World

Firefighters raced Tuesday to contain a massive blaze devastating a national park in the Brazilian capital, which is suffering from a heat wave and more than four months of drought.

The fire, which hit the park Monday, has burned through around 2,000 hectares (nearly 5,000 acres) of the 42,000 hectare reserve in Brasilia, according to the national parks service, ICMBio.

Forty firefighters from ICMBio and the Brasilia fire department managed to control one of the fire’s two fronts Monday night.

The blaze is concentrated in an area around 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the presidential offices, the Planalto Palace.

“Severe conditions,” including temperatures of more than 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and critically low humidity of around 30 percent, have exacerbated the already flammable situation left by the drought, ICMBio said.

The Brazilian capital has not had rain in 122 days.

Officials said they did not yet know what caused the fire.

Brasilia National Park was established in 1961, the year after the ultra-modernist capital was inaugurated in Brazil’s central-west — a region with a prolonged dry season that typically runs from May to September.

The Brasilia blaze comes as officials report an alarming surge in fires in the Brazilian Amazon.

Last month was the worst August in 12 years, with 33,116 fires detected in Brazil’s share of the world’s biggest rainforest, according to satellite monitoring by the national space agency, INPE.

President Jair Bolsonaro, who is up for reelection in October, has faced international outcry over a surge of fires and destruction in the Amazon, whose billions of carbon-absorbing trees are a key buffer against global warming.

A stellar nursery nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula has been captured in crisp detail by NASA’s Webb telescope, revealing hitherto unseen features that deepen scientific understanding, the agency said Tuesday.

Officially known as 30 Doradus, the region of space is characterized by its dusty filaments that resemble the legs of a hairy spider, and has long been a favorite for astronomers interested in star formation.

Thousands of young stars, distant background galaxies, and the detailed structure of the nebula’s gas and dust structures were viewable for the first time thanks to Webb’s high resolution infrared instruments.

Webb operates primarily in the infrared spectrum, because light from objects in the distant cosmos has been stretched into this wavelength over the course of the universe’s expansion.

The telescope’s primary imager, Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), found the cavity in the center of the nebula was hollowed out by radiation carried on stellar winds emanating from a cluster of massive young stars, which appear as pale blue dots.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), which analyzes light patterns to determine the composition of objects, caught one young star in the act of shedding a cloud of dust from around itself. 

The same star was previously thought to be at a later stage of formation, already well on the way to clearing its dusty bubble.

The region was also imaged using the Mid-infrared Instrument (MIRI), which uses longer wavelengths of infrared to pierce through dust grains that absorb or scatter shorter wavelengths. 

This faded the hot stars and clarified the cooler regions, revealing never-before-seen points of light within the stellar nursery, which indicate protostars that are still gaining mass.

Astronomic interest in the Tarantula Nebula stems from its similar chemical composition to gigantic star-forming regions observed a few billion years after the Big Bang, a period called the “cosmic noon” when star formation peaked.

At just 161,000 light-years away, Tarantula is a readily viewable example of this flourishing period of cosmic creation. 

Webb should also provide scientists the opportunity to gaze at distant galaxies from the actual era of cosmic noon, and compare it to observations of Tarantula, to understand similarities and differences.

Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, with astronomers confident it will herald a new era of discovery.

More frequent and intense heatwaves and wildfires driven by climate change are expected to worsen the quality of the air we breathe, harming human health and ecosystems, the UN warned Wednesday.

A new report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) cautioned that the interaction between pollution and climate change would impact hundreds of millions of people over the coming century, and urged action to rein in the harm.

The WMO’s annual Air Quality and Climate Bulletin examined the impacts of large wildfires across Siberia and western North America in 2021, finding that they produced widespread increases in health hazards, with concentrations in eastern Siberia reaching “levels not observed before”.

Tiny particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5) are considered particularly harmful since they can penetrate deep into the lungs or cardiovascular system.

“As the globe warms, wildfires and associated air pollution are expected to increase, even under a low emissions scenario,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

“In addition to human health impacts, this will also affect ecosystems as air pollutants settle from the atmosphere to Earth’s surface.”

– ‘Foretaste of the future’ –

At the global scale, there has been a reduction over the past two decades in the total burned area, as a result of decreasing numbers of fires in savannas and grasslands.

But WMO said that some regions like western North America, the Amazon and Australia were seeing far more fires.

Even beyond wildfires, a hotter climate can drive up pollution and worsen air quality.

Taalas pointed out that severe heatwaves in Europe and China this year, coupled with stable high atmospheric conditions, sunlight and low wind speeds, had been “conducive to high pollution levels,” warning that “this is a foretaste of the future.”

“We expect a further increase in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves, which could lead to even worse air quality,” he said.

This phenomenon is known as the “climate penalty”, which refers to how climate change amplifies ground-level ozone production, which negatively impacts air quality. 

In the stratosphere, ozone provides important protection from cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, but closer to the ground it is very hazardous for human health.

If emission levels remain high, this climate penalty is expected to account for “a fifth of all surface ozone concentration increase,” WMO scientific officer Lorenzo Labrador told reporters.

He warned that most of that increase will happen over Asia, “and there you have about one quarter of the entire world population.”

The WMO called for action, stressing that “a worldwide carbon neutrality emissions scenario would limit the future occurrence of extreme ozone air pollution episodes.”

The report points out that air quality and climate are interconnected, since chemicals that worsen air quality are normally co-emitted with greenhouse gases.

“Changes in one inevitably cause changes in the other,” it said.

Foreign governments are spending more than 30 times more on fossil fuel projects in Africa than on initiatives to lessen the impacts of the continent’s second-biggest killer, air pollution, research showed Wednesday.

The report, released on the International Day of Clean Air, showed how little donor nations spend on improving air quality while ploughing money into dirty energy and infrastructure projects across Africa. 

The United Nations estimates that air pollution kills around nine million people globally each year, with fossil fuels accounting for two-thirds of the levels of harmful particulates humans are exposed to. 

The financial benefits of improving air quality alone would far exceed the costs of slashing emissions to meet the Paris Agreement temperature goals, according to a landmark United Nations climate science assessment this year. 

Yet, as Wednesday’s analysis by the Clean Air Fund shows, US, European and Asian governments are still going ahead with fossil fuel-based development projects that will likely worsen already poor air quality in cities and along highways across Africa.

The fund found that just 0.3 percent of African countries’ development assistance received between 2015-2021 had been specifically earmarked for air quality projects, despite pollution being responsible for some one in five deaths continent-wide. 

During the same period, donor nations provided 36 times more funding for prolonging fossil fuel use in Africa. 

“That difference alone is extremely startling,” Dennis Appiah, head of the fund’s Ghana office and a co-author of the report. 

“I think it’s also highlighted that most often governments are not paying attention to the issue of air pollution,” he told AFP. 

“Either they are not conscious of the impact of it, or they do not see it as a problem.” 

Appiah called air pollution a “silent killer” as its effects are far harder to see and message to communities compared with other climate-linked phenomena such as flooding.

– ‘Death sentence’ –

An ongoing population boom means Africa will be — on current birth rates — home to some 2.5 billion people by 2050, with the UN estimating that 26 countries will double their populations by then. 

The vast majority of population growth will occur in urban areas, with much of the infrastructure needed to support increases yet to be built.

The continent is virtually blameless for climate change yet continues to be a hotspot for extreme events linked to global heating. 

Appiah said that while Africa’s development needs were huge, governments needed to prioritise sustainable ways of electrifying and connecting communities. 

“Policymakers are stuck in going through the same traditional chain for development that we see in the West, and also in some of the Asian countries that are now suffering the consequences of some of those decisions,” he said. 

“I think Africa is positioned to take advantage of some of the technology which exists. We don’t have to go through the same process (as developed countries), we can leapfrog to new technologies.”

With renewable energy such as wind and solar already frequently cheaper than oil and fossil gas per kilowatt hour, the hope is that African governments can factor in the economic benefits of avoiding air pollution into their development plans.

In a preface to Wednesday’s report, Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate said that policies featuring new fossil fuel infrastructure in Africa were “a death sentence for people in communities like mine”.

“It’s time for governments to hear the voices of people all around the world who are calling for leaders to clean up our air and protect our health,” she said.

Ducks contaminated by mercury pollution are significantly more likely to get bird flu, a study found Wednesday, pointing towards another way that human-driven changes to the natural world increase the risk of viruses spreading.

Bird flu rarely infects humans but persistent outbreaks in the US and UK among other countries have led to millions of poultry being culled so far this year.

Wild waterfowl such as ducks are believed to be superspreaders of the virus in part because they travel so far as they migrate, potentially infecting other birds along the way.

For the new study, scientists shot down nearly 750 wild ducks from 11 different species in California’s San Francisco Bay, which is in a migratory path that stretches from Alaska to Patagonia.

They then tested the ducks for mercury contamination and whether they were infected with bird flu — or had antibodies for the virus in their system. 

The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that ducks contaminated with mercury were up to 3.5 times more likely to have had bird flu at some point over the last year or so.

The study’s lead author, Claire Teitelbaum, a quantitative ecologist at the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center, said mercury contamination “can suppress the immune system, and that might make infection with anything — including influenza — more likely”.

The San Francisco Bay is also a “significant hotspot for mercury contamination in North America… largely from historical gold mining, where mercury was part of that process,” she told AFP.

The ducks however tested negative to the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu strain that has been detected in many parts of the world.

– More bird flu likely –

Teitelbaum said that bird flu outbreaks in the United States had slowed down during the summer “because many of the wild birds are up on their breeding grounds” farther north. 

But “as they’re starting to come back down, we’re probably going to see a lot more activity”, she warned.

The spread comes as researchers increasingly sound the alarm that climate change, deforestation, livestock farming and other human-induced factors raise the likelihood of viruses crossing over from animals to humans.

Teitelbaum said that “there are just so many ways in which humans have historically altered and are continuing to alter the natural environment.”

How pollution and contamination affect the risk of diseases spreading is “just another link that we need to add in to our more holistic view of what’s going on in the world,” she said.

Daniel Becker, a biologist at the University of Oklahoma not involved in the research, hailed the “impressive” study.

“There is surprisingly little work looking at contaminant concentrations in wildlife and their relationship to infectious disease,” especially for viruses that can cross over to humans like bird flu, he said.