AFP

Firefighters were battling California’s largest wildfire of the summer on Monday, a blaze near famed Yosemite National Park that has forced thousands of people to evacuate, officials said.

The Oak Fire in central California broke out on Friday and is raging while parts of the United States swelter through a heat wave, including the usually cool Pacific Northwest.

The fire in Mariposa County has engulfed 17,241 acres (6,977 hectares) and is 16 percent contained, Cal Fire, the state fire department, said.

“Fire crews are working aggressively using bulldozers, hand crews and aircraft,” with only “minimal growth on the fire” seen on Monday, the department said.

It is the most destructive blaze so far this fire season, according to Cal Fire, destroying more than three times the acreage of the nearby Washburn Fire, which has been nearly 90 percent contained.

But it remains much smaller than last year’s Dixie Fire, which burned nearly one million acres.

Jon Heggie, a Cal Fire battalion chief, told CNN the latest wildfire was “very indicative” of other blazes seen in the region over the last two years.

“These fires are burning with just such a velocity and intensity, it makes it extremely challenging and extremely dangerous for both the public and the firefighters,” Heggie said.

“It’s moving so quickly it’s not giving people a lot of time, and they sometimes are just going to have to evacuate with just the shirts on their back.”

One such couple, Jane and Wes Smith, lost their home and everything in it to the inferno, CNN reported.

“It’s pretty sad to see the house that I grew up in and was raised in gone,” their son Nick Smith told the broadcaster. “It hits hard.”

Cal Fire said 55 residential, commercial and other structures had been destroyed.

– ‘Direct result’ of climate change –

Jonathan Pierce, a spokesman for the fire department, said low humidity and high temperatures were stoking the blaze, worsened by the high number of dead trees and steep slopes in the area.

The Oak Fire has forced the evacuation of around 3,000 people so far, officials said.

Nearly 3,000 firefighters backed by 24 helicopters have been deployed near the southwestern edge of Yosemite National Park.

In recent years, California and other parts of the western United States have been ravaged by huge and fast-moving wildfires, driven by years of drought and a warming climate.

“What I can tell you is this is a direct result of what is climate change,” Heggie told CNN.

“You can’t have a 10-year drought in California and expect things to be the same,” he said. “That drought is what drives what we are calling megafires.”

Extreme temperatures could be seen elsewhere in the country, as 60 million Americans were under a heat advisory on Monday.

The National Weather Service said heat advisories were in place in the Southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley, while stifling temperatures would ease on Tuesday in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

The usually cool Pacific Northwest will see temperatures surpassing 100 or more degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) in the Columbia River Gorge and Basin.

The NWS said daily record highs will likely be broken from northern California to the Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington areas on Tuesday.

Cities have opened cooling stations and increased outreach to at-risk communities such as the homeless and those without air conditioning.

The world has been hit by extreme heat waves in recent months, including Western Europe in July and India in March and April — incidents that scientists say are an unmistakable sign of a warming climate.

The extreme weather prompted former US vice president Al Gore, a long-time climate advocate, to issue a stark warning on Sunday about “inaction” by US lawmakers.

Asked whether he believes US President Joe Biden should declare a climate emergency, which would grant him additional policy powers, Gore was blunt.

“Mother Nature has already declared it a global emergency,” Gore told ABC.

Farmers in Iraqi Kurdistan seeking to irrigate crops face seeing their economic lifeline slip away as the waters of Lake Dukan recede and dams upstream in Iran stem the flow.

Bapir Kalkani, who is also a trade unionist, farms near the picturesque lake but has seen marked changes over the past three years as Iraq suffers prolonged drought.

“There was water where I’m standing now” in 2019, the 56-year-old said. “It used to go three kilometres (two miles) further, but the level has retreated.”

Sesame and beans are being grown on the plain under a blazing sun, adjacent to the lake which is fed by a Tigris tributary, the Lower Zab river which has its source in Iran.

The large artificial lake was created in the 1950s following construction of the Dukan dam, to supply irrigation and drinking water for the region, as well as to generate electricity.

But for several years both the lake and the river have been shrinking — as have all of the rivers in Iraq.

The country is classified as one of the five nations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and desertification.

Its water reserves have fallen by 60 percent compared with last year, the government says.

– Rainfall becoming rare –

With rainfall becoming a rarity and after three successive years of drought, Iraq has been forced to halve the area it devotes to agriculture.

“If we hadn’t had a little rain in late spring, there would have been no crops in Kurdistan this year,” Kalkani said.

Farmers in the area used to dig shallow wells fed by the Dukan so they could irrigate their crops. But not any more.

“The wells have lost 70 percent of their water,” he said.

Sesame farmer Shirko Aziz Ahmed had to dig a well several metres deep so he could access water and raise it using a diesel-powered pump.

“Sesame needs a lot of watering, so I’m going to have to dig even deeper as the water level goes down,” he said.

Drought is not the only source of the farmer’s water problems.

Iran has built several dams on the Lower Zab, notably the Kolsa barrage.

“The Kolsa dam has caused at least an 80 percent drop in the water levels” of the Lower Zab, said Banafsheh Keynoush of the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

She said Iran is going through one of the worst droughts in its history and has had to revise its irrigation policy.

– Iran ‘dam-building spree’ –

“Iran is on a dam-building spree, and many of its dams are small,” she told AFP.

The Dukan dam in Iraq has also been badly affected by the reduced river flow, said its director Kochar Jamal Tawfeeq.

“Now we have only 41 percent, below half of the capacity” of the dam, he said.

It supplies drinking water for “about three million people in Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk”, two major cities downstream, he said.

But at just 300 mm (less than 12 inches) of rainfall last year — half the previous annual average — the skies have not been generous. And Tawfeeq said 2022 is on track to mirror last year’s figures.

“We are releasing 90 cubic metres per second,” the director said. “When the reservoir is full, we release 200 to 250.”

Tawfeeq said farmers were being told “not to grow crops that need too much water”.

He said Baghdad had sent teams to Iran to discuss the reduced flow of the Lower Zab river, but “there’s no cooperation from the Iranians”.

Iran contends its river flow contribution into the Tigris and Euphrates basin is only about six percent, according to Keynoush.

“What Iran is trying to say is: ‘The Euphrates and Tigris problems you have are really between you and Turkey’,” where the two main rivers have their sources, she added.

But Iraq itself is not above criticism, said Azzam Alwash, founder of the Nature Iraq non-government organisation and presidential adviser.

Iraqi Kurdistan in the north plans to construct new dams but the projects lack any coordination with Baghdad, Alwash said.

Downstream, in central and south Iraq, the situation is being exasperated by a lack of modernisation of water resources and could result in disaster, he warned.

Way up in the snowy Alps, the border between Switzerland and Italy has shifted due to a melting glacier, putting the location of an Italian mountain lodge in dispute.

The borderline runs along a drainage divide — the point at which meltwater will run down either side of the mountain towards one country or the other.

But the Theodul Glacier’s retreat means the watershed has crept towards the Rifugio Guide del Cervino, a refuge for visitors near the 3,480-metre (11,417-foot) Testa Grigia peak — and it is gradually sweeping underneath the building.

Frederic, a 59-year-old tourist, opens the narrow wooden door to enter the refuge’s restaurant, the light flooding in from outside.

The menu is in Italian, not German, and priced in euros rather than Swiss francs. Nonetheless, at the counter, he orders a slice of pie and asks: “So — are we in Switzerland or in Italy?”

It is a question worth asking as it has been the subject of diplomatic negotiations that started in 2018 and concluded with a compromise last year — but the details remain secret.

– Sleeping on the Swiss side –

When the refuge was built on a rocky outcrop in 1984, its 40 beds and long wooden tables were entirely in Italian territory.

But now two-thirds of the lodge, including most of the beds and the restaurant, is technically perched in southern Switzerland.

The issue has come to the fore because the area, which relies on tourism, is located at the top of one of the world’s largest ski resorts, with a major new development including a cable car station being constructed a few metres away.

An agreement was hammered out in Florence in November 2021 but the outcome will only be revealed once it is rubber-stamped by the Swiss government — which will not happen before 2023.

“We agreed to split the difference,” Alain Wicht, chief border official at Switzerland’s national mapping agency Swisstopo told AFP.

His job includes looking after the 7,000 boundary markers along landlocked Switzerland’s 1,935-kilometre border with Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Liechtenstein.

Wicht attended the negotiations, where both parties made concessions to find a solution. “Even if neither side came out winners, at least nobody lost”, he said.

– Line in the snow –

Where the Italian-Swiss border traverses Alpine glaciers, the frontier follows the watershed line.

But the Theodul Glacier lost almost a quarter of its mass between 1973 and 2010. That exposed the rock underneath to the ice, altering the drainage divide and forcing the two neighbours to redraw around a 100-metre-long stretch of their border.

Wicht said that such adjustments were frequent and generally settled by comparing readings by surveyors from the border countries, without getting politicians involved.

“We are squabbling over territory that isn’t worth much,” he said. But he added that this “is the only place where we suddenly had a building involved”, giving “economic value” to the land.

His Italian counterparts declined to comment “due to the complex international situation”.

Former Swisstopo chief Jean-Philippe Amstein said such disputes are typically resolved by exchanging parcels of land of equivalent surface area and value.

In this case, “Switzerland is not interested in obtaining a piece of glacier,” he explained, and “the Italians are unable to compensate for the loss of Swiss surface area”.

– Wine stays Italian –

While the outcome remains secret, the refuge’s caretaker, 51-year-old Lucio Trucco, has been told it will stay on Italian soil.

“The refuge remains Italian because we have always been Italian,” he said.

“The menu is Italian, the wine is Italian, and the taxes are Italian.”

The years of negotiation have delayed the refuge’s renovation — the villages either side of the border have not been able to issue a building permit.

The works will therefore not be completed in time for the scheduled opening of a new cable car up the Italian side of the Klein Matterhorn mountain in late 2023.

The slopes are only accessible from the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt.

While some mid-altitude resorts are preparing for the end of Alpine skiing due to global warming, skiing is possible throughout the summer on the Zermatt-Cervinia slopes, even if such activities contribute to the glacier’s retreat.

“That’s why we have to enhance the area here because it will surely be the last one to die,” said Trucco.

For now, on Swisstopo’s maps, the solid pink band of the Swiss border remains a dashed line as it passes the refuge.