MADRID, Spain (AFP) — A 17-year-old harvest worker has died from heat stroke in Spain, local authorities said, in the first known death related to the record heatwave currently raging in Spain and large parts of Europe. The youth suddenly felt dizzy and took a dip in a swimming pool but suffered convulsions when he got out and collapsed, the regional government of Andalusia in southern Spain said. He was rushed to the emergency ward […]
Tag: climate
Searing heat across Europe sparks scramble for shade
by Joseph Schmid PARIS, France (AFP) — Fans flew off store shelves and water fountains offered relief from the heat as temperatures soared in Europe on Monday, with officials urging vigilance ahead of even hotter conditions forecast later in the week. Meteorologists blamed a blast of torrid air from the Sahara for the unusually early summer heatwave, which could send thermometers up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) across large swathes of the continent with […]
Bloomberg pledges $500m to clean energy in ‘fight of our time’
NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — US billionaire Michael Bloomberg said Thursday he will spend half a billion dollars in the “fight of our time” to move the US away from carbon energy and combat climate change. The former New York mayor and philanthropist said the $500 million investment will go toward launching the Beyond Carbon initiative, which aims to close nearly 250 coal plants throughout the country by 2030 and prevent new ones […]
Grandma Ca: the 99-year-old standing up to Vietnam’s coal rush
by Tran Thi Minh Ha, with Jenny Vaughan in Tuy Phong VIETNAM (AFP) — Toothless and nearly blind, grandmother Pham Thi Ca refuses to leave her plot of land even after bulldozers demolished her house — an extraordinary holdout against communist Vietnam’s deepening addiction to coal. The 99-year-old was offered money to move as authorities hoovered up land for a planned $2.6 billion Japanese-funded coal plant in the remote Van Phong Bay she has called […]
Mineral misery: Vietnam salt farmers battered by imports, climate
by Jenny VAUGHAN / Tran Thi Minh Ha HON KOI, Vietnam (AFP) — The salt farmers of Hon Khoi rise before dawn as they have for generations, fanning out across shallow seawater pools in southern Vietnam to harvest the precious mineral, hoping for a better season than the last. The work is punishing and the incomes unstable, subject to seesawing demand swayed by foreign imports, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. Many people in the sleepy […]
Fear of change: Negative politics wins Australia election
Australia’s conservative government held on to power at national elections thanks to a highly effective negative campaign warning voters against the centre-left Labor Party’s large policy reform agenda, analysts said Sunday. Labor led every opinion poll in the two years prior to Saturday’s election but fell well short of a parliamentary majority after the vote, in a surprise result for the ruling Liberal-National coalition. Analysts said opposition leader Bill Shorten’s unpopularity with voters and his […]
UN chief’s call to ‘save the Pacific to save the world’
PORT VILA, Vanuatu (AFP) — UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was vital “to save the Pacific to save the world” as he wrapped up his brief South Pacific tour in Vanuatu on Saturday. Guterres has spent the past week in the region pushing for urgent action ahead of a UN summit in September billed as a last chance to prevent irreversible climate change. According to the UN, Vanuatu is the world’s most at-risk […]
Alaska’s thaw threatens prehistoric sites once frozen in time
by Jocelyne Zablit Agence France Presse QUINHAGAK, United States (AFP) — The first artifact — a wooden mask — was discovered in 2007 by a child who stumbled upon it while playing on the beach near his home in Quinhagak, a village in western Alaska that sits by the Bering Sea. Over the following months, hundreds of similar objects — baskets, finely carved harpoon shafts, lip plugs, wooden dolls, ivory tattoo needles — emerged […]
Antarctic penguins suffer ‘catastrophic’ breeding failure
The second largest Emperor penguin colony on Earth has suffered a “catastrophic” breeding failure after nearly all chicks born over three years died as their icy Antarctic habitat shrinks, researchers said Thursday. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) used satellite imagery to study the behaviour of the Halley Bay colony in the Weddell Sea due south of Cape Hope, which normally sees up to 25,000 penguin pairs mate each year. They found that in 2016, when […]
Tropical forest the size of England destroyed in 2018: report
by Marlowe Hood Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Last year humanity destroyed an expanse of tropical forest nearly the size of England, the third largest decline since global satellite data become available in 2001, researchers reported Thursday. The pace of the loss is staggering — the equivalent of 30 football fields disappearing every minute of every day, or 12 million hectares a year. Almost a third of that area, some 36,000 square […]
Researchers calculate decades of ‘scary’ Greenland ice melting
by Ivan Couronne WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Measuring melting ice is a fairly precise business in 2019 — thanks to satellites, weather stations and sophisticated climate models. By the 1990s and 2000s, scientists were able to make pretty good estimates, although work from previous decades was unreliable due to less advanced technology. Now, researchers have recalculated the amount of ice lost in Greenland since 1972, the year the first Landsat satellites entered orbit to […]
Nearly 300 arrested at London climate protests
LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — Nearly 300 people have been arrested in ongoing climate change protests in London that brought parts of the British capital to a standstill, police said Tuesday. Demonstrators began blocking off a bridge and major central road junctions on Monday at the start of a civil disobedience campaign that also saw action in other parts of Europe. The protests were organised by the campaign group Extinction Rebellion, which was established last […]





