lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury and pesticides. 

This “increasingly threatens global food safety”, the report said, adding that “toxic metals found in infant formula and baby foods are of particular concern.”

Fuller said the threat of pollution — particularly air and lead pollution — is underappreciated, with more attention focused on the health implications of microplastics. 

“We can show a million people dying from lead pollution right now — more than die from malaria, more than die from HIV — and that’s not even discussed,” he said.

Sandstorms across the Middle East have delayed flights, closed schools and hospitalised thousands — a phenomenon experts say could worsen as climate change warps regional weather patterns. 

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday became the latest country blanketed with dust that slowed traffic and made iconic towers in the capital difficult to see from more than a few hundred metres (yards) away.

Emergency rooms in Riyadh hospitals had received some 1,285 people suffering from respiratory problems over 24 hours as a result of the sandstorm, the state-run Al-Ekhbariya channel reported.

Electronic signs along Riyadh’s highways warned drivers to reduce their speed because of the lower visibility, even as life largely went on as usual in the kingdom. 

The national meteorology centre predicted that “surface dusty winds” originating in the east and bringing a thick grey haze would continue west towards the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Other countries have been grappling with the problem for longer: Neighbouring Iraq has experienced eight sandstorms since mid-April, fuelled by soil degradation, intense droughts and low rainfall linked to climate change. 

The country’s latest sandstorm on Monday enveloped the capital Baghdad in an orange glow, sent at least 4,000 people to hospital with breathing problems and led to the closure of airports, schools and public offices across the country. 

Iran announced that it, too, was closing government offices and schools Tuesday, citing “unhealthy weather” conditions and sandstorms. 

Average airborne concentration of the finest and most hazardous particles (PM2.5) was at 163 microgrammes per cubic metre Tuesday in Tehran, according to a government website.

That is more than six times the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum of 25 microgrammes per cubic metre.

In Kuwait, meanwhile, air traffic at the main airport was suspended for an hour and a half due to a dust storm Monday, and marine traffic in all three ports remained suspended as of Tuesday afternoon. 

Kuwait’s ministry of education said classes were suspended on Tuesday but would resume the following day. 

– Response needed ‘urgently’ –

The Middle East has always been battered by dust and sandstorms, but they have become more frequent and intense in recent years. 

The trend is associated with overgrazing and deforestation, overuse of river water and more dams. 

Unseasonable masses of dry, cold air help explain the recent proliferation of sandstorms in eastern Syria and Iraq and “their transmission to the Arabian Peninsula”, Hassan Abdallah from the WASM meteorological centre in Jordan told AFP. 

By the time the sandstorms reach Saudi Arabia they tend to be less intense, he added. 

Sandstorms are worsening regionally because of factors including low water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, large fluctuations in annual rainfall and disintegrating soil, he said. 

As for how to mitigate them, Abdallah advised planting more trees and “addressing the low level of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers urgently”.

In central Riyadh on Tuesday, sand layered cars and buildings, and residents struggled to keep it out of their homes. 

“Working outside is very difficult because of the dirt,” a Pakistani construction worker who gave his name as Kalimullah told AFP as he installed tiles. 

“I try to wash my face from time to time,” the 30-year-old added, wrapping a piece of cloth around it to block the sand. 

Saudi office worker Abdullah Al-Otaibi, 39, said he was grateful he works indoors. 

“Dust storms are part of our culture and we are used to it, but some of them are severe,” he said, rubbing his eyes as he hurried inside.

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