World

Firefighters struggled Friday to contain a giant blaze that has been burning for more than a month in New Mexico, raising fears for the summer ahead in the drought-hit western United States.

The so-called “Hermits Peak Fire” has torn through 168,000 acres at the southern end of the Rocky Mountains, destroying around 170 properties and forcing the evacuation of nearly 16,000 homes.

But the blaze remains just 20 percent contained.

“This is a historic fire weather event… this is a critical stage of the fire,” New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a briefing Friday.

“We have high temperatures and extreme wind. This is the worst possible set of conditions for any fire,” she warned. 

The fire began on April 6 when a “prescribed” burn, intended to remove excess vegetation in a controlled area, escaped control due to strong winds and dry conditions.

The blaze comes at the start of the American West’s long fire season but is already the second-largest in New Mexico’s history, having burned an area more than the state’s average for an entire year.

The National Weather Service in Albuquerque warned that windy and dry conditions are expected through the weekend and “will make our bad situation worse.”

US President Joe Biden this week declared a major disaster in New Mexico, unlocking federal resources including financial aid for affected individuals.

Like much of the American West, New Mexico is in the grip of a years-long drought that has left the area parched and vulnerable to wildfire.

Reservoirs have plummeted to dangerously low levels, with Lake Mead — the country’s largest reservoir, close to Las Vegas — at 31 percent.

The water has dropped to such a historic extent that a corroded barrel containing a four-decade-old body was found in the lake earlier this week.

Lake Mead is fed by the Colorado River, which has seen its flow drop by 20 percent over the past century, driven by atmospheric warming, according to a US Geological Survey report in 2020.

Although fires are a natural part of the climate cycle and help to clear dead brush, their scale and intensity are increasing.

Scientists say a warming climate, chiefly caused by human activities such as the unchecked burning of fossil fuels, is altering weather patterns.

This prolongs droughts in some areas and provokes unseasonably large storms in other places.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon last month shattered the record for April, destroying more than 1,000 square kilometers of the world’s biggest rainforest, nearly double the previous high, according to official figures published Friday.

The record — the third in four months — is the latest damning statistic on the accelerating loss of the Amazon under President Jair Bolsonaro.

Satellite images show a total area of destroyed forest cover of 1,012.5 square kilometers (391 square miles) from April 1 to 29, with the last day of the month yet to be analyzed, according to the Deter monitoring system run by the national space agency, INPE.

The area, equivalent to some 140,000 football fields, is by far the biggest for April since record-keeping began in 2015.

Deforestation is usually slower in April, the rainy season in the Amazon. The previous record for the month was 580 square kilometers, set last year — also under Bolsonaro.

“This figure is extremely high for this period of the year,” Mariana Napolitano, science director at the World Wildlife Fund’s Brazil office, said in a statement.

“It’s an alert of the immense pressure the forest is under.”

Experts warn Brazil may have its fourth straight year of decade-high deforestation this year, after also setting monthly records in January and February.

Since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, average annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen more than 75 percent from the previous decade, to an area roughly the size of Qatar.

“The Bolsonaro administration is abetting deforestation and environmental crime, and what we harvest are these terrible, scary, revolting numbers,” Marcio Astrini, head of the Climate Observatory, a coalition of environmental groups, told AFP.

The far-right president, an ally of the powerful agribusiness industry blamed for driving the destruction, has faced international condemnation over the damage to the Amazon.

Last week, actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio urged young Brazilians to vote in  October elections in which Bolsonaro is up for re-election.

“Brazil is home to the Amazon and other ecosystems critical to climate change,” he tweeted.

“What happens there matters to us all and youth voting is key in driving change.”

“Thanks for your support, Leo!” Bolsonaro tweeted back sarcastically.

The devastating heatwave that gripped India and Pakistan over the last two months is unprecedented, but worse — perhaps far worse — is on the horizon as climate change continues apace, top climate scientists told AFP. 

Even without additional global warming South Asia is, statistically speaking, ripe for a “big one” in the same way that California is said to be overdue for a major earthquake, according to research published this week. 

Extreme heat across much of India and neighbouring Pakistan in March and April exposed more than a billion people to scorching temperatures well above 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). The hottest part of the year is yet to come.

“This heatwave is likely to kill thousands,” tweeted Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate science research non-profit.

The number of excess deaths, especially among the elderly poor, will only become apparent in hindsight.

Heatwave mortality in India has increased by more than 60 percent since 1980, according to the country’s Ministry of Earth Sciences. 

But “cascading impacts” on agricultural output, water, energy supplies and other sectors are already apparent, World Meteorological Organization chief Petteri Taalas said this week.  

Air quality has deteriorated, and large swathes of land are at risk of extreme fire danger.

Power blackouts last week as electricity demand hit record levels served as a warning of what might happen if temperatures were to climb even higher.  

For climate scientists, none of this came as a surprise.

“What I find unexpected is most people being shocked, given how long we have been warned about such disasters coming,” Camilo Mora, a professor at the University of Hawaii, told AFP.

“This region of the world, and most other tropical areas, are among the most vulnerable to heatwaves.”

– The new normal –

In a benchmark 2017 study, Mora calculated that nearly half the global population will be exposed to “deadly heat” 20 days or more each year by 2100, even if global warming is capped under two degrees Celsius, the cornerstone target of the Paris Agreement.

To what extent is climate change to blame for the scorched Earth temperatures just now easing up in India and Pakistan?

Scientists at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute led by Friederike Otto, a pioneer in the field of attribution science, are crunching the numbers.

“How much more likely and intense this particular heatwave has become is something we’re still working on,” she told AFP. 

“But there is no doubt that climate change is a huge game changer when it comes to extreme heat,” she added. “What we see right now will be normal, if not cool, in a 2C to 3C world.”

Earth’s surface, on average, is 1.1C above preindustrial levels. National carbon cutting pledges under the Paris Agreement, if fulfilled, would still see the world warm 2.8 degrees. 

In India and Pakistan, “more intense heat waves of longer durations and occurring at a higher frequency are projected,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a recent landmark report.

“Before human activities increased global temperatures, we would have seen the heat that hit India around once in 50 years,” said Marian Zachariah, a researcher at Imperial College London.

“But now we can expect such high temperatures about once ever four years.”

Continued global warming, in other words, guarantees greater heat extremes in the coming decades.

– Wet-bulb temperature –

But things may get worse even sooner, according to a new study in Science Advances.

A team led by Vikki Thompson of Bristol University ranked the world’s most severe heatwaves since 1960. Their benchmark, however, was not maximum temperatures, but how hot it got compared to what would be expected for the region.

Surprisingly, South Asia was nowhere near the top of the list.

“When defined in terms of deviation from the local norm, heatwaves in India and Pakistan to date have not been all that extreme,” Thompson explained in a commentary.

By that measure, the worst scorcher on record over the last six decades was in Southeast Asia in 1998.

“An equivalent outlier heatwave in India today would mean temperatures over 50C across large swathes of the country,” Thompson said.

“Statistically, a record-breaking heatwave is likely to occur in India at some point.”        

What makes extreme heat deadly is high temperatures combined with humidity, a steam-bath mix with its own yardstick: wet-bulb temperature (WB). 

When the body overheats, the heart ups the tempo and sends blood to the skin where sweating cools it down. But above a threshold of heat-plus-humidity this natural cooling system shuts down. 

“Think of it as a sunburn but inside your body,” said Mora.

A wet-bulb temperature of 35C WB will kill a healthy young adult within six hours. Last week, the central Indian city of Nagpur briefly registered 32.2 WB.

“The rise in heatwaves, floods, cyclones and droughts that we have seen in this region so far are in response to just one degree Celsius,” Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told AFP.

“It is difficult for me to even imagine the impacts when the increase in global temperatures are doubled.”