AFP

Europe counted the cost of a record heatwave on Wednesday as French firefighters brought twin blazes near Bordeaux under control and climate change protesters pointed to the sizzling weather as a wake up call for the continent. 

Temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) over previous days have spelled misery for millions and shattered heat records, focusing attention on the impact of global warming.

Cooler air swept in Wednesday, bringing relief to people from Portugal to Britain, but thousands of firefighters continued to tackle mass fires that have broken out in multiple countries in recent days after months of drought-like conditions.

“Our assessment is generally positive. The situation improved overnight,” French fire service spokesman Arnaud Mendousse told AFP from the southwestern Gironde region where two huge blazes have engulfed 20,600 hectares (50,900 acres) of tinder-dry forest since last week.

The infernos had barely expanded overnight, with lower temperatures and the construction of a 300-metre wide fire break helping stem the spread of the flames.

President Emmanuel Macron was set to visit later on Wednesday to speak to emergency services members and some of the 37,000 people who have been evacuated in the popular Atlantic Ocean region that is teaming with tourists in the summer months.

Two firefighters were severely injured overnight, government spokesman Olivier Veran told reporters.

Separate blazes in the Monts d’Arree area of northwestern Brittany continued to rage on Wednesday, with aircraft dropping water from above.

Greek planes and helicopters were also in action against a wildfire that has forced hundreds of people to flee mountainside suburbs north of Athens. 

Greece had been spared the scorching heatwave experienced in western Europe, but the flames fanned by high winds were threatening the suburbs of Penteli, Pallini, Anthousa and Gerakas, home to tens of thousands of people.

“The civil protection authority was late in alerting us,” a Pallini resident who lost his car and shed to the flames told ERT television. “The fire was scorching our backs, we left in the nick of time. Had we stayed another 30 seconds it would have burned us.” 

Firefighters have also been pressed into action in Portugal, Spain and Italy in recent weeks to tackle wild fires. 

– Heat records –

The heatwave saw a host of local records set in France and a new all-time record for Britain where the national weather service clocked 40.3C in eastern England, surpassing the previous high set in 2019.

Grassland fires erupted on Tuesday on the edge of London, with one forcing the evacuation of 14 people as farm buildings, houses and garages were consumed by the flames.

Sixteen firefighters were injured around the capital with two taken to hospital, the London Fire Brigade said.

“Yesterday was the busiest day for the fire service in London since the Second World War,” the city’s mayor Sadiq Khan told Sky News on Wednesday, urging the public to remain vigilant despite temperatures now falling.

Khan also accused Conservative leadership candidates vying to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson of ignoring “the elephant in the room” of climate change.

Climate demonstrators triggered a lengthy tailback on Britain’s busiest motorway encircling London on Wednesday as they sought to highlight the need for greater action to reduce greenhouse gases which are responsible for global heating.

Members of the group Just Stop Oil climbed gantries over the M25 arterial motorway, causing police to intervene and vehicles to back up for several miles (kilometres) in one direction.

“This is the moment when climate inaction is truly revealed in all its murderous glory for everyone to see: as an elite-driven death project that will extinguish all life if we let it,” the activist group said in a statement.

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Climate-change deniers have a viral way of spreading misinformation on social media during a heatwave: by publishing weather maps out of context to imply forecasters are exaggerating global heating.

During the two recent heatwaves in Europe, users in various countries and languages misleadingly juxtaposed weather maps, suggesting the colours had been changed to red by media or authorities seeking to create panic. 

AFP Fact Check has debunked several versions of the claim, which have surfaced in languages including English, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian and Polish.

“LEFT – Old school weather forecast. Happy and sunshiny. Right – New style weather forecast. Designed to look like fear and destruction. It’s called summer,” read a text with one pair of UK weather maps shared on Twitter during this week’s British heatwave.

The two side-by-side maps under the post showed hot weather over Britain. The left one was light green with sun symbols, the right-hand one dark red.

UK Met Office weatherman Aidan McGivern branded it a “ridiculous comparison,” in his own Twitter thread.

He said the colour scheme had been redesigned last year to make the contrasts more visible to those who were colour blind.

“The new temperature colour scale does go darker (red) when it gets hotter (especially >38.7 C, the UK record),” he said. “It also goes darker (blue) when it gets colder.”

He added that the right-hand image was from a “one-off” Met Office tweet dating from 2016 – not from the current heatwave.

– Coloured red? – 

One post shared in Spanish and Catalan during this week’s heatwave said: “Now they have to colour the map as if we were in hell itself.”

The two side-by-side maps under the post showed hot weather over Spain. One was white with sun symbols, the other dark red.

A digital investigation by AFP revealed they were two different types of map, from different sources – not, as the post claimed, from a single forecaster that had manipulated its colour scheme. 

In English and German, numerous similar claims circulated during hot weather in May and June.

One Facebook post showed side-by-side maps showed similar temperatures over Sweden. One was green and dated 1986, the other orange and dated 2022. 

A digital investigation revealed that the years on the maps were incorrect and they were from different news organisations that use different colour codes. 

Thousands of social media users shared the same image in French, claiming it was evidence of a “global warming scam.” 

Posts in Germany in June showed two maps from the news show Tagesschau, claiming it had changed their colour from green in 2009 to red in 2019 to hype the climate threat.

Tagesschau explained that the red map was a temperature forecast, and even in 2009 such maps had used red. The green one was a general weather forecast with different colour scheme and variables.

– Climate change is real –

Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels are heating the planet, raising the risk and severity of heatwaves and other extreme weather events.

With temperatures topping 40 C, the heatwave in Britain this week prompted comparisons with the summer of 1976, when the temperature peaked at 35.9 C.

“Of course there have been heatwaves in the past, but the big difference with 1976 is what the rest of the world looked like,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change.

“In ’76 there was a heatwave in (Britain), in 2022 there are heatwaves everywhere in the world and so there have been in 2021, ’20, ’19,” she told reporters on Monday.

Nostalgia for 1976 — sometimes accompanied by misleading map-sharing — irritated some users on social media. 

“Folk keep sharing the fake f**king image showing ‘WEATHER in my day’ bla bla bla,” wrote one user, identified as Talent Stockport, on July 17.

“Its misleading” (sic), the post continued. “Your spreading miss information which could actually put peoples lives in danger, and its the same type of people too. The people who are unable to process basic facts.” 

The fact-check investigations cited in this story can be found in different languages at factcheck.afp.com.

The invasion of a remote Russian village by dozens of ravenous polar bears three years ago captured headlines around the world, with images of groups of animals gorging on rubbish in an open garbage dump. 

Scientists and conservationists warned Wednesday that it was just one of a growing number of incidents showing the threat food waste poses to the at-risk animals. 

Polar bears are acutely threatened by climate change, with the Arctic region warming about three times faster than the global average, meaning there is less sea ice that the animals rely on to hunt for food.  

“We’ve been seeing this slow and steady increase in negative human polar bear interactions, fuelled largely by loss of sea ice pushing more bears onshore for longer periods and in more places,” said Geoff York, Senior Director of Conservation at Polar Bears International. 

In the new analysis, researchers looked at how discarded food, particularly in garbage dumps, is drawing polar bears towards human communities and into danger. 

“We know from the brown and black bear world in Europe and North America that dumps are a huge problem for bears. Human food is a huge problem for bears,” said York, who co-authored the report in the conservation journal Oryx. 

“It’s likely to get worse if it’s not addressed.”

– Eating plastic –

The report draws together a number of case studies in recent years and calls for greater awareness of the risks and better waste management in Arctic communities. 

These include isolated incidents where one or two bears approached villages or encampments — sometimes being shot after attacking local people — and much larger congregations. 

In Kaktovik, Alaska, the protected beach dumping site for the remnants of bowhead whales, which the Inupiat community has traditionally hunted, attracts as many as 90 polar bears from up to 160 kilometres (a hundred miles) each autumn.  

The authors said the dramatic scenes in the Russian village of Belushya Guba in 2019, where more than 50 bears were drawn to an open dump on a bad ice year, were an extreme example of what can happen when sites are left unsecured.

Polar bears have evolved to eat a high fat diet, so that the weight they put on in the spring when they hunt ice seal pups will last them much of the rest of the year. 

But with ice melting earlier in this crucial period, York said bears are now sometimes returning to shore without having put on enough weight and even those that do return well fed are staying on land for longer.  

In this case an accessible rubbish dump can present a “bonanza of calories”, he said, although dramatically less nourishing than their normal diet. 

“What they don’t know is they’re also ingesting plastics, they’re ingesting toxic materials that are also in the landfill,” said York. 

He added that there was also a disease risk from garbage like cat food as well as proximity to humans and other animals at the dumps. 

– Uncertain future –

York said communities in the Arctic region were faced with steep costs for dealing with household waste, because the frozen and rocky ground offers limited options for landfill. 

Dumping or low temperature burning are often used, but he said high temperature burning could be a better, if imperfect, approach. 

Meanwhile some communities have formed patrols to chase bears from landfill sites before they get a taste for human food. 

Other ideas the authors put forward include education around the issue, and the use of non-lethal deterrents like air horns and electric fences.   

Given the significant threat posed to polar bears by climate change, is it worth bothering about the risks from food waste? 

“I say yes, because every bear matters, especially as we’re starting to see declining populations,” he said. 

“We have solutions. So let’s do what we can while we can and make sure they have the best ride possible as they’re heading into this uncertain future.”

Greek planes and helicopters on Wednesday stepped up their battle against a wildfire raging for a second day that has forced hundreds of people to flee mountainside suburbs north of Athens.  

Nearly 500 firefighters, 120 vehicles, nine planes and 10 helicopters supported by army units sought to prevent the flames from causing further damage in the suburbs of Penteli, Pallini, Anthousa and Gerakas, home to tens of thousands of people.

Greece has been so far spared a scorching heatwave that saw deadly wildfires destroy vast tracts of land in France, Portugal and Spain, but has instead faced gale-force winds.

Experts blame climate change for extreme weather events and warn that worse is yet to come.

Thirty people, including three firefighters, required medical attention for burns and breathing difficulty, the Greek fire department said.

Several buildings have sustained varying degrees of damage, AFP images showed.

“The sky was red… we left without taking anything with us,” a Pallini resident who lost his car and shed to the flames told ERT television.

“The civil protection authority was late in alerting us. The fire was scorching our backs, we left in the nick of time. Had we stayed another 30 seconds it would have burned us,” he added.

The house next door was completely gutted, the man said.

– ‘Two active fronts’ –

Authorities warned residents to stay indoors and keep their windows shut. 

With winds racing at over 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour, smoke from the fire billowed as far as the island of Crete, hundreds of kilometres to the south, satellite imagery showed.

Residents say fires have struck the area three times in the last three decades.

Greek media reported that an 80-year-old man in Anthousa shot himself dead in despair over the fire, which broke out on Tuesday afternoon.

The wildfires around Mount Penteli north of Athens were fanned overnight by strong winds that constantly changed direction.

“There are two active fronts,” civil protection official Vassilis Kokkalis told Athens 98.4 radio. “The winds are so strong that the planes are prevented from making targeted water drops,” he added.

The fire was threatening businesses on a major Athens highway, he added.

“It’s a fire that will be a cause for concern for several days,” Kokkalis said.

Residents in several areas, a paediatric hospital and the national observatory at Athens were evacuated as a precautionary measure.

– ‘Insane’ –

The police said some 600 people had been moved to safety overnight.

“It was insane, we did not know where to flee,” an elderly resident of Anthousa told ERT.

“Embers were falling from the sky, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

Greece has set up a crisis cell and firefighters battled 117 wildfires in the country in the last 24 hours.

Another 87 firefighters were battling a blaze in the Peloponnese, a southern peninsula.

Athens has asked European countries to send firefighters. A squad from Romania was assisting in Wednesday’s fire.

A heatwave and wildfires last year destroyed 103,000 hectares (255,000 acres) and claimed three lives in Greece.

The country’s worst fire disaster in 2018 in the coastal suburb of Mati, claiming 102 lives, was just a few kilometres from the area affected by Wednesday’s blaze.

Firefighters battling twin fires in southwest France said Wednesday the blazes were being brought under control thanks to improved weather conditions, but had not been stopped completely. 

“Our assessment is generally positive. The situation improved overnight,” local fire service spokesman Arnaud Mendousse said, saying that only 300 more hectares (740 acres) had burned since Tuesday evening. 

French President Emmanuel Macron is due to visit the fire-hit Gironde region where a total of 20,600 hectares (50,900 acres) of forest have gone up in flames since last week and 37,000 people have been evacuated.

Temperatures have dropped from above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday to the mid-20s on Wednesday.

“We’ve been able to really work on our defences against the fire,” local government official Fabienne Buccio told reporters Tuesday evening. “We managed to improve, advance and create significant fire breaks.”

“Cooler weather” had helped, she said, though the area was not expecting significant rainfall that would help extinguish the flames.

The pine forests along the Atlantic coast were bone-dry after months of drought-like conditions that have affected the entire country.

The biggest blaze is in a thinly populated area south of Bordeaux near the village of Landiras, which is being treated by police as suspected arson.

A 39-year-old local man arrested on Monday was released overnight after investigators concluded “the evidence and statements collected exonerated him.”

He had been arrested but not charged in 2014 over a separate forest fire, the local prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

A second blaze has ripped through a popular ocean-front tourist area behind the Dune du Pilat, Europe’s biggest sand dune, near the Bay of Arcachon.

It is thought to have been caused by a van that caught fire last week.

Macron is expected to meet members of the emergency services, local officials and volunteers as he tours the area Wednesday alongside Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.

India and Namibia signed a deal Wednesday to bring cheetahs into the South Asian country, with the first batch of eight wild cats set to arrive next month, officials said.

India has been working to relocate the animals since 2020, when the Supreme Court announced that African cheetahs could be introduced in a “carefully chosen location” on an experimental basis.

India in the past had Asiatic cheetahs, but the species was officially declared extinct within the country by 1952.

The deal inked Wednesday will see Namibia’s African cheetahs flown in next month to a wildlife sanctuary in the central state of Madhya Pradesh for captive breeding — a move expected to coincide with India’s 75th Independence Day celebrations. 

“Completing 75 glorious years of Independence with restoring the fastest terrestrial flagship species, the cheetah, in India, will rekindle the ecological dynamics of the landscape,” India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav tweeted.

“Cheetah reintroduction would also greatly enhance local community livelihoods through eco-tourism prospects in the long term.”

Signed in New Delhi with Namibia’s deputy prime minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, the deal will also see the two countries collaborate in areas of climate change, waste and wildlife management. 

The Kuno-Palpur National Park in Madhya Pradesh state was selected as the new home for the cheetahs because of its abundant prey base and grasslands which were found suitable for the felines.

“The main goal of cheetah reintroduction project is to establish viable cheetah metapopulation in India that allows the cheetah to perform its functional role as a top predator,” the environment ministry said in a statement.

The cheetah is the only large carnivore believed to have gone extinct in India, primarily due to hunting for its distinctive, spotted pelts and habitat loss.

Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo is widely believed to have killed the last three recorded cheetahs in India in the late 1940s. 

India is also planning to ship in some cheetahs from South Africa but a formal pact has yet to be signed.

Considered vulnerable under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the cheetah has a declining population of less than 7,000 — found primarily in African savannas.

Hundreds of people were evacuated early Wednesday as firefighters deployed planes and helicopters to fight a surging wildfire in mountainside suburbs north of Athens for a second day.

Nearly 500 firefighters, 120 vehicles, three planes and four helicopters swung into action from dawn to battle the flames from spreading to the suburbs of Penteli, Pallini, Anthousa and Gerakas, which is home to some 29,000 people.

No injuries were immediately reported but at least 10 homes are believed to have sustained varying degrees of damage, state TV ERT said.

“The sky was red…we left without taking anything with us,” a Pallini resident who lost his car and shed to the flames told ERT. 

The house next door was completely gutted.

“The civil protection authority was late in alerting us. The fire was scorching our backs, we left in the nick of time. Had we stayed another 30 seconds it would have burned us,” he said.

Greek media reported that an 80-year-old man in Anthousa had fatally shot himself in despair over the fire, which broke out on Tuesday afternoon.

Greece has so far been spared the scorching temperatures that have contributed to deadly wildfires in France, Portugal and Spain, destroying vast tracts of land, but has faced gale-force winds this week.

The wildfires on the foot of Mount Penteli north of Athens were fanned overnight by strong winds that constantly changed direction.

“There are two active fronts…the winds are so strong that the planes are prevented from making targeted water drops,” senior civil protection official Vassilis Kokkalis told Athens 98.4 radio.

He added that the fire was threatening businesses on a major Athens highway.

“It’s a fire that will be a cause for concern for several days because of rekindlings,” Kokkalis said.

Residents in several areas, a paediatric hospital and the national observatory at Athens were evacuated as a precautionary measure.

The police said some 600 people had been moved to safety overnight.

“It was insane, we did not know where to flee,” an elderly resident of Anthousa told ERT.

“Embers were falling from the sky, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

Traffic was suspended on parts of a ring road around Athens, the company that manages it said on Twitter.

Greece has set up a crisis cell and firefighters battled 117 wildfires in the country in the last 24 hours.

Another 87 firefighters were battling a blaze in the Peloponnese, a southern peninsula.

Athens has asked European countries to send firefighters. A heatwave and wildfires last year destroyed 103,000 hectares (255,000 acres) and claimed three lives.