World

Whether they realised it or not, some 7.6 billion people — 96 percent of humanity — felt global warming’s impact on temperatures over the last 12 months, researchers have said.

But some regions felt it far more sharply and frequently than others, according to a report based on peer-reviewed methods from Climate Central, a climate science think tank.

People in tropical regions and on small islands surrounded by heat-absorbing oceans were disproportionately impacted by human-induced temperature increases to which they barely contributed.

Among the 1,021 cities analysed between September 2021 and October 2022, the capitals of Samoa and Palau in the South Pacific have been experiencing the most discernible climate fingerprints, the researchers said in the report, released on Thursday.

Spiking temperatures in these locations were commonly four to five times more likely to occur than in a hypothetical world in which global warming had never happened. 

Lagos, Mexico City and Singapore were among the most highly exposed major cities, with human-induced heat increasing health risks to millions.

Researchers at Climate Central, led by chief scientist Ben Strauss, looked for a way to bridge the gap between planetary-scale global warming — usually expressed as Earth’s average surface temperature compared to an earlier reference period — to people’s day-to-day experience.

“Diagnosing climate fingerprints lets people know that their experiences are symptoms of climate change,” Strauss told AFP. “It represents a signal and shows we must adapt.”

Using seven decades of high-resolution daily temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and two dozen climate models, Strauss and his team created a tool — the Climate Shift Index. 

The tool calculates the likelihood that unusually warm weather at a specific location on any given day is due to climate change.

In 26 cities, for example, at least 250 of the 365 days from October 2021 saw temperature increases that were at least three times more likely due to climate change.

– ‘Unfair and tragic’ –

Most of these cities were in east Africa, Mexico, Brazil, small island states, and the Malay Archipelago — a string of some 25,000 islands belonging to Indonesia and the Philippines. 

“The effect of warming is much more noticeable in the equatorial belt because there has been historically less temperature variability there,” Strauss told AFP. 

This is why even a relatively modest rise in local temperatures brought on by global warming registers so clearly on the index, he explained. 

“Island temperatures are strongly shaped by the temperature of the ocean around them,” said Strauss, who has also mapped the projected impacts of sea level rise on coastal areas worldwide. 

“To see that small island states have essentially already lost their historical climates — even as they face losing their land from rising seas — feels very unfair and tragic.”

The urgent need for money to help vulnerable tropical nations adapt to climate impacts will be squarely on the table when nearly 200 countries meet in 10 days for United Nations climate talks in Egypt. 

Rich nations have yet to honour a decade-old pledge to ramp up climate financing for developing nations to $100 billion per year, even though the UN’s climate advisory panel, the IPCC, estimates that annual adaptation costs could hit one trillion dollars by 2050 if warming continues apace.

The map-based climate shift index tool can be found here: https://csi.climatecentral.org/csi-contour-map/tavg/2022-10-27/

The UK government was on Friday expected to call the second election in a year in Northern Ireland after politicians failed to resolve a standoff over post-Brexit trade rules.

A deadline to resume power-sharing in Northern Ireland’s regional government passed at midnight on Friday.

British environment minister Therese Coffey said that meant an election would now “definitely happen”.

Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the pro-UK Democratic Unionist Party, defended his party’s blocking of the restoration of power-sharing as part of its protest against the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol governing post-Brexit trade rules.

He said his party could not “nominate ministers to an executive that is required to impose a protocol that harms our economy, harms our people and prevents us getting access to medicines and other vital supplies from the rest of the United Kingdom”.

He said he stood “ready to form an executive as soon as that solution is found” but that they had been waiting for nearly three years and “we need a solution”.

The expiration of the legal cut-off point for the creation of a joint executive between pro-Ireland nationalists and pro-UK unionists came after parties made a last-ditch attempt to restart Northern Ireland’s devolved assembly. 

In an argumentative Thursday session, lawmakers briefly reconvened for the first time in months for a special sitting but failed to elect a speaker needed to form a new executive.

The DUP has boycotted the assembly since February, calling for the protocol to be overhauled or scrapped entirely.

Donaldson told reporters Thursday the party would not vote for a new speaker because insufficient action had been taken to address their demands since they collapsed the executive.

“We need to remove the rubble of the protocol that has undermined our economy, that has inhibited our ability to trade within our own country,” he said ahead of the failed vote.

– ‘Perpetual standoff’ –

New British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had implored the parties to “get back to Stormont”, arguing that people there “deserve a fully functioning and locally elected executive”, his official spokesman said.

Chris Heaton-Harris, Britain’s Northern Ireland minister and an arch-Eurosceptic, has said repeatedly that if the deadline expired he would not hesitate to call an election on Friday, with December 15 the expected date for the new poll.

Northern Ireland has now been without a functioning government for nine months, with pro-Irish party Sinn Fein winning a historic first election in May which is seen as further complicating the political situation.

Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill — who was set to become first minister if the executive was restarted — condemned the DUP’s “perpetual standoff with the public, the majority of whom they do not speak for or indeed represent”.

– Delicate balance of peace –

The DUP insists the protocol — agreed by London and Brussels as part of Britain’s 2019 Brexit deal — must be addressed first.

It claims the pact, which effectively keeps Northern Ireland in the European Union’s single market and customs union, weakens the province’s place within the United Kingdom.

Many unionists also argue it is threatening the delicate balance of peace between the pro-Irish nationalist community and those in favour of continued union with Britain.

The protocol was agreed to avoid the return of a hard land border with the Republic of Ireland, which remains an EU member.

Eliminating that hard border was a key strand of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended three decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

Britain’s Conservative government, which has had three prime ministers in two months, has urged Brussels to agree to wholesale revisions of the protocol.

London is also in the midst of passing contentious legislation to override it unilaterally.

That has sparked fears of a trade war and worsening relations with Europe when the economic landscape is already gloomy.

French consumer prices rose at their fastest pace since 1985 in October, official data showed Friday, driven by rising energy, food and manufactured goods prices.

Year-on-year price growth hit 6.2 percent this month, statistics authority Insee said based on preliminary data, a new increase in inflation after it slowed in August and September.

Food especially grew more expensive, at almost 12 percent, in a blow to the least well-off households who spend a larger share of their monthly budget at supermarkets.

Meanwhile energy prices added almost 20 percent, despite government interventions to limit bills for consumers that have kept overall inflation below levels seen in EU neighbours.

Russia’s war on Ukraine and the throttling of gas supplies to Europe has triggered an energy crisis on the continent — at the same moment when many of France’s vital nuclear power plants are offline for maintenance.

French inflation reached 7.1 percent year-on-year when measured using the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) yardstick preferred by the European Central Bank.

The Frankfurt-based ECB on Thursday announced a fresh bumper interest rate hike of 0.75 percent as it strives to bring price growth across the 19-nation eurozone under control.

“We will have further rate increases in the future,” central bank chief Christine Lagarde said. “There is still ground to cover.”

Insee will publish its final October inflation reading in mid-November.

Landslides and flooding killed 31 people as heavy rain from an approaching storm lashed the southern Philippines, a disaster official said Friday.

The storm unleashed flash floods carrying uprooted trees, rocks and mud overnight in mainly rural communities around Cotabato, a city of 300,000 people on Mindanao island.

Many residents were caught by surprise by the rapidly rising floodwaters, Naguib Sinarimbo, the spokesman and civil defence chief for the regional government, told AFP.

“The water started entering the houses before dawn,” Sinarimbo said, confirming that the death toll in the storm-hit areas had risen to 31 from the earlier tally of 13.

Rescuers retrieved 16 bodies from Datu Odin Sinsuat, 10 from Datu Blah Sinsuat and five from Upi town, he told reporters.

Teams in rubber boats had to rescue some residents from rooftops, Sinarimbo added.

Local filmmaker Remar Pablo told AFP he was shooting a beauty pageant in the town of Upi when the floodwaters suddenly came in after midnight and forced audience members to flee for safety.

A row of cars sat half-submerged on the street outside, his clips showed.

“We were stranded inside,” said Pablo, who eventually waded into the water to get home.

Rescuers carried a baby in a plastic tub as they waded through chest-deep water, a photo posted by the provincial police showed.

– ‘It was a shock’ –

Floodwaters have receded in several areas, but Cotabato City remained almost entirely waterlogged.

Sinarimbo said there could be more flooding on Friday because of heavy rain.

“Our focus at this time is rescue as well as setting up community kitchens for the survivors,” he said.

The army deployed its trucks to collect stranded residents in Cotabato and eight nearby towns, provincial civil defence chief Nasrullah Imam said.

“It was a shock to see municipalities which had never flooded getting hit this time,” Imam said, adding that some families were swept away when the waters hit their homes.

The heavy rainfall began late Thursday in the impoverished region, which is under Muslim self-rule after decades of separatist armed rebellion.

The state weather office in Manila said it was partly caused by Tropical Storm Nalgae, which it expects to strengthen at landfall.

Nalgae was now heading toward the northern or central sections of the Philippines, with the state weather service saying it was not ruling out a landfall on Samar island later Friday, much earlier than earlier forecast.

Nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from flood- and landslide-prone communities in these areas, the civil defence office said.

The coast guard also suspended ferry services in much of the archipelago nation where tens of thousands of people board boats each day.

An average of 20 typhoons and storms strike the Philippines each year, killing people and livestock and destroying farms, houses, roads and bridges, although the south is rarely hit.

Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

Like many around the world, Iceland’s prime minister delved into her hobby during the pandemic. Now, the crime novel she co-wrote with one of Iceland’s most popular authors has just been published.

“Obviously, this is not something that I thought I would have any time to do”, 46-year-old Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir told AFP at an event this week for the book’s launch.

But it was “quite liberating to be working on this project during Covid”, she said. “I don’t have any other interests, this is my interest”, she added with a laugh.

Entitled “Reykjavik”, the thriller is written with Ragnar Jonasson, bestselling author of the “Dark Iceland” series, and is set in 1986, an important year in Iceland’s modern history.

The idea that a head of government would have enough spare time to write a novel may sound absurd in most countries, but not in Iceland.

The nation of 375,000 people has a strong tradition of reading and writing literature, with one in 10 Icelanders publishing a book in their lifetime, according to statistics.

And it’s not a first for a serving prime minister either: Jakobsdottir’s predecessor David Oddsson published a novel in 1997 while he was in office.

– A ‘therapeutic genre’ –

“I think every politician needs to have something to take his or her mind from the daily business of politics”, Jakobsdottir said.

She holds a Master of Arts from the University of Iceland in Icelandic literature. Her final thesis was on the work of popular Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason.

“I have been reading crime fiction all my life, so it is kind of in my DNA”, she said. “I read fiction every day.”

Crime fiction in particular was “a little bit like psychotherapy”, she added. 

“It’s really about solving crimes and finding justice, so it’s a very therapeutic genre for me”.

The idea for Jakobsdottir and Jonasson to write a book together came about in January 2020 over lunch.

“I was a bit surprised at first that she agreed to this suggestion because she is very busy”, said Jonasson.

The two are old friends, and had served together on a jury 10 years ago to select the best crime novel translated in Iceland.

It took them two years to write their book, with Jakobsdottir’s busy agenda often setting the pace.

“We had to schedule calls and plan meetings in between when she was meeting (former British prime minister) Boris Johnson one day and (French President Emmanuel) Macron the other”, recalled Jonasson.

“It was quite surreal for me to work in this environment”, said the 46-year-old who has sold three million books worldwide.

– ‘Reminiscent of Agatha Christie’ – 

Jonasson, who is used to writing alone and having total control, said the experience of collaborating with someone else was better than he had expected.

“It was refreshing to have someone else that you had to compromise with”, he said.

“Reykjavik” tells the story of a cold case involving a teenage girl who went missing 30 years ago in Videy, a small island near the Icelandic capital. Valur, a journalist at a local tabloid, dives into the case to pick up the trail.

The events unfold in 1986, as Reykjavik celebrates its 200th anniversary, launches its first commercial radio and television stations, and hosts a historic summit between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

“We thought all of these events together would create the best background for a story”, said Jonasson. He and Jakobsdottir did a lot of research to add details to the plot, such as popular music, TV shows and movies from the time.

Jakobsdottir expects critics to be tough on her.

“I think I can deal with that. I have experience as a politician, so it’s quite okay.” 

But Egill Helgason, who has hosted the book show “Kiljan” on public broadcaster RUV for 15 years, said he found the thriller “well written and well researched”.

“It’s a very pleasant read…,” he told AFP. “Somewhat reminiscent of Agatha Christie.

“This is a mystery, not a blood-dripping horror story.”

Published in Iceland on October 25, “Reykjavik” is set to be translated into several languages. It is due out in Britain and the US in August 2023, and in France, Jonasson’s biggest market, in the autumn of 2023.