AFP

New Zealand has experienced its warmest and wettest winter on record, scientists said Friday in the wake of widespread flooding last month on the South Island.

For the third year in a row, New Zealand recorded its warmest winter since temperature records began in 1909.

Researchers at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research said the average temperature nationwide was 9.8 degrees Celsius (49.64 degrees Fahrenheit), which was 1.4 degrees Celsius warmer than average.

Institute scientist Nava Fedaeff said climate change “is strongly contributing to New Zealand’s temperature trend”.

For the first time, temperatures were more than 1.2 degrees Celsius higher than average in all three winter months.

Of New Zealand’s 10 warmest winters on record, six have occurred since 2013.

This winter was also the wettest since rainfall records started in 1971.

Wild weather battered New Zealand last month, especially on the South Island where widespread flooding led to hundreds of homes being temporarily evacuated.

A phenomenon from the tropics known as an atmospheric river of moisture was to blame for the downpours, which saw states of emergency declared in Nelson, Tasman, the West Coast, and Marlborough.

Fedaeff said New Zealand’s wettest winter is the culmination of numerous extreme rainfall events “which affected almost every part of the country at some point”.

Swaddled tightly under the shelter of a donated tent, a newborn baby lays still amid the disorder all around. 

Her mother, Hajira Bibi, flits between checking on the 10-day-old girl — so young she’s yet to be named — and attempting to clean away the ankle-high mud left behind in her home by the floods that forced her family to shelter on the hard shoulder of a motorway. 

“I took her up on the motorway when she was only four days old… she was so small,” Bibi told AFP about their weekend evacuation.

“She was sick and her eyes were hurting, suffering from a fever too, my baby was in deep trouble because of the heat.”

Similar scenes are playing out across Pakistan following record monsoon rains that have flooded over a third of the country, affecting more than 33 million people.

UNICEF says 16 million children are impacted and 3.4 million are in need of humanitarian support.

Still recovering from the birth, Bibi had to be helped up the steep slope as warnings arrived that the Kabul River was about to burst its banks because of torrential rains further north. 

In this village near Charsadda in northwest Pakistan, the sun was scorching when they fled to A-frame tents handed out to families. 

– Sludge everywhere –

They slept there for days in the open air, with no fans, no running water and nothing to bat away the mosquitos.

When the shoulder-high floodwater receded, a dark brown sludge had coated everything in their three-room home, their feet sinking into it.

“We just want our house to be fixed. It’s painful to see the children laying here,” said Bibi, who hopes for a doctor to reach the extended family of around 15.

It is common in rural parts of Pakistan for birthdays to not be precisely recorded, but Bibi believes the baby was born about four days before the floods and is now around 10 days old.

She is unsure of her own exact age, putting herself at around 18 — quietly explaining that she was only around 12 when she gave birth to her first baby.

They have now moved their tents to drier ground outside their home, the children sharing wooden charpoy beds.

The environment is ripe for a breakout of infections. 

The water pump is broken, so the adults have not showered in clean water for nearly a week. 

Children swim in the small pools of floodwater where buffalo bathe and pass urine. 

“The flood has passed but the water was very dirty, very muddy, all these children have rashes and their health is getting worse and worse,” said Naveed Afzal, Bibi’s husband, who since the floods can no longer find work as a day labourer.

On their feet and shins, adults display sores they say have tripled in size in just a couple of days.

A young boy has watery red eyes, another has fever. 

The baby, at least, is washed in the few bottles of mineral water collected from donation points that the men spend hours walking to each day. 

Many link roads have been cut off by standing floodwater. 

“I haven’t yet lost hope but this baby girl is so small that it would be better to return home and settle down,” said Bibi, cradling the infant in her arms.  

sjd-zz-ecl-fox/smw

Swaddled tightly under the shelter of a donated tent, a newborn baby lays still amid the disorder all around. 

Her mother, Hajira Bibi, flits between checking on the 10-day-old girl — so young she’s yet to be named — and attempting to clean away the ankle-high mud left behind in her home by the floods that forced her family to shelter on the hard shoulder of a motorway. 

“I took her up on the motorway when she was only four days old… she was so small,” Bibi told AFP about their weekend evacuation.

“She was sick and her eyes were hurting, suffering from a fever too, my baby was in deep trouble because of the heat.”

Similar scenes are playing out across Pakistan following record monsoon rains that have flooded over a third of the country, affecting more than 33 million people.

UNICEF says 16 million children are impacted and 3.4 million are in need of humanitarian support.

Still recovering from the birth, Bibi had to be helped up the steep slope as warnings arrived that the Kabul River was about to burst its banks because of torrential rains further north. 

In this village near Charsadda in northwest Pakistan, the sun was scorching when they fled to A-frame tents handed out to families. 

– Sludge everywhere –

They slept there for days in the open air, with no fans, no running water and nothing to bat away the mosquitos.

When the shoulder-high floodwater receded, a dark brown sludge had coated everything in their three-room home, their feet sinking into it.

“We just want our house to be fixed. It’s painful to see the children laying here,” said Bibi, who hopes for a doctor to reach the extended family of around 15.

It is common in rural parts of Pakistan for birthdays to not be precisely recorded, but Bibi believes the baby was born about four days before the floods and is now around 10 days old.

She is unsure of her own exact age, putting herself at around 18 — quietly explaining that she was only around 12 when she gave birth to her first baby.

They have now moved their tents to drier ground outside their home, the children sharing wooden charpoy beds.

The environment is ripe for a breakout of infections. 

The water pump is broken, so the adults have not showered in clean water for nearly a week. 

Children swim in the small pools of floodwater where buffalo bathe and pass urine. 

“The flood has passed but the water was very dirty, very muddy, all these children have rashes and their health is getting worse and worse,” said Naveed Afzal, Bibi’s husband, who since the floods can no longer find work as a day labourer.

On their feet and shins, adults display sores they say have tripled in size in just a couple of days.

A young boy has watery red eyes, another has fever. 

The baby, at least, is washed in the few bottles of mineral water collected from donation points that the men spend hours walking to each day. 

Many link roads have been cut off by standing floodwater. 

“I haven’t yet lost hope but this baby girl is so small that it would be better to return home and settle down,” said Bibi, cradling the infant in her arms.  

sjd-zz-ecl-fox/smw

Occasionally at night, if the weather’s bad when she walks her dog along the waterfront, Georgina Salt admits feeling a little “frisson” at the vulnerability of her exposed Welsh village.

Otherwise, like many residents in Fairbourne, northwest Wales, she tries not to worry that rising sea levels are predicted to swamp the village.

A decade ago, Fairbourne — in a stunning but perilous position sandwiched between the Irish Sea, an estuary and the mountains of Snowdonia National Park — was given an official death sentence.

But Salt, a community councillor, thinks the decision by local authority Gwynedd Council and others to relocate Fairbourne by the mid-2050s was made prematurely, without adequate consideration or consultation — and could now itself be abandoned.

“The biggest problem was they put a date on things,” she told AFP in the condemned village.

“We’re trying to get them (the council) to… be a bit more flexible about it and say, ‘we’re going to keep an eye on things’.”

After a summer of drought and record temperatures, the UK is increasingly bracing for the many varied impacts of human-caused climate change while this week saw a US government report emerge showing the planet’s sea levels rising for a 10th straight year.

Meteorologists noted last month that the seas surrounding the UK are rising at a far faster rate than a century ago, while the head of the Environment Agency warned in June that some coastal communities “cannot stay where they are”.

– ‘Catastrophic’ –

But Fairbourne, founded in the late 1880s by a Victorian flour merchant and now home to up to 900 people, could be considered a cautionary tale of how to proceed.

In 2013, Gwynedd Council adopted proposals in the region’s latest Shoreline Management Plan (SMP) to stop maintaining the village’s flood defences and relocate its residents in 40 to 50 years. 

The following year, the devolved Welsh Assembly in Cardiff, which has powers over environmental policy, also signed off on the SMP, which said Fairbourne faced long-term “catastrophic flood risk”.

A subsequent multi-agency “masterplan” proposed decommissioning the village “by 2054”.

SMPs have been conducted for the entire UK coastline in recent decades but Fairbourne appears to be the first place given that fate, despite not flooding severely in generations.

Residents say the order quickly “blighted” the village. They were labelled Britain’s first “climate refugees” in a flurry of media attention.

With prospective home buyers unable to get mortgages, sales dried up and property values fell by nearly half.

Meanwhile, Gwynedd Council has faced persistent criticism for failing to detail its relocation plans, with frustrated locals left feeling they were unfairly singled out.

– ‘Death… by supposition’ –

“We weren’t told where we were going to live… how people with jobs will find new jobs,” said retiree Angela Thomas. 

Locals are living under a “sword of Damocles”, unsure whether to spend money on their homes or even on a holiday, she added.

“Some people may be thinking, ‘Crikey, I’ve got to leave that money in the bank just in case I’m turfed out of my home’.”

Residents note other more flood-prone places, such as Barmouth on the other side of the estuary, have not had the same treatment.

“There’s many villages… around the coast of Great Britain that will also be in the same predicament,” said Stuart Eves, another local councillor who also runs a campsite. 

“You can’t condemn a village 40 years into the future and not have… any form of plan in place,” he added, sitting off the main street near the sole pub, post office, grocery store and railway station.

“(It’s) the ultimate death of a village by supposition.” 

Some even sense a conspiracy given that Fairbourne, which sits in a predominantly Welsh-speaking part of Wales, hosts many retirees from England.

“We had even Welsh residents coming back to us saying ‘I do sometimes think that we’re being targeted because it’s a mainly English community’,” said Salt.

– ‘Don’t agree’ –

After nearly a decade of recriminations, locals say the devolved Welsh Assembly is reassessing the SMP and 2054 decision.

External consultants have been chosen to review the latest evidence, residents claim — though the Welsh government has not confirmed as much. 

That includes a report by a local academic with relevant expertise which argues the SMP ignored the dynamism of Fairbourne’s natural shingle bank beach, as well as the cost of decommissioning and returning the village to marshland.

A spokesman for the Labour-led government in Cardiff declined to confirm that a review was underway but said Gwynedd Council’s decision “does not necessarily mean that funding will end in 2054” for flood defences.

Natural Resources Wales, the government agency which maintains sea defences, conceded that protecting Fairbourne was “working against nature”.

“As long as funding is available, we will continue to monitor and maintain the village’s flood defences to protect the community of Fairbourne,” a spokesperson added.

Gwynedd Council declined to comment.

In the meantime, the village appears to be recovering from the earlier fallout. Some property sales are now happening and new residents arriving.

“I can’t see it (relocation) happening,” said one of them, 23-year-old Mike Owen.

He recently moved with his parents and girlfriend from northwest England, drawn by the area’s relative affordability and natural beauty.

“I don’t agree with it — why would you give up on something?”

The stars appear to be aligned for NASA’s Moon rocket to finally blast off on Saturday, with weather forecasts favorable and technical issues that postponed the launch earlier this week resolved.

Liftoff is scheduled for 2:17 pm local time (1817 GMT) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the potential for up to a two-hour delay if necessary.

The chance for favorable weather conditions within that window sat at 60 percent Thursday evening. 

“The weather looks good,” and isn’t expected to be a “showstopper,” forecast analyst Melody Lovin said at a press conference.

NASA has also been working to correct the technical difficulties that lead to the last-minute delay of the launch during its originally scheduled window Monday.

At first, it seemed that one of the rocket’s four main engines was too hot, though it turned out just to be a reading from a “bad sensor,” the rocket’s program manager John Honeycutt said Thursday. 

In the future, the incorrect information will simply be ignored. 

Then a fuel tank leak had to be patched. 

“We were able to find what we believe is the source of the leak and correct that,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said. 

The Artemis 1 mission is an uncrewed test flight. It will be the first launch for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the most powerful in the world and which has been in development for more than a decade. 

“There’s no guarantee that we’re going to get off on Saturday, but we’re going to try,” Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin said. 

If the mission goes ahead Saturday, the Orion capsule fixed atop the rocket will spend 37 days in space, orbiting the Moon from about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away. 

It is the Orion that will then take future astronauts back to the Moon — including the first woman and the first person color to walk on its surface — in 2025 at the earliest. 

Artemis is named for the twin sister of the Greek god Apollo, for whom the first Moon missions were named. With the new flagship program, NASA hopes to test technology someday meant for sending humans to Mars.