In America’s hottest big metro, older people like the Sun Lakes mobile home resident accounted for most of the 77 people who died last summer in broiling heat inside their homes, almost all without air conditioning. Now, the heat dangers long known in greater Phoenix are becoming familiar nationwide as global warming creates new challenges to protect the aged.

From the Pacific Northwest to Chicago to North Carolina, health clinics, utilities and local governments are being tested to keep older people safe when temperatures soar. They’re adopting rules for disconnecting electricity, mandating when to switch on communal air conditioning and improving communication with at-risk people living alone.

Situated in the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix and its suburbs are ground zero for heat-associated deaths in the U.S. Such fatalities are so common that Arizona’s largest county keeps a weekly online tally during the six-month hot season from May through October. Temperatures this year were already hitting the high 90s the first week of April.

A WARMING WORLD

“Phoenix really is the model for what we’ll be seeing in other places,” said researcher Jennifer Ailshire, a native of the desert city now at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology where she studies how environmental factors affect health and aging. “The world is changing rapidly and I fear we are not acting fast enough to teach people how harmful rising temperatures can be.”

A 2021 study estimated more than a third of U.S. heat deaths each year can be attributed to human-caused global warming. It found more than 1,100 deaths a year from climate change-caused heat in some 200 U.S. cities, many in the East and Midwest, where people often don’t have air conditioning or are not acclimated to hot weather. Another study showed that in coming decades dangerous heat will hit much of the world at least three times as hard as climate change worsens.

Isolated and vulnerable, the heat victims last year during Maricopa County’s deadliest summer on record included a couple in their 80s without known relatives, an 83-year-old woman with dementia living alone after her husband entered hospice care and a 62-year-old Rwandan refugee whose air conditioner broke down.

While most of the county’s confirmed 378 heat-associated deaths were outdoors, those who died indoors were especially vulnerable because of isolation, mobility issues or medical problems as outside summertime highs hit 115 degrees.

Older people of color, with a greater tendency for chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure are especially at risk.

In Chicago, three African American women in their 60s and 70s died in spring 2022 when the centrally controlled heating in their housing complex remained on and the air conditioning was off despite unseasonable 90-degree weather in mid-May.

An undetermined number of older people died during the summer of 2021 when an unexpected heat wave swept across the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Canada reported that coroners confirmed more than 600 people died from the heat in neighboring British Columbia.

CHECKING ON OLDER PEOPLE

Many U.S. cities, including Phoenix, have plans to protect people during heat waves, opening cooling centers and distributing bottled water.

But many older people need personalized attention, said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, who directs the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“If you are elderly and sick you are unlikely to get into an Uber or bus to get to a cooling center,” said Bernstein, who vividly recalls a 1995 heat wave that killed 739 mostly older people in Chicago, his hometown. “So many were socially isolated and at tremendous risk.”

Sociologist Eric M. Klinenberg, who wrote about the catastrophe in his book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,” has noted social contacts can protect older people during disasters.

“Older people are more prone to live alone,” he said, “and they are the most likely to die.”

That’s true of all extreme weather.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana in 2005, around half of the 1,000 people killed were 75 or older, most of them drowned when their homes flooded.

Chicago encourages residents to check on older relatives and neighbors on hot days and city workers visit people’s home. But last year’s deaths at a Chicago apartment house shows more is needed.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CLINICS CAN HELP

Bernstein’s center is working with relief organization Americares to help community health clinics prepare vulnerable patients for heat waves and other extreme weather.

A “climate resilience tool kit” includes tips like making sure patients have wall thermometers and know how to check weather forecasts on a smart phone. Patients learn simple ways to beat the heat, like taking a shower or sponge bath to cool off and drinking plenty of water.

Alexis Hodges, a family nurse practitioner at the Community Care Clinic of Dare in coastal North Carolina, said rising temperatures can cause renal failure in patients with kidney problems and exacerbate dehydration from medications like diuretics.

Hodges contributed to the climate kit from a region that experiences all the weather events it covers: extreme heat, hurricanes, flooding and wildfires.

At the nonprofit Mountain Park Health centers that annually serve 100,000 patients in greater Phoenix, nurse practitioner Anthony Carano has written numerous letters to utility companies for low-income patients with chronic conditions, asking them not to turn off power despite missed payments.

“This is such an at-risk population,” Carano said of the overwhelmingly Latino patient population that suffer from diabetes and other ailments aggravated by warm weather. About one-tenth of the patients are 60 and older.

Francisca Canes, a 77-year-old patient visiting for back pain, said she’s fortunate to live with two daughters who take care of her during hot spells. In the summertime, she stays in shape by joining several women friends at 4 a.m. most mornings for a 4-mile walk.

AIR CONDITIONER REPLACEMENT AND REPAIR

Maricopa County in April used federal funds to to allocate another $10 million to its air conditioner replacement and repair program for people who qualify, brining total funding to $13.65 million. In greater Phoenix and several rural Arizona counties, older low-income people can apply for free repair or replacement of air conditioners through a separate non-profit program.

The Healthy Homes Air Conditioning Program run by the nonprofit Foundation for Senior Living last summer ensured about 30 people got new air conditioners or repairs and helped others with home improvements.

Priority goes to older people, those with disabilities and families with very small children, who are also vulnerable to the heat. A person living alone must earn $27,180 or less, said Laura Simone, program coordinator for FSL Home Improvements.

The program recently installed energy efficient windows in the 1930s home of 81-year-old widow Socorro Silvas.

“I am so grateful they are taking care of low-income people like me,” said Silvas, who got her air conditioner in the middle of a sweltering summer several years ago through a program run by Tolleson, a suburb west of Phoenix.

Utility companies can also help protect vulnerable people by halting power disconnections during hot periods.

“In Arizona, air conditioning is a matter of life and death, especially if you are older,” said Dana Kennedy, the state director of AARP, which has fought for stricter regulations preventing summertime power cutoffs.

STRICTER REGULATIONS

New rules for Arizona utilities were adopted after 72-year-old Stephanie Pullman died in August 2018 at her Phoenix area home as outside temperatures reached 107 degrees.

The medical examiner’s office said Pullman died from “environmental heat exposure” combined with cardiovascular disease after her power was shut off over a $176.84. debt.

The Arizona agency that regulates utilities now bans electricity cutoffs for nonpayment during the hottest months.

After the three Chicago women died last year, residential buildings for older people in the city now must provide air-conditioned common areas and administrators no longer have to keep centrally controlled heat on during unseasonably warm weather. The Illinois state Senate recently passed legislation requiring that all affordable housing have air-conditioning operating when the temperature is 80 degrees (26.6 C) or higher and must be operable by residents.

Kennedy said mobile homes are especially dangerous as high temperatures transform them into a hot metal containers.

“A lot are not insulated,” said Kennedy, who has advised an Arizona State University group working to make mobile homes safer with more surrounding shade and on-site cooling centers. “These heat deaths truly are heartbreaking. But in many cases we can help prevent them.”

____

Those experts aren’t worried about an apocalypse like the one seen in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” but there is cause for concern.

You may have seen some of the headlines, as the CDC warns of a deadly fungal infection spreading at an alarming rate.

“The reason this is worrisome is because this is a relatively new fungus,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He’s been studying fungal infections for three decades.

“And once it gets into a hospital, into a nursing home or into a health care facility, it is difficult to eradicate.”

The fungus is called Candida Auris, and it’s a drug-resistant fungus that’s been reported in more than half of states in the U.S. — including Maryland and Virginia.

Casadevall says C. Auris is typically not harmful to healthy people with strong immune systems. But it can be serious, even deadly, among those who are immunocompromised.

“This is a fungus that causes disease primarily in debilitated individuals who are hospitalized or institutionalized in some way,” said Casadevall. “The majority of healthy people with immune systems and no medical problems don’t really have to worry about Candida Auris.”

Despite outbreaks at some hospitals and healthcare facilities, scientists say the situation is not like the zombie apocalypse in “The Last of Us.”

“‘The Last of Us’ is fiction,” Casadevall said. “It’s fun to watch. But currently, an organism like that doesn’t exist. When reporters ask me, ‘Is this possible?’ My answer is always improbable, but not impossible.”

That’s because fungal infections continue to evolve and adapt, thanks to climate change.

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“With climate change and global warming, some of the fungi will adapt to higher temperatures,” Casadevall said. “And I and some of my colleagues have proposed that Candida Auris is the first example of that.”

He says scientists have long known about the impacts of this fungus on frogs and bats. But now that humans are affected, we need to be more aware.

That awareness involves educating people about symptoms, educating hospitals on infection control, and educating researchers so they can develop treatment options, Casadevall said.

“It’s not happening like COVID that burst into our consciousness all of a sudden,” he said. “It’s happening gradually. And this is why vigilance, research, and awareness is the way to protect yourself in the future.”

According to Casadevall, the fungus can live on surfaces and on a person’s skin, infecting the bloodstream, heart, or brain.

Symptoms can vary greatly depending on the type of infection, but fever and chills are the most common, CNBC reported in late March. People with weak immune systems, who have diabetes, who take a lot of antibiotics or who are on breathing tubes, feeding tubes and catheters are more likely to be affected.

By getting the word out, hospitals and nursing homes can have measures in place to disinfect contaminated areas and treat the sick. The CDC is also working to find better treatments.

There are already antifungal medications that work, Casadevall said, and once someone is treated and recovers, they’re cured.

For a growing number of adults in their 30s, 40s and 50s, those symptoms are turning out to be hallmarks of something they’ve never had to deal with before: seasonal allergies.

“What I see is people coming in for the first time, especially over the last five, seven years or so,” said Dr. Clifford Bassett, an allergist at NYU Langone Health in New York City. “They will always say, ‘I don’t understand how this is happening to me.'”

It’s not clear how many people are feeling pollen pain for the first time, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported recently that about a quarter of adults in the United States had a seasonal allergy in 2021, the first time the CDC tracked data on seasonal allergies for adults.

A large driver of adult-onset seasonal allergies appears to be climate change.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

As many as five projects nationwide will be funded through the 2021 infrastructure law, with at least two projects set aside for solar farms, the White House said Tuesday.

The White House also said it will allow developers of clean energy projects to take advantage of billions of dollars in new bonuses being offered in addition to investment and production tax credits available through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The bonuses will “incentivize more clean energy investment in energy communities, particularly coal communities,” that have been hurt by a decade-plus decline in U.S. coal production, the White House said.

The actions are among steps the Biden administration is taking as the Democratic president moves to convert the U.S. economy to renewable energy such as wind and solar power, while turning away from coal and other fossil fuels that produce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

The projects are modeled on a site Biden visited last summer, where a former coal-fired power plant in Massachusetts is shifting to offshore wind power. Biden highlighted the former Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, calling it the embodiment of the transition to clean energy that he is seeking but has struggled to realize in the first two years of his presidency.

“It’s very clear that … the workers who powered the last century of industry and innovation can power the next one,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, whose agency will oversee the new grant program.

Former mining areas in Appalachia and other parts of the country have long had the infrastructure, workforce, expertise and “can-do attitude” to produce energy, Granholm told reporters on Monday. “And now, thanks to President Biden’s investments in America, we have the resources that can help them bring this new energy economy to life.”

Up to five clean energy projects will be funded at current and former mines, Granholm said. The demonstration projects are expected to be examples for future development, “providing knowledge and experience that catalyze the next generation of clean energy on mine land projects,” the Energy Department said.

Applications are due by the end of August, with grant decisions expected by early next year.

In a related development, the Energy Department said it is awarding $16 million from the infrastructure law to West Virginia University and the University of North Dakota to study ways to extract critical minerals such as lithium, copper and nickel from coal mine waste streams.

Rare earth elements and other minerals are key parts of batteries for electric vehicles, cellphones and other technology. Biden has made boosting domestic mining a priority as the U.S. seeks to decrease its reliance on China, which has long dominated the battery supply chain.

One of the two universities that will receive funding is in the home state of one of Biden’s loudest critics, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a fellow Democrat who has decried what he calls Biden’s anti-coal agenda. Manchin complained on Friday about new Treasury Department guidelines for EV tax credits that he said ignore the intent of last year’s climate and health care law.

The new rules are aimed at reducing U.S. dependence on China and other countries for EV battery supply chains, but Manchin said they don’t move fast enough to “bring manufacturing back to America and ensure we have reliable and secure supply chains.″

Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, also slammed Biden last year after the president vowed to shutter coal-fired power plants and rely more heavily on wind and solar energy.

The powerful coal state lawmaker called Biden’s comments last November “divorced from reality,” adding that they “ignore the severe economic pain” caused by higher energy prices as a result of declining domestic production of coal and other fossil fuels. The White House said Biden’s words in a Nov. 4 speech in California had been “twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended” and that the president regretted any offense caused.

“No one is building new coal plants because they can’t rely on it, even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of their existence of the plant. So it’s going to become a wind generation,” Biden said in the speech in Carlsbad, California. “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”

Biden has set a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and achieve a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said Monday that Biden believes U.S. leaders “need to be bold” in combating climate change “and that includes helping revitalize the economies of coal, oil and gas and power-plant communities.”

Blame geography for the U.S. getting hit by stronger, costlier, more varied and frequent extreme weather than anywhere on the planet, several experts said. Two oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, jutting peninsulas like Florida, clashing storm fronts and the jet stream combine to naturally brew the nastiest of weather.

That’s only part of it. Nature dealt the United States a bad hand, but people have made it much worse by what, where and how we build, several experts told The Associated Press.

Then add climate change, and “buckle up. More extreme events are expected,” said Rick Spinrad, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Flash floods. Droughts. Wildfires. Blizzards. Ice storms. Nor’easters. Lake-effect snow. Heat waves. Severe thunderstorms. Hail. Lightning. Atmospheric rivers. Derechos. Dust storms. Monsoons. Bomb cyclones. And the dreaded polar vortex.

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It starts with “where we are on the globe,” North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello said. “It’s truly a little bit … unlucky.”

China may have more people, and a large land area like the United States, but “they don’t have the same kind of clash of air masses as much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe weather,” said Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina.

The U.S. is by far the king of tornadoes and other severe storms.

“It really starts with kind of two things. Number one is the Gulf of Mexico. And number two is elevated terrain to the west,” said Victor Gensini, a Northern Illinois University meteorology professor.

Look at Friday’s deadly weather, and watch out for the next week to see it in action: Dry air from the West goes up over the Rockies and crashes into warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s all brought together along a stormy jet stream.

In the West, it’s a drumbeat of atmospheric rivers. In the Atlantic, it’s nor’easters in the winter, hurricanes in the summer and sometimes a weird combination of both, like Superstorm Sandy.

“It is a reality that regardless of where you are in the country, where you call home, you’ve likely experienced a high-impact weather event firsthand,” Spinrad said.

Killer tornadoes in December 2021 that struck Kentucky illustrated the uniqueness of the United States.

They hit areas with large immigrant populations. People who fled Central and South America, Bosnia and Africa were all victims. A huge problem was that tornadoes really didn’t happen in those people’s former homes, so they didn’t know what to watch for or what to do, or even know they had to be concerned about tornadoes, said Joseph Trujillo Falcon, a NOAA social scientist who investigated the aftermath.

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With colder air up in the Arctic and warmer air in the tropics, the area between them — the mid-latitudes, where the United States is — gets the most interesting weather because of how the air acts in clashing temperatures, and that north-south temperature gradient drives the jet stream, said Northern Illinois meteorology professor Walker Ashley.

Then add mountain ranges that go north-south, jutting into the winds flowing from west to east, and underneath it all the toasty Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf injects hot, moist air underneath the often cooler, dry air lifted by the mountains, “and that doesn’t happen really anywhere else in the world,” Gensini said.

If the United States as a whole has it bad, the South has it the worst, said University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd, a former president of the American Meteorological Society.

“We drew the short straw (in the South) that we literally can experience every single type of extreme weather event,” Shepherd said. “Including blizzards. Including wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes. Every single type. … There’s no other place in the United States that can say that.”

Florida, North Carolina and Louisiana also stick out in the water so are more prone to being hit by hurricanes, said Shepherd and Dello.

The South has more manufactured housing that is vulnerable to all sorts of weather hazards, and storms are more likely to happen there at night, Ashley said. Night storms are deadly because people can’t see them and are less likely to take cover, and they miss warnings in their sleep.

The extreme weather triggered by America’s unique geography creates hazards. But it takes humans to turn those hazards into disasters, Ashley and Gensini said.

Just look where cities pop up in America and the rest of the world: near water that floods, except maybe Denver, said South Carolina’s Cutter. More people are moving to areas, such as the South, where there are more hazards.

“One of the ways in which you can make your communities more resilient is to not develop them in the most hazard-prone way or in the most hazard-prone portion of the community,” Cutter said. “The insistence on building up barrier islands and development on barrier islands, particularly on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast, knowing that that sand is going to move and having hurricanes hit with some frequency … seems like a colossal waste of money.”

Construction standards tend to be at the bare minimum and less likely to survive the storms, Ashley said.

“Our infrastructure is crumbling and nowhere near being climate-resilient at all,” Shepherd said.

Poverty makes it hard to prepare for and bounce back from disasters, especially in the South, Shepherd said. That vulnerability is an even bigger issue in other places in the world.

“Safety can be bought,” Ashley said. “Those that are well-to-do and who have resources can buy safety and will be the most resilient when disaster strikes. … Unfortunately that isn’t all of us.”

“It’s sad that we have to live these crushing losses,” said Kim Cobb, a Brown University professor of environment and society. “We’re worsening our hand by not understanding the landscape of vulnerability given the geographic hand we’ve been dealt.”

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Throw another mammoth on the barbie?

An Australian company on Tuesday lifted the glass cloche on a meatball made of lab-grown cultured meat using the genetic sequence from the long-extinct pachyderm, saying it was meant to fire up public debate about the hi-tech treat.

The launch in an Amsterdam science museum came just days before April 1 so there was an elephant in the room: Is this for real?

“This is not an April Fools joke,” said Tim Noakesmith, founder of Australian startup Vow. “This is a real innovation.”

Cultivated meat — also called cultured or cell-based meat — is made from animal cells. Livestock doesn’t need to be killed to produce it, which advocates say is better not just for the animals but also for the environment.

Vow used publicly available genetic information from the mammoth, filled missing parts with genetic data from its closest living relative, the African elephant, and inserted it into a sheep cell, Noakesmith said. Given the right conditions in a lab, the cells multiplied until there were enough to roll up into the meatball.

More than 100 companies around the world are working on cultivated meat products, many of them startups like Vow.

Experts say that if the technology is widely adopted, it could vastly reduce the environmental impact of global meat production in the future. Currently, billions of acres of land are used for agriculture worldwide.

But don’t expect this to land on plates around the world any time soon. So far, tiny Singapore is the only country to have approved cell-based meat for consumption. Vow is hoping to sell its first product there — a cultivated Japanese quail meat — later this year.

The mammoth meatball is a one-off and has not been tasted, even by its creators, nor is it planned to be put into commercial production. Instead, it was presented as a source of protein that would get people talking about the future of meat.

“We wanted to get people excited about the future of food being different to potentially what we had before. That there are things that are unique and better than the meats that we’re necessarily eating now, and we thought the mammoth would be a conversation starter and get people excited about this new future,” Noakesmith told The Associated Press.

“But also the woolly mammoth has been traditionally a symbol of loss. We know now that it died from climate change. And so what we wanted to do was see if we could create something that was a symbol of a more exciting future that’s not only better for us, but also better for the planet,” he added.

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Seren Kell, science and technology manager at Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products, said he hopes the project “will open up new conversations about cultivated meat’s extraordinary potential to produce more sustainable foods, reduce the climate impact of our existing food system and free up land for less intensive farming practices.”

He said the mammoth project with its unconventional gene source was an outlier in the new meat cultivation sector, which commonly focuses on traditional livestock — cattle, pigs and poultry.

“By cultivating beef, pork, chicken, and seafood, we can have the most impact in terms of reducing emissions from conventional animal agriculture and satisfying growing global demand for meat while meeting our climate targets,” he said.

The jumbo meatball on show in Amsterdam — sized somewhere between a softball and a volleyball — was for show only and had been glazed to ensure it didn’t get damaged on its journey from Sydney.

But when it was being prepared — first slow baked and then finished off on the outside with a blow torch — it smelled good.

“The folks who were there, they said the aroma was something similar to another prototype that we produced before, which was crocodile,” Noakesmith said. “So, super fascinating to think that adding the protein from an animal that went extinct 4,000 years ago gave it a totally unique and new aroma, something we haven’t smelled as a population for a very long time.”

___

Associated Press reporter Laura Ungar contributed from Louisville, Kentucky.

Frost and “extreme temperatures” in the United States may have played a role in the butterfly’s decline during the most recent winter season, said Humberto Peña, director of Mexico’s nature reserves.

Monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada overwinter in the fir forests of the western state of Michoacan, west of Mexico City. The total area they occupied this past winter dropped to 5.4 acres (2.21 hectares), from 7 acres (2.84 hectares) a year earlier.

The annual butterfly count doesn’t calculate the individual number of butterflies, but rather the number of acres they cover when they clump together on tree boughs.

Gloria Tavera, conservation director of Mexico’s Commission for National Protected Areas, said the area of forest cover appropriate for the butterflies that was lost rose to 145 acres (58.7 hectares), from 46.2 acres (18.8 hectares) last year.

Illegal logging has been a major threat to the pine and fir forests where the butterflies gathering in clumps to keep warm. But experts said that this year, more than half the tree loss was due to removal of dead or sick trees affected by fires, storms or pests. Tavera said a lack of rain had plunged trees into hydric stress, making them more vulnerable to diseases, pests and fires.

Jorge Rickards, Mexico director of the WWF conservation group, blamed climate change,

“The monarch butterfly is an indicator of these changes,” Rickards said.

Critics say that in the past, removal of diseased trees has been used as a pretext for felling healthy trees for timber.

Tavera said she had no evidence that occurred this year, adding, “I don't think anyone is lying.”

Each year the monarchs return to the United States and Canada on an annual migration that is threatened by loss of the milkweed they feed on north of the border and by deforestation in the butterfly reserves in Mexico.

Due to a myriad of factors, monarch numbers have dropped in recent years. Experts say drought, severe weather and loss of habitat — especially of the milkweed where the monarchs lay their eggs — as well as pesticide and herbicide use and climate change all pose threats to the species’ migration.

Illegal logging also continues to plague the reserves, and Peña said there are plans to station National Guard troops in the reserve to prevent it.

But open, illegal tree cutting actually dropped 3.4% this year, largely due to the efforts of inhabitants to protect their forests, a change of attitude by many.

For example, on Jan. 23, the communal farm community of Crescencio Morales — once the area with the worst illegal logging — fielded its first class of trained and officially approved forest rangers.

The 58-strong forest ranger “Community Guard” of Crescencio Morales began life several years ago as a rag-tag band of farmers armed with a motley collection of weapons, before the state government offered to train and equip them.

The community’s struggle began in the early 2000s, when residents fought to kick out drug traffickers and illegal loggers and redeem itself in the process.

“Back in 1998, the inhabitants of Crescencio Morales decided to set fire to the monarch butterfly colonies, in order to log the land,” recalls Erasmo Álvarez Castillo, the leader of the communal, or ejido, farmers in the village.

Residents quickly saw two things: The illegal logging brought with it the incursion of drug cartels and surrounding communities were making money off tourism.

So starting around 2000, the farmers began reforesting the mountain slopes. But they still had to expel the drug gangs. It was a long and arduous fight that eventually forced the farmers to take up arms, after calls to police for help in defending the community went unanswered.

Things came to a head when the town declared itself an autonomous, self-governing municipality.

Faced with armed, rebellious farmers, the government decided to try to professionalize the community force and train it to protect the forests.

Now, with the butterflies back, the village can dream of attracting tourists.

“The land we have on the mountaintop is very beautiful. It would be good for a tourism site,” Álvarez Castillo said. “The plan is to make trails, put up cabins — a tourist site without destroying the environment.” ___

Solís reported from Crescencio Morales, Mexico.

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But doing so requires quickly slashing carbon pollution and fossil fuel use by nearly two-thirds by 2035, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. The United Nations chief said it more bluntly, calling for an end to new fossil fuel exploration and rich countries quitting coal, oil and gas by 2040.

“Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Stepping up his pleas for action on fossil fuels, Guterres not only called for “no new coal” but also for eliminating its use in rich countries by 2030 and poor countries by 2040. He urged carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas-fired power plants too.

That date is key because nations soon have to come up with goals for pollution reduction by 2035, according to the Paris climate agreement. After contentious debate, the U.N. science panel calculated and reported that to stay under the warming limit set in Paris the world needs to cut 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, adding a new target not previously mentioned in the six reports issued since 2018.

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“The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts for thousands of years,” the report, said calling climate change “a threat to human well-being and planetary health.”

“We are not on the right track but it’s not too late,’’ said report co-author and water scientist Aditi Mukherji. “Our intention is really a message of hope, and not that of doomsday.’’

With the world only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times, scientists stressed a sense of urgency. The goal was adopted as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is likely the last warning the Nobel Peace Prize-winning collection of scientists will be able to make about the 1.5 mark because their next set of reports will likely come after Earth has either breached the mark or locked into exceeding it soon, several scientists, including report authors, told The Associated Press.

After 1.5 degrees “the risks are starting to pile on,” said report co-author Francis X. Johnson, a climate, land and policy scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. The report mentions “tipping points” around that temperature of species extinction, including coral reefs, irreversible melting of ice sheets and sea level rise on the order of several meters.

“The window is closing if emissions are not reduced as quickly as possible,” Johnson said in an interview. “Scientists are rather alarmed.”

“1.5 is a critical critical limit, particularly for small islands and mountain (communities) which depend on glaciers,” said Mukherji, who’s also the climate change impact platform director at the research institute CGIAR.

Many scientists, including at least three co-authors, said hitting 1.5 degrees is inevitable.

“We are pretty much locked into 1.5,” said report co-author Malte Meinshausen, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “There’s very little way we will be able to avoid crossing 1.5 C sometime in the 2030s ” but the big issue is whether the temperature keeps rising from there or stabilizes.

Guterres insisted “the 1.5-degree limit is achievable.” Science panel chief Hoesung Lee said so far the world is far off course.

“This report confirms that if the current trends, current patterns of consumption and production continues, then … the global average 1.5 degrees temperature increase will be seen sometime in this decade,” Lee said.

Scientists emphasize that the world, civilization or humanity won’t end if and when Earth hits and passes the 1.5 degree mark. Mukherji said “it’s not as if it’s a cliff that we all fall off.” But an earlier IPCC report detailed how the harms – from coral reef extinction to Arctic sea ice absent summers to even nastier extreme weather – are much worse beyond 1.5 degrees of warming.

“It is certainly prudent to be planning for a future that’s warmer than 1.5 degrees,” said IPCC report review editor Steven Rose, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute in the United States.

If the world continues to use all the fossil fuel-powered infrastructure either existing now or proposed Earth will warm at least 2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, blowing past the 1.5 mark, the report said.

Because the report is based on data from a few years ago, the calculations about fossil fuel projects already in the pipeline do not include the increase in coal and natural gas use after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said report co-author Dipak Dasgupta, a climate economist at The Energy and Resources Institute in India. The report comes a week after the Biden Administration in the United States approved the huge Willow oil-drilling project in Alaska, which could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day.

The report and the underlying discussions also touch on the disparity between rich nations, which caused much of the problem because carbon dioxide emissions from industrialization stay in the air for more than a century, and poorer countries that get hit harder by extreme weather.

If the world is to achieve its climate goals, poorer countries need a “many-fold” increase in financial help to adapt to a warmer world and switch to non-polluting energy. Countries have made financial pledges and promises of a damage compensation fund.

If rich countries don’t cut emissions quicker and better help victim nations adapt to future harms, “the world is relegating the least developed countries to poverty,” said Madeline Diouf Sarr, chair of a coalition of the poorest nations.

The report offers hope if action is taken, using the word “opportunity” nine times in a 27-page summary. Though opportunity is overshadowed by 94 uses of the word “risk.”

The head of the IPCC said the report contains “a message of hope in addition to those various scientific findings about the tremendous damages and also the losses that climate change has imposed on us and on the planet.”

“There is a pathway that we can resolve these problems, and this report provides a comprehensive overview of what actions we can take to lead us into a much better, livable future,” Lee told The Associated Press.

Lee was at pains to stress that it’s not the panel’s job to tell countries what they should or shouldn’t do to cap global temperature rise at 1.5 Celsius.

“It’s up to each government to find the best solution,” he said, adding that scientists hope those solutions will stabilize the globe’s temperature around 1.5 degrees.

Asked whether this would be the last report to describe ways in which 1.5 C can be achieved, Lee said it was impossible to predict what advances might be made that could keep that target alive.

“The possibility is still there,” he said. “It depends upon, again I want to emphasize that, the political will to achieve that goal.”

Activists also found grains of hope in the reports.

“The findings of these reports can make us feel disheartened about the slow pace of emissions reductions, the limited transition to renewable energy and the growing, daily impact of the climate crisis on children,” said youth climate activist Vanessa Nakate, a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. “But those children need us to read this report and take action, not lose hope.”

___

Borenstein reported from Kensington, Maryland.

Overhead, WeatherNation plays on the television, looping footage of last year’s mega storms and flashing a headline: “2022 billion dollar disasters.”

Aspen Skiing Company’s vice-president of sustainability, who sits nearby eating a slice of pizza, says it’s not enough for resorts to just change their on-site operations to become “green.”

“If you’re a ski resort and you care about climate change or you profess to care about climate change, it absolutely has to go beyond reducing your carbon footprint,” said Auden Schendler. “If your CEO hasn’t spoken out on climate publicly or in an op-ed, you’re not a green company.”

As global warming threatens to put much of the ski industry out of business over the next several decades, resorts are beginning to embrace a role as climate activists in the halls of government. The industry contributes just a tiny fraction of overall greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change, but arguably has outsized influence on popular culture and in the business world. While many resorts are focused on reducing their own emissions, others are going much further, leveraging their influence to shift public opinion and advocate for climate legislation.

Arapahoe Basin is a ski area leading such efforts in the United States. Positioned high up on the craggy, wind-whipped continental divide in central Colorado, the mountain is relatively well-positioned to endure a warmer, shorter winter season. High altitude, which keeps temperatures cooler and lengthens the time snow stays on the ground, is its golden ticket. But it isn’t immune to extreme weather: it has experienced close calls with wildfires and subsequent mudslides, which washed out a parking lot adjacent to its slopes in 2021.

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About a decade ago, the ski area transitioned from spending thousands of dollars annually to cancel out some carbon emissions by paying for carbon credits to instead funding a staff position focused on reducing on-site emissions.

“If we are gonna ask our guests to be better, we’re gonna ask our guests to talk to their leadership, we’re gonna go talk to our leadership directly, we definitely feel like we need to be doing it too,” said Sustainability Manager Mike Nathan.

One way they’re working to nudge a transition to renewable energies is with newly installed electric vehicle chargers. After a day on the slopes, Denver resident Kurt Zanca returned to his Tesla, which had been charging for free at one of the five dual-port stations situated in the front row of the mountain’s parking lot.

Zanca said he thinks charging infrastructure at ski areas can help encourage hesitant shoppers to purchase an EV. “If you can drive up here, charge, go back, no problem, it makes it a lot easier,” Zanca said.

In the northern French Alps, luxury chalet operator Alikats also sees incentives for customers as a catalyst for change. They offer discounts to guests who travel by train, opt out of eating meat or don’t use a hot tub during their stay.

Al Judge, who owns and operates the business with his wife Kat, considers himself a realist. He’s not trying to save snowfall—massive reductions in greenhouse gases emissions worldwide are needed to slow global warming—but rather set a standard for how businesses should operate in a way that respects natural resources and protects biodiversity.

“The more that becomes a cultural imperative, the quicker change will happen, and I think business has a very important role to play in that process,” Judge said.

Arapahoe Basin, affectionately known by locals as “A-bay,” is working toward net-zero emissions by 2025, partially by relying on credits through the Colorado Carbon Fund to offset some natural gas and diesel they’ll still be burning at that time. They also aim to divert 75% of their waste by then — they’re currently at 50% through various recycling and composting programs. Nathan says these efforts give them clout when trying to flex their influence off the mountain.

They’ve pressured their utility, Xcel Energy, to expedite the transition to renewable power. Earlier this year, Nathan and other industry leaders met with the governor’s staff to encourage the rapid transition to manufacturing EV heavy machinery statewide. And, after watching a federal bill that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act stall, Nathan and Chief Operating Officer Alan Henceroth co-authored an op-ed and sent letters to Colorado’s congressional delegation.

“Kicking the can for another legislative session was going to have direct and negative impacts on businesses like us,” Nathan said.

Similarly active in policy work, Judge runs an organization that’s studying the lack of public transit in the region and expects to soon lobby French officials for a solution. A train route through the northern Alps would provide a more direct public transit option that could reduce the number of flights coming in, Judge said.

Customer travel remains a primary source of pollution for ski areas, with air travel, in particular private jets, a major culprit. For example, over 80 percent of flights in and out of Aspen-Pitkin County Airport are private jets, airport officials said. Ideally, airports could tax private jets and invest that money in renewable energy projects, said Schendler. But the Federal Aviation Administration remains a roadblock. Federal law prohibits airports from spending tax revenue offsite. This restricts any renewable projects to airport grounds, and any revenue made from them must be used exclusively at the facility.

While Aspen has yet to win over the FAA, it found a way to sway its local utility, Holy Cross, which supplies power to more than a dozen towns in addition to Vail Mountain Resort along the Interstate-70 corridor. About 15 years ago, Schendler began phoning environmentally minded locals and encouraged them to run for board positions for the utility, which produced about 10% renewable electricity at the time. Today, the board is stacked with pro-renewable members, largely the fruit of lobbying by Aspen and other activists. The utility is split about 50/50 between renewables and fossil fuels, and is committed to 100% renewables by 2030.

Another way to speed the transition to renewables is through power purchase agreements. This is when a business or utility commits to buying a set amount of energy from yet-to-be-built projects, guaranteeing some of the funding to be built.

Vail Resorts, which owns 37 ski areas in three countries, has done this with a wind farm in Nebraska, and is one of five partners for a new solar array in Salt Lake City. Power purchase agreements have helped Vail reach 100% renewable electricity for all its resort and ski areas in North America, and 96% internationally.

Snowshoe Mountain is a ski resort in West Virginia still largely powered by fossil fuels. As the climate bill stalled last summer in Congress, CEO Patti Duncan felt the need to get involved. She doesn’t consider herself an activist but wanted to speak up when she watched one of her state’s senators, Joe Manchin, defend the state’s coal industry and hold up the legislation. Duncan wondered, what about the thriving outdoor industry, which is negatively impacted by the burning of fossil fuels?

With encouragement by owner Alterra Mountain Company and climate activist group Protect Our Winters, she wrote a letter to Manchin. Days later, he came out in support of the bill. Duncan said she doesn’t know whether her letter played a role in the senator’s decision but is glad she spoke up.

“It’s my responsibility to do something about it for our resort and our community and our state,” Duncan said.

On the other side of the country, Aspen had installed a kiosk at its Limelight Hotel lobby at the base of Snowmass Mountain. The kiosk allowed guests to send a pre-paid card to the senator, encouraging him to support the bill.

The climate bill passed and was signed into law. As a result, record federal funding is now available for households and businesses to decarbonize buildings and transportation. But Mario Molina, executive director of Protect Our Winters, says the work is just getting started.

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The next steps are “anything and everything that resorts can engage in to leverage not only their political power but also their power as large consumers to help implement and realize the promise of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Molina said. He cautioned of local opposition to renewable energy projects, and said resorts could make a big impact advocating for the permitting necessary for those projects, in addition to taking advantage of every available credit on their own.

Many skiers applaud such efforts and want their favorite ski areas to have a role in fighting climate change — with an important caveat.

“As long as they’re being sincere and not just sort of doing it for show and not actually making much of a change,” said Archie Bolgar, a British student on vacation at Aspen in January with friends from Boston’s Bentley University.

While there are many environmental issues corporations could embrace, Schendler says the focus must be on reducing emissions to make sure global temperatures don’t rise more than 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit compared to preindustrial times. The rise is currently about 1.1 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and climate scientists warn that as it increases so too will extreme weather events.

“If we can stabilize warming at sub 2 degrees Celsius, we’re going to prevent billions of people from suffering. That’s profound,” he said.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Officials warned visitors to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore on the state’s Outer Banks to watch out for debris from a collapsed one-story house along the beach and in the ocean in Rodanthe.

Most of the debris is at the site of the collapsed house along East Point Drive, and officials said they are communicating with the owner of the house to coordinate the removal of the house and all related debris on the beach.

The site of the collapse on Monday is about a mile north of Ocean Drive, where other homes collapsed last year, including two that collapsed on the same day in May.

Over the last few years, the county has grappled with the high cost of beach nourishment, the process of dredging sand from the ocean floor and piping it to the shore to replenish the coast line. Leaders in Dare County say they can no longer afford to build back the beaches without state and federal help.

According to NBC affiliate WRAL, nearly $100 million was already spent on beach nourishment in the Outer Banks in 2021alone, with Dare County covering $30 million of the cost for projects in Buxton and Avon. Leaders in Dare County say they can’t afford to build back the beaches in Rodanthe without state and federal help.

“The county doesn’t have the funds to pay for a beach nourishment project,” Dare County Manager Bobby Outten told WRAL. “We don’t have $30 million to do that, and without an influx of new money, we aren’t going to be in a position to nourish in Rodanthe.”

However, shifting the financial burden of rebuilding onto tax payers to protect these often high-end homes is a tough sell.

North Carolina’s coast is almost entirely made up of narrow, low-lying barrier islands. The islands are particularly vulnerable to storm surges and to being washed over from both sides.

The announcement came a day after the administration, in a move in the other direction toward conservation, said it would bar or limit drilling in some other areas of Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.

The Willow approval by the Bureau of Land Management would allow three drill sites, which would include up to 199 total wells. Two other drill sites proposed for the project would be denied. Project developer ConocoPhillips has said it considers the three-site option workable, “the right decision for Alaska and our nation” in the words of company chairman and CEO Ryan Lance.

Houston-based ConocoPhillips will relinquish rights to about 68,000 acres of existing leases in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The order, one of the most significant of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s tenure, was not signed by her but rather by her deputy, Tommy Beaudreau, who grew up in Alaska and has a close relationship with state lawmakers. She was notably silent on the project, which she had opposed as a New Mexico congresswoman before becoming Interior secretary two years ago.

Climate activists were outraged that Biden greenlighted the project, which they say put his climate legacy at risk. Allowing the drilling plan to go forward also would break Biden’s campaign promise to stop new oil drilling on public lands, they say.

However, administration officials were concerned that ConocoPhillips’ decades-old leases limited the government’s legal ability to block the project and that courts might have ruled in the company’s favor.

Monday’s announcement is not likely to be the last word, with litigation expected from environmental groups.

The Willow project could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day, create up to 2,500 jobs during construction and 300 long-term jobs, and generate billions of dollars in royalties and tax revenues for the federal, state and local governments, the company said.

The project, located in the federally designated National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, enjoys widespread political support in the state. Alaska Native state lawmakers recently met with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to urge support for Willow.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Monday the decision was “very good news for the country.”

“Not only will this mean jobs and revenue for Alaska, it will be resources that are needed for the country and for our friends and allies,” Murkowski said. “The administration listened to Alaska voices. They listed to the delegation as we pressed the case for energy security and national security.”

Fellow Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan said conditions attached to the project should not reduce Willow’s ability to produce up to 180,000 barrels of crude a day. But he said it was “infuriating” that Biden also moved to prevent or limit oil drilling elsewhere in Alaska.

Environmental activists who have promoted a #StopWillow campaign on social media were fuming at the approval, which they called a betrayal.

“We are too late in the climate crisis to approve massive oil and gas projects that directly undermine the new clean economy that the Biden administration committed to advancing,” said Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen. “We know President Biden understands the existential threat of climate, but he is approving a project that derails his own climate goals.”

Christy Goldfuss, a former Obama White House official who now is a policy chief at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said she was “deeply disappointed” at Biden’s decision to approve Willow, which NRDC estimates would generate planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to more than 1 million homes.

“This decision is bad for the climate, bad for the environment and bad for the Native Alaska communities who oppose this and feel their voices were not heard,” Goldfuss said.

Anticipating that reaction among environmental groups, the White House announced on Sunday that Biden will prevent or limit oil drilling in 16 million acres in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean. The plan would bar drilling in nearly 3 million acres of the Beaufort Sea — closing it off from oil exploration — and limit drilling in more than 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve.

The withdrawal of the offshore area ensures that important habitat for whales, seals, polar bears and other wildlife “will be protected in perpetuity from extractive development,″ the White House said in a statement.

The conservation announcement did little to mollify activists.

“It’s a performative action to make the Willow project not look as bad,” said Elise Joshi, the acting executive director of Gen-Z for Change, an advocacy organization. Alaska’s bipartisan congressional delegation met with Biden and his advisers in early March to plead their case for the project, while environmental groups rallied opposition and urged project opponents to place pressure on the administration.

City of Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, whose community of about 525 people is closest to the proposed development, has been outspoken in her opposition, worried about impacts to caribou and her residents’ subsistence lifestyles. The Naqsragmiut Tribal Council, in another North Slope community, also raised concerns with the project.

But there is “majority consensus” in the North Slope region supporting the project, said Nagruk Harcharek, president of the group Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, whose members include leaders from across much of that region.

The conservation actions announced Sunday complete protections for the entire Beaufort Sea Planning Area, building upon President Barack Obama’s 2016 action on the Chukchi Sea Planning Area and the majority of the Beaufort Sea, the White House said.

Separately, the administration moved to protect more than 13 million acres within the petroleum reserve, a 23-million acre chunk of land on Alaska’s North Slope set aside a century ago for future oil production.

The Willow project is within the reserve, and ConocoPhillips has long held leases for the site. About half the reserve is off limits to oil and gas leasing under an Obama-era rule reinstated by the Biden administration last year.

Areas to be protected include the Teshekpuk Lake, Utukok Uplands, Colville River, Kasegaluk Lagoon and Peard Bay Special Areas, collectively known for their globally significant habitat for grizzly and polar bears, caribou and hundreds of thousands of migratory birds.

___

Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana contributed to this story.

But if it’s difficult to settle on that peak day — defined as when 70% of the Yoshino cherry blossoms on the National Mall around the Tidal Basin are open — one thing is certain. It’s occurring earlier.

And arborists and others point to climate change. 

“Warmth is what drives them to bloom and blossom so it certainly stands to reason as temperatures are getting warmer, we’re going to see the cherry blossoms continue to come out earlier,” said Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the National Park Service.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, “scientists have very high confidence that recent warming trends in global climate are causing spring events such as leaf growth and flower blooms to happen earlier.”

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In the case of the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin, 2023’s peak bloom projection now is for March 22 through 25, according to the National Park Service. Unusually warm or cool temperatures have meant peak blooms as early as March 15 in 1990 and as late as April 18 in 1958.

The peak bloom date has shifted forward by about seven days since 1921. That’s according to the EPA, which also notes that, based on 102 years of data, the average peak bloom date is April 4. But in 16 of the last 20 years, the peak bloom date has occurred before April 4. 

Litterst said that the average date of peak bloom has moved up about six days in the last 60 to 80 years. At the same time, temperatures along the Tidal Basin have risen a statistically significant 2.5 degrees, he said.

The cherry trees in the nation’s capital are among the country’s most famous. Japan gave the United States about 3,000 trees in 1912 as a symbol of friendship. Today, more than 1.5 million visitors attend the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which began in 1934 and now lasts four weeks. The early peak bloom dates, however, means that in some years, the festival misses them.

"The greatest indicator of spring in the nation’s capital is when the cherry blossoms come out," LItterst said. "There is focus on those trees more so than just about any other natural resource around here, so when they come earlier that gets everybody’s attention."

"This year especially," he said. "We’re coming off the third warmest winter on record."

Data for Kyoto’s famous cherry trees go back to 812, records compiled from imperial court diaries and chronicles. In 2021, the full flowering of the trees was recorded on March 26, the earliest in more than 1200 years. A study last year, “Human influence increases the likelihood of extremely early cherry tree flowering in Kyoto,” examined that early flowering.

The authors showed that Kyoto’s cherry flowering season arrives on average one to two weeks earlier because of manmade climate change. Under a scenario of medium emissions, they project an extra week earlier by the end of the century.

“As a result, extremely early flowering like in year 2021 becomes increasingly common in a warming climate and may occur every few years by 2100, when it will no longer be classified as extreme,” wrote the authors, Nikolaos Christidis, a senior scientist in the Meteorological Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service, Yasuyuki Aono, an environmental scientist at Osaka Prefecture University, and Peter A. Stott, a climate scientist in the Meteorological Office.  

Cherry Trees Across the United States

Cherry trees are popular across the United States, from New York City to Los Angeles, with some communities holding their own cherry blossom festivals. Here is a sampling of where you can find them.

In the Northeast, cherry trees are expected to blossom in New York City in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Central Park. The Central Park Conservancy in Manhattan is warning that this year’s warm winter means the trees there will bloom much earlier than usual. 

New Haven will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Cherry Blossom Festival. Seventy-two Yoshino cherry trees were planted on Wooster Square in 1973.

Other trees will be blooming in Philadelphia at the Morris Arboretum, the Subaru Cherry Blossom Festival at West Fairmount Park on April 15 to 16, the Fairmount Park Horticulture Center and Longwood Gardens.

In Boston, there are cherry trees at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum, on the Charles River Esplanade and at the Boston Common and the Public Garden.

Branch Brook Park in Newark, New Jersey, will host the Essex County Cherry Blossom Festival from April 1 to April 16.

Chicago's Jackson Park cherry blossoms will be celebrated April 22.

A floral festival is taking place now in Dallas. Hundreds of cherry trees are expected to be in bloom next week at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden during its Dallas Blooms festival, which runs until April 16, and in Fort Worth at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden.

In California, cherry trees bloom in San Diego's Japanese Friendship Garden, which is holding its Cherry Blossom Festival March 10 through 12. In Los Angeles, you can visit Descanso Gardens and The Huntington, while in San Francisco, the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival will be held April 8 to 16.

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The number of humpback whales getting stranded along the entire East Coast has risen since January 2016, with 178 dying in what NOAA calls “unusual mortality events.” That’s defined as a significant die-off of a marine mammal species for unknown causes. 

Partial or full necropsies — or autopsies for animals — on about half of the whales found that 40% had evidence of being struck by ships or had gotten entangled in fishing nets. 

Of importance for offshore wind installations, there is no scientific information to connect the whale deaths to equipment used to exploration and development.

The population of humpback whales has increased, said to Kimberly Damon-Randall, director of NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources. They eat small fish called menhaden, which are closer to shore this year than they normally are, possibly because climate change.

“That draws the whales closer in, following their prey, where there is a significant amount of vessel traffic,” she said. 

Since Dec. 1, there have been 22 standings of large whales, including humpback whales and others, according to Damon-Randall. 

Especially concerning has been the deaths of two North Atlantic Right Whales, which are endangered. There are fewer that 350 left. 

NOAA says the best thing boaters can do is to slow down. Boaters should travel no faster than 10 knots so that they can slow down if they see a whale. If a strike is unavoidable it is less likely to be lethal to the whale.

Scientists got their first up-close look at what’s eating away part of Antarctica’s Thwaites ice shelf, nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier because of its massive melt and sea rise potential, and it’s both good and bad news.

Using a 13-foot pencil-shaped robot that swam under the grounding line where ice first juts over the sea, scientists saw a shimmery critical point in Thwaites’ chaotic breakup, “where it’s melting so quickly there, there’s just material streaming out of the glacier,” said robot creator and polar scientist Britney Schmidt of Cornell University.

Before, scientists had no observations from this critical but hard-to-reach point on Thwaites. But with the robot named Icefin lowered down a slender 1,925-foot (587-meter) hole, they saw how important crevasses are in the fracturing of the ice, which takes the heaviest toll on the glacier, even more than melting. “That’s how the glacier is falling apart. It’s not thinning and going away. It shatters,” said Schmidt, lead author of one of two studies in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

That fracturing “potentially accelerates the overall demise of that ice shelf,” said Paul Cutler, the Thwaites program director for the National Science Foundation who returned from the ice last week. “It’s eventual mode of failure may be through falling apart.”

The work comes out of a massive $50 million multi-year international research effort to better understand the widest glacier in the world. The Florida-sized glacier has gotten the nickname the “Doomsday Glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts — more than 2 feet (65 centimeters), though that’s expected take hundreds of years.

The melting of Thwaites is dominated by what’s happening underneath, where warmer water nibbles at the bottom, something called basal melting, said Peter Davis, an oceanographer at British Antarctic Survey who is a lead author of one of the studies.

“Thwaites is a rapidly changing system, much more rapidly changing than when we started this work five years ago and even since we were in the field three years ago,” said Oregon State University ice researcher Erin Pettit, who wasn’t part of either study. “I am definitely expecting the rapid change to continue and accelerate over the next few years.”

Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley, who also wasn’t part of the studies, said the new work “gives us an important look at processes affecting the crevasses that might eventually break and cause loss of much of the ice shelf.”

The good news: Much of the flat underwater area they explored is melting much slower than they expected. The bad news: That doesn’t really change how much ice is coming off the land part of the glacier and driving up sea levels, Davis said.

Davis said the melting isn’t nearly the problem at Thwaites that glacier retreat is. The more the glacier breaks up or retreats, the more ice floats in water. When ice is on ground as part of the glacier it isn’t part of sea rise, but when it breaks off land and then goes onto water it adds to the overall water level by displacement, just as ice added to a glass of water raises water level.

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And more bad news: This is from the eastern, larger and more stable part of Thwaites. Researchers couldn’t safely land a plane and drill a hole in the ice in the main trunk, which is breaking up much faster. And they also found staircase-like steps, those crevasses, in parts of the more stable eastern side where the break-up is far faster and worse.

The key to seeing exactly how bad conditions are on the glacier would require going to the main trunk and looking at the melting from below. But that would require a helicopter to land on the ice instead of a heavier airplane and would be incredibly difficult, said studies co-author Eric Rignot of the University of California Irvine.

The main trunk’s glacier surface “is so messed up by crevasses it looks like a set of sugar cubes almost. There’s no place to land a plane,” NSF’s Cutler said.

Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who wasn’t part of the studies, said the results add to understanding how Thwaites is diminishing.

“Unfortunately, this is still going to be a major issue a century from now,” Scambos said in an email. “But our better understanding gives us some time to take action to slow the pace of sea level rise.”

When the skinny robot wended its way through the hole in the ice – made by a jet of hot water – the cameras showed not just the melting water, the crucial crevasses and seabed. It showed critters, especially sea anemones, swimming under the ice.

“To accidentally find them here in this environment was really, really cool,” Schmidt said in an interview. “We were so tired that you kind of wonder like, ‘am I really seeing what I’m seeing?’ You know because there are these little creepy alien guys (the anemones) hanging out on the ice-ocean interface.

“In the background is like all these sparkling stars that are like rocks and sediment and things that were picked up from the glacier,” Schmidt said. “And then the anemones. It’s really kind of a wild experience.”

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The move — while not final — drew immediate anger from environmentalists who saw it as a betrayal of the president’s pledges to reduce carbon emissions and promote clean energy sources.

ConocoPhillips Alaska had proposed five drilling sites as part of its Willow project, and the approach listed as the preferred alternative by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in the report calls for up to three drill sites initially. Even as the land agency released its report, the U.S. Interior Department said in a separate statement that it has “substantial concerns” about the project and the report’s preferred alternative, “including direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and impacts to wildlife and Alaska Native subsistence.”

The Bureau of Land Management, which falls under the Interior Department, also said in the report that identifying a preferred alternative “does not constitute a commitment or decision” and notes it could select a different alternative in the final decision.

Opponents have raised concerns about the impacts of oil development on wildlife, such as caribou, and efforts to address climate change.

The project is in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a vast region roughly the size of Indiana on Alaska’s resource-rich North Slope. ConocoPhillips Alaska says the project, at its peak, could produce an estimated 180,000 barrels of oil a day.

The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, an Alaska Native corporation, and the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope joined the North Slope Borough in praising the proposed alternative and calling on the administration to move ahead on the project. In a joint statement, they said advancing the project “is critical for domestic energy independence, job security for Alaskans and the right of Alaska Natives to choose their own path.”

Other Alaska Native groups have expressed concerns.

Leaders of the Native Village of Nuiqsut and city of Nuiqsut in a recent letter said they do not feel like the Bureau of Land Management is listening. The community is about 36 miles (58 kilometers) from the Willow project, in a remote region of Alaska’s far north.

The Bureau of Land Management’s “engagement with us is consistently focused on how to allow projects to go forward; how to permit the continuous expansion and concentration of oil and gas activity on our traditional lands,” Native Village of Nuiqsut President Eunice Brower and City of Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak wrote in a letter dated last week.

ConocoPhillips has estimated the project would create as many as 2,000 jobs during construction and 300 permanent jobs and generate between $8 billion and $17 billion in federal, state and local revenue in an area more than 600 miles (965 kilometers) from Anchorage.

Erec Isaacson, the president of ConocoPhillips Alaska, said in a statement the company believes the project will “benefit local communities and enhance American energy security while producing oil in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.” He said the review process “should be concluded without delay.”

The members of Alaska’s congressional delegation — Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat — all said they welcomed Wednesday’s environmental review and urged the administration to allow the project to move forward.

The project would bring miles of roads and hundreds of miles of pipeline to the area, disrupt animal migration patterns and erode habitat if it goes forward, said Earthjustice, an environmental group.

Jeremy Lieb, an attorney with the group, said Willow is currently the largest proposed oil project in the U.S. He said it is “drastically out of step with the Biden administration’s goals to slash climate pollution and transition to clean energy.” President Joe Biden campaigned on pledges to end new drilling on public lands and has set an ambitious goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

Biden “will be remembered for what he did to tackle the climate crisis, and as things stand today, it’s not too late for him to step up and pull the plug on this carbon bomb,” Lieb said.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who fought the Willow project as a member of Congress, has the final decision on whether to approve it, although top White House climate officials are likely to be involved. Haaland has multiple options, including outright approval or rejection or a middle ground that allows some drilling but blocks other development. A final decision is expected no sooner than early March.

Federal agencies have within the last week made two major decisions around resources in Alaska. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it was reinstating restrictions on road-building and logging on the country’s largest national forest in southeast Alaska, the Tongass National Forest.

And on Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it was exercising its so-called veto authority under the federal Clean Water Act to block plans for a proposed copper and gold mine in a mineral-rich area of southwest Alaska because of concerns about its environmental impact on a rich Alaska aquatic ecosystem that supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

Flight No. EK2646 flew for just under an hour over the coastline of the United Arab Emirates, after taking off from Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, and heading out into the Persian Gulf before circling back to land. The fuel powered one of the Boeing’s two General Electric Co. engines, with the other running on conventional jet fuel for safety.

“This flight is a milestone moment for Emirates and a positive step for our industry as we work collectively to address one of our biggest challenges — reducing our carbon footprint,” Adel al-Redha, Emirates’ chief operation officer, said in a statement.

Emirates, a state-owned airline under Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, described the sustainable fuel as a blend “that mirrored the qualities of jet fuel.” It included fuel from Neste, a Finnish firm, and Virent, a Madison, Wisconsin-based company.

Virent describes itself as using plant-based sugars to make the compounds needed for sustainable jet fuel, while Neste’s fuel comes from vegetable oils and animal fats. Those fuels reduce the release of heat-trapping carbon dioxide typically burned off by engines in flight.

Aviation releases only one-sixth the amount of carbon dioxide produced by cars and trucks, according to World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research group based in Washington. However, airplanes are used by far fewer people per day — meaning aviation is a higher per-capita source of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Airplane and engine manufacturers have been designing more-efficient models, in part to help keep down costs of jet fuel — one of the biggest expenses airlines face. Emirates, for instance, used over 5.7 tons of jet fuel last year alone, costing it $3.7 billion out of its $17 billion in annual expenses.

But analysts suggest sustainable fuels can be three times or more the cost of jet fuel, likely putting ticket prices even higher as aviation restarts following the lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic.

It wasn’t immediately clear how much the fuel used in the Emirates’ test on Monday cost per barrel. Jet fuel cost on average $146 a barrel at the end of last week, according to S&P Global Platts.

The UAE, a major oil producer and OPEC member, is to host the next United Nations climate negotiations, or COP28, beginning in November. Already, the seven sheikhdom federation has come under fire from activists for nominating the CEO of Abu Dhabi’s state oil company to lead the U.N. negotiations known as the Conference of the Parties — where COP gets its name.

Thunberg was among hundreds of people who resumed anti-mining protests at multiple locations in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia a day after the last two climate activists holed up in a tunnel beneath the village of Luetzerath left the site.

The German government reached a deal with energy company RWE last year allowing it to destroy the village in return for ending coal use by 2030, rather than 2038. Both argue the coal is needed to ensure Germany’s energy security that’s squeezed by the cut in supply of Russian gas due to the war in Ukraine.

But environmentalists say bulldozing Luetzerath will result in vast greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is expected to miss its ambitious climate targets for the second year in a row.

Amid the heated coal debate in Germany, the European Union pushed forward on Tuesday with a major clean tech industrial project designed to boost its plans for a greener future as the 27-nation bloc pursues the goal of being climate neutral by 2050.

Elsewhere in western Germany, dozens of climate activists glued themselves to a main street in Germany’s western city of Cologne and to a state government building in Duesseldorf. Near Rommerskirchen, a group of about 120 activists also occupied the coal railroad tracks to the Neurath power plant, according to police and RWE.

Those who refused to leave the tracks were carried away, dpa reported.

In addition, several people occupied a giant digger at the coal mine of Inden, while hundreds of other protesters joined a march near Luetzerath. The village itself was evacuated by the police in recent days and is sealed off.

Once again, there were a few clashes with the police.

Several activists ran over to the Garzweiler open pit mine, according to dpa. They stood at the brink of the open pit, which has a sharp break-off edge. Police said it was dangerous and people were prohibited from staying there.

Thunberg had traveled to western Germany to participate in weekend demonstrations against the expanded mine and also took part in Tuesday’s protest near Luetzerath. Police in nearby Aachen said a group of around 50 protesters got dangerously close to the rim of the mine and did not want to leave despite being asked to do so.

All the people in that group had to be carried away from the edge of the mine and were then temporarily held to determine their identities, police said. Photos from the scene showed Thunberg was one of those whom officers took away.

One protester was able to enter the mine, RWE said, calling the move “very reckless,” dpa said.

A police spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity as is customary in Germany, said he was not permitted to give out any details on Thunberg or any other individuals who participated in the protest due to privacy rules.

Police and RWE started evicting protesters from Luetzerath on Jan. 11, removing roadblocks, chopping down treehouses and bulldozing buildings.

Activists have cited the symbolic importance of Luetzerath for years, and thousands of people demonstrated Saturday against the razing of the village by RWE for the expansion of the Garzweiler coal mine.

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In an interview Sunday with The Associated Press, the former U.S. secretary of state acknowledged that the Emirates and other countries relying on fossil fuels to fund their state coffers face finding “some balance” ahead.

However, he dismissed the idea that Sultan al-Jaber’s appointment should be automatically disqualified due to him leading the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. Activists, however, equated it to asking “arms dealers to lead peace talks” when authorities announced his nomination Thursday.

“I think that Dr. Sultan al-Jaber is a terrific choice because he is the head of the company. That company knows it needs to transition,” Kerry said after attending an energy conference in the Emirati capital. “He knows — and the leadership of the UAE is committed to transitioning.”

Still, Abu Dhabi plans to increase its production of crude oil from 4 million barrels a day up to 5 million even while the UAE promises to be carbon neutral by 2050 — a target that remains difficult to assess and one that the Emirates still hasn’t fully explained how it will reach.

Kerry pointed to a speech al-Jaber gave Saturday in Abu Dhabi, in which he called for the upcoming COP — or Conference of Parties — to move “from goals to getting it done across mitigation, adaptation, finance and loss and damage.” Al-Jaber also warned that the world “must be honest with ourselves about how much progress we have actually achieved, and how much further and faster we truly need to go.”

“He made it absolutely clear we’re not moving fast enough. We have to reduce emissions. We have to begin to accelerate this transition significantly,” Kerry said. “So I have great confidence that the right issues are going to be on the table, that they’re going to respond to them and lead countries to recognize their responsibility.”

Each year, the country hosting the U.N. negotiations nominates a person to chair the talks. Hosts typically pick a veteran diplomat as the talks can be incredibly difficult to steer between competing nations and their interests. The nominee’s position as “COP president” is confirmed by delegates at the start of the talks, usually without objections.

Al-Jaber is a trusted confidant of UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. He also led a once-ambitious project to erect a $22 billion “carbon-neutral” city on Abu Dhabi’s outskirts — an effort later pared back after the global financial crisis that struck the Emirates hard beginning in 2008. Today, he also serves as the chairman of Masdar, a clean energy company that grew out of the project.

Skepticism remains among activists over al-Jaber, however. A call by countries, including India and the United States, for a phase down of oil and natural gas never reached a public discussion during COP27 in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in November.

Activists worry that COP being held in a Mideast nation reliant on fossil fuel sales for a second year in a row could see something similar happen in the Emirates.

Asked about that fear, Kerry said: “I don’t believe UAE was involved in changing that.”

“There’s going to be a level of scrutiny — and and I think that’s going to be very constructive,” the former U.S. senator and 2004 presidential contender said. “It’s going to help people, you know, stay on the line here.”

“I think this is a time, a new time of accountability,” he added.

Still, the Emirates and the U.S. maintain close military relations, regardless of the federation making policy decisions disliked by Washington.

Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port is the most-used port of call for the U.S. Navy outside of America. Some 3,500 American troops are deployed in the country, including at Abu Dhabi’s Al Dhafra Air Base and a Navy outpost in Fujairah. The UAE has some $29 billion in pending defense sales with the Americans, including purchasing its most-advanced air defense system known by the acronym THAAD.

For Europeans in particular, Russia’s war on Ukraine has led to a reckoning on the continent’s reliance of Moscow’s natural gas to heat their homes in the winter. Though aided by an unusually warm winter, Europeans are trying to source gas elsewhere while also looking for renewables to fill whatever gaps they can.

“No country is advantaged by having a petro-dictator be able to control their future and their prices and their economy with reckless behavior,” Kerry said, referring to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

“To the degree there’s something that’s coming out of it that will change things for the better, that is Europe’s deep commitment to big reductions in emissions and to a whole shift in the nature of their energy supply,” Kerry said.

But expect record-shattering hot years soon, likely in the next couple years because of “relentless” climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas, U.S. government scientists said.

Despite a La Nina, a cooling of the equatorial Pacific that slightly reduces global average temperatures, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculates 2022’s global average temperature was 58.55 degrees (14.76 degrees Celsius), ranking sixth hottest on record. NOAA doesn’t include the polar regions because of data concerns, but soon will.

If the Arctic — which is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the world — and Antarctic are factored in, NOAA said it would be fifth warmest. NASA, which has long factored the Arctic in its global calculations, said 2022 is essentially tied for fifth warmest with 2015. Four other scientific agencies or science groups around the world put the year as either fifth or sixth hottest.

NOAA and NASA records go back to 1880.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said global temperature is “pretty alarming … What we’re seeing is our warming climate, it’s warning all of us. Forest fires are intensifying. Hurricanes are getting stronger. Droughts are wreaking havoc. Sea levels are rising. Extreme weather patterns threaten our well-being across this planet.”

Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit group of independent scientists, said it was the fifth warmest on record and noted that for 28 countries it was the hottest year on record, including China, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany and New Zealand.

Another group, whose satellite-based calculations tend to run cooler than other science teams, said it was the seventh hottest year.

Last year was slightly toastier than 2021, but overall the science teams say the big issue is that the last eight years, from 2015 on, have been a step above the higher temperatures the globe had been going through. All eight years are more than 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) warmer than pre-industrial times, NOAA and NASA said. Last year was 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-19th century, NASA said.

“The last eight years have clearly been warmer than the years before,” said NOAA analysis branch chief Russ Vose.

In a human body an extra 2 degrees Fahrenheit is considered a fever, but University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Renee McPherson, who wasn’t part of any of the study teams, said the global warmth is actually worse than the equivalent of a planetary fever because fevers can be treated to go down quickly.

“You can’t take a pill for it so the fixes aren’t easy,” McPherson said. “It’s more what you consider a chronic illness like cancer.”

Like a fever, “every tenth of a degree matters and things break down and that’s what we’re seeing,” Climate Central Chief Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky.

The likelihood of the world shooting past the 1.5 degrees Celsius(2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold that the world adopted in 2015 is increasing with every year, said the World Meteorological Organization. The United Nations weather agency said the last 10 years average 1.14 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times. Vose said there’s a 50-50 chance of hitting 1.5 degrees Celsius temporarily in the 2020s.

Vose and NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt both said there are hints of an acceleration of warming but the data isn’t quite solid enough to be sure. But the overall trend of warming is rock solid, they said.

“Since the mid-1970s you’ve seen this relentless increase in temperature and that’s totally robust to all the different methodologies,” Schmidt said.

The La Nina, a natural process that alters weather worldwide, is in its third straight year. Schmidt calculated that last year the La Nina cooled the overall temperature by about a tenth of a degree (.06 degrees Celsius) and that last year was the hottest La Nina year on record.

“The La Nina years of today aren’t the La Nina years of yesterday,” said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello. “Historically, we could rely on La Nina turning down the global thermostat. Now, heat-trapping gases are keeping the temperature cranked up, and handing us another top-10 warmest year on record.”

With La Nina likely dissipating and a possible El Nino on the way — which adds to warming — Schmidt said this year will likely be warmer than 2022. And next year, he said, watch out if there’s an El Nino.

“That would suggest that 2024 would be the record warmest year by quite a large amount,” Schmidt said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Scientists say about 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the upper 6,561 feet of the ocean (2000 meters), and figures released Wednesday show 2022 was another record year for ocean heat.

“There’s a real good connection between the patterns of ocean warming, the stratification, and then the weather that we experience in our daily lives on land,” including stronger hurricanes and rising seas, said study co-author John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas.

In the United States, global warming first grabbed headlines when Schmidt’s predecessor, climate scientist James Hansen, testified about worsening warming in 1988. That year would go on to be the record warmest at the time.

Now, 1988 is the 28th hottest year on record.

The last year that the Earth was cooler than the 20th century average was 1976, according to NOAA.

But scientists say average temperatures aren’t what really affects people. What hits and hurts people are how the warming makes extreme weather events, such as heat waves, floods, droughts and storms worse or more frequent or both, they said.

“These trends should concern everyone,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the study teams.

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in 2022 those extremes “undermined health, food, energy and water security and infrastructure. Large areas of Pakistan were flooded, with major economic losses and human casualties. Record breaking heat waves have been observed in China, Europe, North and South America. The long-lasting drought in the Horn of Africa threatens a humanitarian catastrophe.”

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On average it’s been about 15 degrees warmer than normal, with Wednesday being almost 30 degrees above normal. Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport recorded a record-high temperature of 85.

Months like this could be more common in the future.

As our climate changes, winter is the fastest warming season. In the United States, winters are 3.3 degrees warmer than they were in 1970.

The winters here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have warmed more than the national average. Our winter is 3.8 degrees warmer than in 1970.

This all means our coldest days of the season aren’t as cold anymore and our number of cold snaps is shrinking.

While it is nice to get outside and enjoy the warmth, there are negative impacts.

Energy usage goes up as the demand for air conditioning increases.

Warmer, shorter winters mean the earlier arrival of spring and later onset of frost. Longer growing seasons can benefit certain crops, but can also boost the growth of weeds, increase water demands, and even shift plant and animal species.

This does not help fruit. Many fruit crops require a minimum number of winter chill hours. Warmer, shorter winters mean shorter chill periods, which could lead to lower fruit yields.

Cold winters keep bugs like mosquitoes and ticks in check. But warmer, shorter winters can worsen these insects and pest-related health risks.

What could be worse for some are allergies: warmer winters and earlier starts to blooming trees and plants means allergy symptoms begin sooner and last longer.

A once-every-four-years scientific assessment found recovery in progress, more than 35 years after every nation in the world agreed to stop producing chemicals that chomp on the layer of ozone in Earth’s atmosphere that shields the planet from harmful radiation linked to skin cancer, cataracts and crop damage.

“In the upper stratosphere and in the ozone hole we see things getting better,” said Paul Newman, co-chair of the scientific assessment.

The progress is slow, according to the report presented Monday at the American Meteorological Society convention in Denver. The global average amount of ozone 18 miles (30 kilometers) high in the atmosphere won’t be back to 1980 pre-thinning levels until about 2040, the report said. And it won’t be back to normal in the Arctic until 2045.

Antarctica, where it’s so thin there’s an annual giant gaping hole in the layer, won’t be fully fixed until 2066, the report said.

Scientists and environmental advocates across the world have long hailed the efforts to heal the ozone hole — springing out of a 1987 agreement called the Montreal Protocol that banned a class of chemicals often used in refrigerants and aerosols — as one of the biggest ecological victories for humanity.

“Ozone action sets a precedent for climate action. Our success in phasing out ozone-eating chemicals shows us what can and must be done – as a matter of urgency — to transition away from fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gases and so limit temperature increase,” World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Signs of healing were reported four years ago but were slight and more preliminary. “Those numbers of recovery have solidified a lot,” Newman said.

The two chief chemicals that munch away at ozone are in lower levels in the atmosphere, said Newman, chief Earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Chlorine levels are down 11.5% since they peaked in 1993 and bromine, which is more efficient at eating ozone but is at lower levels in the air, dropped 14.5% since its 1999 peak, the report said.

That bromine and chlorine levels “stopped growing and is coming down is a real testament to the effectiveness of the Montreal Protocol,” Newman said.

“There has been a sea change in the way our society deals with ozone depleting substances,” said scientific panel co-chair David W. Fahey, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chemical sciences lab.

Decades ago, people could go into a store and buy a can of refrigerants that eat away at the ozone, punch a hole in it and pollute the atmosphere, Fahey said. Now, not only are the substances banned but they are no longer much in people’s homes or cars, replaced by cleaner chemicals.

Natural weather patterns in the Antarctic also affect ozone hole levels, which peak in the fall. And the past couple years, the holes have been a bit bigger because of that but the overall trend is one of healing, Newman said.

This is “saving 2 million people every year from skin cancer,” United Nations Environment Programme Director Inger Andersen told The Associated Press earlier this year in an email.

A few years ago emissions of one of the banned chemicals, chlorofluorocarbon-11 (CFC-11), stopped shrinking and was rising. Rogue emissions were spotted in part of China but now have gone back down to where they are expected, Newman said.

A third generation of those chemicals, called HFC, was banned a few years ago not because it would eat at the ozone layer but because it is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. The new report says that the ban would avoid 0.5 to 0.9 degrees (0.3 to 0.5 degrees Celsius) of additional warming.

The report also warned that efforts to artificially cool the planet by putting aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight would thin the ozone layer by as much as 20% in Antarctica.

Both attended the recent U.N. climate conference in Egypt, where Lula promised cheering crowds “zero deforestation” in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and a key to fighting climate change, by 2030. “There will be no climate security if the Amazon isn’t protected,” he said.

Silva told the news network Globo TV shortly after the announcement that the name of the ministry she will lead will be changed to the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

Many agribusiness players and associated lawmakers resent Silva. That stems from her time as environment minister during most of Lula’s prior presidency, from 2003 to 2010.

Lula also named Sonia Guajajara, an Indigenous woman, as Brazil’s first minister of Indigenous peoples, and Carlos Fávaro, a soybean producer, as agriculture minister.

Silva was born in the Amazon and worked as a rubber tapper as an adolescent. As environment minister she oversaw the creation of dozens of conservation areas and a sophisticated strategy against deforestation, with major operations against environmental criminals and new satellite surveillance. She also helped design the largest international effort to preserve the rainforest, the mostly Norway-backed Amazon Fund. Deforestation dropped dramatically.

But Lula and Silva fell out as he began catering to farmers during his second term and Silva resigned in 2008.

Lula appears to have convinced her that he has changed tack, and she joined his campaign after he embraced her proposals for preservation.

“Brazil will return to the protagonist role it previously had when it comes to climate, to biodiversity,” Silva told reporters during her own appearance at the U.N. summit.

This would be a sharp turnabout from the policies of the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, who pushed for development in the Amazon and whose environment minister resigned after national police began investigating whether he was aiding the export of illegally cut timber.

Bolsonaro froze the creation of protected areas, weakened environmental agencies and placed forest management under control of the agriculture ministry. He also championed agribusiness, which opposes the creation of protected areas such as Indigenous territories and pushes for the legalization of land grabbing. Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon reached a 15-year high in the year ending in July 2021, though the devastation slowed somewhat in the following 12 months.

In Egypt, Lula committed to prosecuting all crimes in the forest, from illegal logging to mining. He also said he would press rich countries to make good on promises to help developing nations adapt to climate change. And he pledged to work with other nations home to large tropical forests — the Congo and Indonesia — in what could be coordinated negotiating positions on forest management and biodiversity protection.

As environment minister, Silva would be charged with carrying out much of that agenda.

Silva is also likely to face resistance from Congress, where the farm caucus next year will account for more than one-third of the Lower House and Senate.

Two lawmakers allied with Lula who come from the nation’s agriculture sector told The Associated Press before the announcements they disagree with Silva’s nomination given the conflict of her prior tenure. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

Others were more hopeful. Neri Geller, a lawmaker of the agribusiness caucus who acted as a bridge to Lula during the campaign, said things had changed since Silva’s departure in 2008.

“At the time, Marina Silva was perhaps a little too extremist, but people from the agro sector also had some extremists,” he said, citing a strengthened legal framework around environmental protection as well. “I think she matured and we matured. We can make progress on important agenda items for the sector while preserving (the environment) at the same time.”

Silva and Brazil stand to benefit from a rejuvenated Amazon Fund, which took a hit in 2019 when Norway and Germany froze new cash transfers after Bolsonaro excluded state governments and civil society from decision-making. The Norwegian Embassy in Brazil praised “the clear signals” from Lula about addressing deforestation.

“We think the Amazon Fund can be opened quickly to support the government’s action plan once the Brazilian government reinstates the governing structure of the fund,” the embassy said in a statement to the AP.

The split between Lula and Marina in his last administration came as the president was increasingly kowtowing to agribusiness, encouraged by voracious demand for soy from China. Tension within the administration grew when Mato Grosso state’s Gov. Blairo Maggi, one of the world’s largest soybean producers, and others lobbied against some of the anti-deforestation measures.

Lula and Silva were also at odds over the mammoth Belo Monte Dam, a project that displaced some 40,000 people and dried up stretches of the Xingu River that Indigenous and other communities depended upon for fish. Silva opposed the project; Lula said it was necessary to meet the nation’s growing energy needs and hasn’t expressed any regret since, despite the plant’s impact and the fact it is generating far below installed capacity.

After Silva resigned, she quit Lula’s Workers’ Party and became a fierce critic of him and his successor, Dilma Rousseff. Silva and Lula didn’t begin to reconcile until this year’s presidential campaign, finding common cause in defeating Bolsonaro, whom they deemed an environmental villain and would-be authoritarian.

Caetano Scannavino, coordinator of Health and Happiness, an Amazon nonprofit that supports sustainable projects, said Silva “grew to become someone larger than only an environment minister.”

“This is important, as the challenges in the environmental area are even greater than two decades ago,” Scannavino said, citing growing criminal activities in the Amazon and increasing pressure from agribusiness eager to export to China and Europe. “Silva’s success is Brazil’s success in the world, too. She deserves all support.”

Researchers surveyed Western Hudson Bay — home to Churchill, the town called the ‘Polar Bear Capital of the World,’ — by air in 2021 and estimated there were 618 bears, compared to the 842 in 2016, when the population was last surveyed.

“The actual decline is a lot larger than I would have expected,” said Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta who has studied Hudson Bay polar bears for nearly four decades. Derocher was not involved in the study.

Since the 1980s, the number of bears in the region has fallen by nearly 50%, the authors found. The ice essential to their survival is disappearing.

Polar bears rely on arctic sea ice — frozen ocean water — that shrinks in the summer with warmer temperatures and forms again in the long winter. They use it to hunt, perching near holes in the thick ice to spot seals, their favorite food, coming up for air. But as the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world because of climate change, sea ice is cracking earlier in the year and taking longer to freeze in the fall.

That has left polar bears — all 19 populations that live across the Arctic — with less ice on which to live, hunt and reproduce.

Polar bears are not only critical predators in the Arctic. For years, before climate change began affecting people around the globe, they were also the best-known face of climate change.

Researchers said the concentration of deaths in young bears and females in Western Hudson Bay is alarming. Young bears need energy to grow and cannot survive long periods without enough food and female bears struggle because they expend so much energy nursing and rearing offspring.

The result confirms what scientists predicted might happen to the species as their habitat is further destroyed, the study said.

“It certainly raises issues about the ongoing viability,” Derocher said. “That is the reproductive engine of the population.”

Back in July, severe turbulence led to at least eight minor injuries on a flight to Nashville, Tennessee, which had to be diverted to Alabama. Another three serious injuries to crew members were reported on three separate flights this year to Detroit, Miami and Columbus, Ohio, according to data from the National Transportation Safety Board.

U.S. airlines have made steady improvements in their overall accident rate, but turbulence continues to be a major cause of accidents and injuries, according to a 2021 NTSB report. Turbulence accounted for 37.6% of all accidents on larger commercial airlines between 2009 and 2018.

The Federal Aviation Administration also stated in a release Monday that there were 146 serious injuries from turbulence from 2009 to 2021.

Climate change is expected to make turbulence worse in the coming decades, experts say. And while improvements in forecasting will help, not everyone expects the technology to ever be perfect.

In the meantime, the NSTB says that more can be done — both within the industry and among passengers. And everyone agrees that simply wearing a seatbelt during the entire flight will significantly reduce one’s risk of injury.

What Is Turbulence?

Turbulence is essentially unstable air that moves in a non-predictable fashion. Most people associate it with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is clear-air turbulence, which can be hard to predict and often with no visible warning in the sky ahead.

Clear-air turbulence happens most often in or near the high-altitude rivers of air called jet streams. The culprit is wind shear, which is when two huge air masses close to each other move at different speeds. If the difference in speed is big enough, the atmosphere can’t handle the strain, and it breaks into turbulent patterns like eddies in water.

“When those eddies are on the same scale as the aircraft, it causes one side of the aircraft to go up and one side to go down or causes the airplane to lose and gain altitude very quickly,” said Thomas Guinn, a meteorology professor at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

If pilots experience moderate turbulence, they can generally avoid it by flying to a higher altitude, Guinn said. But severe turbulence needs to be avoided all together.

“We can give kind of broad areas of where the turbulence is,” Guinn said. “If the indicators are for severe, then we generally expect pilots to to avoid those regions.”

What Role Does Climate Change Play?

Paul D. Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in England, says global warming is changing temperature patterns in the upper atmosphere. And that is causing more instability in the jet streams.

“More specifically, at flight-cruising altitudes, the tropics are warming more rapidly than the poles … leading to stronger north-south temperature differences across the jet stream, and it is those temperature differences that drive the wind shear,” Williams wrote in an email.

But the implications for air travelers are still not fully known, he cautioned.

“One could argue that pilots should be getting better at avoiding turbulence over time, because the specialized forecasts that are used to seek out smooth routes are gradually improving,” Williams wrote. “So more turbulence in the atmosphere will not necessarily translate into more injuries.”

How Common Are Turbulence-Related Injuries?

The NTSB’s 2021 report showed that there were 111 turbulence-related accidents between 2009 and 2018 that resulted in at least one serious injury. That figure applies to commercial carrier planes with more than nine passenger seats.

“Most passengers seriously injured … are either out of their seats or seated with their seat belts unfastened,” the report said.

Flight attendants — who are often up and moving — were most commonly hurt, accounting for 78.9% of those seriously injured.

Numbers released Monday by the FAA showed a similar breakdown between 2009 and 2021: 116 of the 146 serious turbulence injuries — or 79% — were among crew.

Accident reports filed with the NTSB provide examples. For instance, turbulence on a flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Miami in July 2021 resulted in a flight attendant “striking the floor hard” in the aft galley and being diagnosed with “a fractured compressed vertebra.”

On another flight from San Antonio to Chicago in August of last year, a flight attendant “had fallen to her knees because of the turbulence” and “was diagnosed with a fractured kneecap.” And on a flight from Baltimore to Atlanta in October 2021, a flight attendant fell and broke her ankle during drink service when the plane “unexpectedly entered a cloud and experienced moderate to borderline severe turbulence.”

“When turbulence occurs, it can be severe and lead to significant, very serious injuries: everything from broken bones to spinal issues to neck issues,” NTSB Chair Jennifer L. Homendy said in an interview.

What Can Be Done?

The NTSB’s 2021 report offered a long list of recommendations. They included more information-sharing among pilots, carriers and air traffic controllers regarding the weather and turbulence incidents.

“We want to make sure that the best suite of technologies is used … to provide the best information to pilots and flight attendants and passengers,” Homendy told The Associated Press.

The agency also urged revisions to safety recommendations regarding when flight attendants should be secured in their seats, including additional portions of descent, which would “reduce the rate of flight attendant injuries.”

The report also cited parents who have been unable to hold infants securely on their laps during turbulence. The NTSB stated that it’s safest for children under the age of two to be in their own seat and using an appropriate child restraint system.

Michael Canders, director of the Aviation Center at Farmingdale State College in New York, said many in the industry are already sharing information with each other regarding turbulence, while forecasting has improved over the years.

But he’s unconvinced that it will ever be perfect.

“There’s this argument or debate about, ‘Will technology save us or do we need to back off and take better care of the earth?’ ” said Canders, who is also an associate professor of aviation. “I think we have to do both.”

Canders added that preventing injuries from turbulence is “best addressed by sitting in your seat and seat-belting in.”

The U.S. Postal Service said Tuesday that it intends to purchase at least 66,000 electric delivery vehicles as part of a push to transform its delivery fleet.

The electric vehicles would amount to more than half the 106,000 vehicles it plans to acquire for delivery between now and 2028. The new vehicles will start to replace its aging fleet of 220,000 vehicles, the Postal Service said in a press release.

The Postal Service has faced public pressure from environmental campaigns to electrify its fleet.

In April, environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the USPS for its failure to conduct an adequate environmental analysis before deciding to replace its vehicle fleet with more “fuel-guzzling combustion mail trucks,” according to a press release from the Sierra Club.

“Instead of receiving pollution with their daily mail packages, communities across the U.S. will get the relief of cleaner air,” Katherine García, director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Sierra Club was one of the groups pressuring the USPS to go electric.

The USPS said Tuesday its investment is expected to reach $9.6 billion, about a third of which comes from the Inflation Reduction Act. The funding will help the Postal Service build what has the potential to be one of the largest electric vehicle fleets in the country, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said in a statement.

“We have a statutory requirement to deliver mail and packages to 163 million addresses six days per week and to cover our costs in doing so — that is our mission,” DeJoy said. “As I have said in the past, if we can achieve those objectives in a more environmentally responsible way, we will do so.”

The global framework comes a day before the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP15, is set to end in Montreal. China, which holds the presidency at this conference, released a new draft earlier in the day that gave the sometimes contentious talks much-needed momentum.

The most significant part of the agreement is a commitment to protect 30% of land and water considered important for biodiversity by 2030. Currently, 17% of terrestrial and 10% of marine areas are protected.

“There has never been a conservation goal globally at this scale,“ Brian O’Donnell, the director of the conservation group Campaign for Nature, told reporters. “This puts us within a chance of safeguarding biodiversity from collapse … We’re now within the range that scientists think can make a marked difference in biodiversity.”

The draft also calls for raising $200 billion by 2030 for biodiversity from a range of sources and working to phase out or reform subsidies that could provide another $500 billion for nature. As part of the financing package, the framework calls for increasing to at least $20 billion annually by 2025 the money that goes to poor countries — or about double what is currently provided. That number would increase to $30 billion each year by 2030.

Some advocates wanted tougher language around subsidies that make food and fuel so cheap in many parts of the world. The document only calls for identifying subsidies by 2025 that can be reformed or phased out and working to reduce them by 2030.

“The new text is a mixed bag,” Andrew Deutz, director of global policy, institutions and conservation finance for The Nature Conservancy, said. “It contains some strong signals on finance and biodiversity but it fails to advance beyond the targets of 10 years ago in terms of addressing drivers of biodiversity loss in productive sectors like agriculture, fisheries, and infrastructure and thus still risks being fully transformational.”

The ministers and government officials from about 190 countries have mostly agreed that protecting biodiversity has to be a priority, with many comparing those efforts to climate talks that wrapped up last month in Egypt.

Climate change coupled with habitat loss, pollution and development have hammered the world’s biodiversity, with one estimate in 2019 warning that a million plant and animal species face extinction within decades — a rate of loss 1,000 times greater than expected. Humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely, and 1 out of 5 people of the world’s 8 billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said.

But they have struggled for nearly two weeks to agree on what that protection looks like and who will pay for it.

The financing has been among the most contentions issues, with delegates from 70 African, South American and Asian countries walking out of negotiations Wednesday. They returned several hours later.

Brazil, speaking for developing countries during the week, said in a statement that a new funding mechanism dedicated to biodiversity should be established and that developed countries provide $100 billion annually in financial grants to emerging economies until 2030.

“All the elements are in there for a balance of unhappiness which is the secret to achieving agreement in U.N. bodies,” Pierre du Plessis, a negotiator from Namibia who is helping coordinate the African group, told The Associated Press. “Everyone got a bit of what they wanted, not necessarily everything they wanted. Let’s see if there is there is a spirit of unity.”

Others praised the fact the document recognizes the rights of Indigenous communities. In past biodiversity documents, indigenous rights were often ignored and they rarely were part of the larger discussions other than a reference to their traditional knowledge. The framework would reaffirm the rights of Indigenous peoples and ensure they have a voice in any decision making.

“It’s important for the rights of Indigenous peoples to be there, and while it’s not the exact wording of that proposal in the beginning, we feel that it is a good compromise and that it addresses the concerns that we have,” Jennifer Corpuz, a representative of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity said. “We believe that it’s a good basis for us to be able to implement policy at the national level.”

But the Wildlife Conservation Society and other environmental groups were concerned that the draft puts off until 2050 a goal of preventing the extinction of species, preserving the integrity of ecosystems and maintaining the genetic diversity within populations. They fear that timeline is not ambitions enough.

Cloud seeding has been around since the 1940s. It’s become widespread of late as the West battles a drought of historic proportions. States, utility companies and even ski resorts are footing the bill.

While it was was assumed for decades to be effective, recent studies have helped prove that cloud seeding works, and there’s no evidence that silver iodide is harmful at current levels. Experts say cloud seeding generally yields a 5% to 15% increase in precipitation.

It’s no cure for drought, but cloud seeding can be an important water management tool.

“We can’t make a storm happen and we can’t create conditions in this storm that are ideal. Those happen naturally,” said Jason Carkeet, a utility analyst and hydrologist with the Turlock Irrigation District in central California. Turlock started its cloud-seeding program in 1990.

“What we’re doing is just taking advantage of existing conditions, naturally occurring conditions, and trying to make the storm again more efficient from a water supply perspective,” Carkeet said.

How cloud seeding works

When done aerially, cloud seeding involves loading up a plane with silver iodide. Flares are placed on the wings and fuselage.

The pilot reaches a certain altitude, where temperatures are ideal, and shoots the flares into the cloud. The silver iodide causes individual water droplets within the clouds to freeze together, forming snowflakes that eventually become so heavy that they fall.

Absent the freezing process, the droplets wouldn’t bond together and become large enough to precipitate as either rain or snow.

“The cloud initially is all water,” said Bruce Boe, vice president of meteorology at Weather Modification International, a private company that’s been providing cloud-seeding services since 1961. “Eventually, as it gets toward the summit of the mountain, it may be 50% ice or maybe more than that. But even if it is, there’s still a lot of liquid water left there.”

Boe said there’s a “window of opportunity” to get the precipitation big enough to fall “before it crests the mountain and starts to descend and thus warm.”

For cloud-seeding pilots like Joel Zimmer, who works with Weather Modification International to seed clouds for the Turlock Irrigation District, flying into the storm can be an exhilarating but intense experience.

“By the time the wheels are up, you’re in cloud,” said Zimmer, whose route involves seeding over the Sierra Nevada mountains. “And we’re in cloud the entire mission until we’re shooting an approach back into an airport and then pop out of the clouds and have a visual on the runway. It feels like you’re a sub commander in the Navy. You don’t see anything.”

From a water supply perspective, it’s most valuable to seed clouds over mountains, where the water is essentially stored as snow until the spring runoff.

“When it’s out on the plains such as North Dakota, it’s still a benefit because it helps recharge soil moisture,” Boe said. “But it can’t be stored and used for a later date.”

While Texas uses cloud seeding to help irrigate fields for farmers, it’s more common in the West, where states like Idaho, California, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming use it to help fill up their rivers and reservoirs. Most programs use planes for cloud seeding, but some use ground-based flares.

“It’s a lot more common than people think,” Carkeet said. “More basins have a seeding program than do not have a seeding program.”

Costs and impact

Boe says the cost is almost always worth it.

“It makes a lot of sense to water managers to go ahead and do it, even if the increase is on the order of a few percentage points,” he said.

Idaho Power spends about $4 million a year on its cloud-seeding program, which yields an 11% or 12% increase in snowpack in some areas, resulting in billions of gallons of additional water at a cost of about $3.50 per acre-foot. That compares with about $20 per acre-foot for other methods of accessing water, such as through a water supply bank.

And though Turlock only sees a 3% to 5% increase in runoff from its program — which has a maximum budget of $475,000 — California will take all the extra water it can get.

“It’s one of the things that makes it so hard to evaluate, is you don’t see a doubling or tripling of the precipitation,” Boe said. “You see an incremental increase, but you add that up over the course of a winter and then it can be significant.”

Watch the video to learn more about what it takes to make it rain.

The predawn launch aboard a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California capped a highly successful year for NASA.

Nicknamed SWOT — short for Surface Water and Ocean Topography — the satellite is needed more than ever as climate change worsens droughts, flooding and coastal erosion, according to scientists.

“We’re going to be able to see things that we could just not see before … and really understand where water is at any given time,” said Benjamin Hamlington at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

About the size of an SUV, the satellite will measure the height of water on more than 90% of Earth’s surface, allowing scientists to track the flow and identify potential high-risk areas. It will also survey millions of lakes as well as 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) of rivers, from headwater to mouth.

The satellite will shoot radar pulses at Earth, with the signals bouncing back to be received by a pair of antennas, one on each end of a 33-foot (10-meter) boom.

It should be able to make out currents and eddies less than 13 miles (21 kilometers) across, as well as areas of the ocean where water masses of varying temperatures merge.

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NASA’s current fleet of nearly 30 Earth-observing satellites cannot make out such slight features. And while these older satellites can map the extent of lakes and rivers, their measurements are not as detailed, said the University of North Carolina’s Tamlin Pavelsky, who is part of the mission.

Perhaps most importantly, the satellite will reveal the location and speed of rising sea levels and the shift of coastlines, key to saving lives and property. It will cover the globe between the Arctic and Antarctica at least once every three weeks, as it orbits more than 550 miles (890 kilometers) high. The mission is expected to last three years.

NASA and the French Space Agency collaborated on the $1.2 billion project, with Britain and Canada chipping in.

“What a spectacular, truly spectacular, launch,” said NASA program manager Nadya Vinogradova-Shiffer. “It is a pivotal moment, and I’m very excited about it.”

Already recycled, the first-stage booster returned to Vandenberg eight minutes after liftoff to fly again one day.

It’s the latest milestone this year for NASA. Among the other highlights: glamour shots of the universe from the new Webb Space Telescope; the Dart spacecraft’s dead-on slam into an asteroid in the first planetary defense test; and the Orion capsule’s recent return from the moon following a test flight.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

It’s a technology that has the potential to one day accelerate the planet’s shift away from fossil fuels, which are the major contributors to climate change. The technology has long struggled with daunting challenges.

Here’s a look at exactly what nuclear fusion is, and some of the difficulties in turning it into the cheap and carbon-free energy source that scientists believe it can be.

What Is Nuclear Fusion?

Look up, and it’s happening right above you — nuclear fusion reactions power the sun and other stars.

The reaction happens when two light nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus. Because the total mass of that single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei, the leftover mass is energy that is released in the process, according to the Department of Energy.

In the case of the sun, its intense heat — millions of degrees Celsius — and the pressure exerted by its gravity allow atoms that would otherwise repel each other to fuse.

Scientists have long understood how nuclear fusion has worked and have been trying to duplicate the process on Earth as far back as the 1930s. Current efforts focus on fusing a pair of hydrogen isotopes — deuterium and tritium — according to the Department of Energy, which says that particular combination releases “much more energy than most fusion reactions” and requires less heat to do so.

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How Valuable Would This Be?

Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy and society at the University of California at Berkeley, said nuclear fusion offers the possibility of “basically unlimited” fuel if the technology can be made commercially viable. The elements needed are available in seawater.

It’s also a process that doesn’t produce the radioactive waste of nuclear fission, Kammen said.

How Are Scientists Trying to Do This?

One way scientists have tried to recreate nuclear fusion involves what’s called a tokamak — a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber that uses powerful magnets to turn fuel into a superheated plasma (between 150 million and 300 million degrees Celsius) where fusion may occur.

The Livermore lab uses a different technique, with researchers firing a 192-beam laser at a small capsule filled with deuterium-tritium fuel. The lab reported that an August 2021 test produced 1.35 megajoules of fusion energy — about 70% of the energy fired at the target. The lab said several subsequent experiments showed declining results, but researchers believed they had identified ways to improve the quality of the fuel capsule and the lasers’ symmetry.

“The most critical feature of moving fusion from theory to commercial reality is getting more energy out than in,” Kammen said.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature announced the update during the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP15, conference in Montreal. The union’s hundreds of members include government agencies from around the world, and it’s one of the planet’s widest-reaching environmental networks.

The IUCN uses its Red List of Threatened Species to categorize animals approaching extinction. This year, the union is sounding the alarm about the dugong — a large and docile marine mammal that lives from the eastern coast of Africa to the western Pacific Ocean.

The dugong is vulnerable throughout its range, and now populations in East Africa have entered the red list as critically endangered, IUCN said in a statement. Populations in New Caledonia have entered the list as endangered, the group said.

The major threats to the animal are unintentional capture in fishing gear in East Africa and poaching in New Caledonia, IUCN said. It also suffers from boat collisions and loss of the seagrasses it eats, said Evan Trotzuk, who led the East Africa red list assessment.

“Strengthening community-led fisheries governance and expanding work opportunities beyond fishing are key in East Africa, where marine ecosystems are fundamental to people’s food security and livelihoods,” Trotzuk said.

The IUCN Red List includes more than 150,000 species. The list sometimes overlaps with the species listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, such as in the case of the North Atlantic right whale. More than 42,000 of the species on the red list are threatened with extinction, IUCN says.

IUCN uses several categories to describe an animal’s status, ranging from “least concern” to “critically endangered.” IUCN typically updates the red list two or three times a year. This week’s update includes more than 3,000 additions to the red list. Of those, 700 are threatened with extinction.

Jane Smart, head of IUCN’s Centre for Science and Data, said it will take political will to save the jeopardized species, and the gravity of the new listings can serve as a clarion call.

“The news we often give you on this is often gloomy, a little bit depressing, but it sparks the action, which is good,” Smart said.

Pillar coral, which is found throughout the Caribbean, was moved from vulnerable to critically endangered in this week’s update. The coral is threatened by a tissue loss disease, and its population has shrunk by more than 80% across most of its range since 1990, IUCN said. The IUCN lists more than two dozen corals in the Atlantic Ocean as critically endangered.

Almost half the corals in the Atlantic are “at elevated risk of extinction due to climate change and other impacts,” Beth Polidoro, an associate professor at Arizona State University and red list coordinator for IUCN.

Unsustainable harvesting and poaching have emerged as threats to abalone, which are used as seafood, IUCN said. Twenty of the 54 abalone species in the world are threatened with extinction according to the red list’s first global assessment of the species.

Threats to the abalone are compounded by climate change, diseases and pollution, the organization said.

“This red list update brings to light new evidence of the multiple interacting threats to declining life in the sea,” said Jon Paul Rodríguez, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.

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Airlines and scientists are coming to a consensus that the water vapor trails created by airplanes at high altitudes may play a big role in global warming. That’s because those contrails, short for condensation trails, create clouds that trap heat in the atmosphere at the critical altitude where airliners fly.

In fact, contrail clouds may be a more significant factor in global warming than carbon dioxide or other fuel emissions, according to a European Union study measuring more than a decade of airline flights. It’s part of an emerging field of study in climate science called “effective radiative forcing,” which measures the total warming effect instead of the older standard of totaling CO2 emissions.

Now airlines, including Fort Worth-based American and Dallas-based Southwest, are trying to figure out which of these contrails are most harmful to the environment and what, if anything, can be done about it while flying commercial jets full of passengers.

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Biden made the comments during a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Biden, who is honoring Macron with the first state dinner of his presidency on Thursday evening said he and the French president spoke a “a good deal” about European concerns over his signature climate change law during an Oval Office meeting.

Macron has made clear that he and other European leaders are concerned about incentives in the new law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, that favor American-made climate technology, including electric vehicles.

Macron said that while the Biden administration’s efforts to curb climate change should be applauded, the subsidies would be an enormous setback for European companies.

Also on the agenda is the nine-month-old war in Ukraine in which Biden and Macron face headwinds as they try to maintain unity in the U.S. and Europe to keep economic and military aid flowing to Kyiv as it tries to repel Russian forces.

“The choices we make today and the years ahead will determine the course of our world for decades to come,” Biden said at an arrival ceremony.

Macron at the start of the face-to-face meeting acknowledged the “challenging times” in Ukraine and called on the two nations to better “synchronize our actions” on climate.

The leaders began their talks shortly after hundreds of people gathered on the South Lawn on a sunny, chilly morning for the ceremony that included a 21-gun salute and review of troops. Ushers distributed small French and American flags to the guests who gathered to watch Biden and Macron start the state visit.

Both leaders at the ceremony paid tribute to their countries’ long alliance. But they acknowledged difficult moments lay ahead as Western unity shows some wear nine months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In Washington, Republicans are set to take control of the House, where GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has said his party’s lawmakers will not write a “blank check” for Ukraine. Across the Atlantic, Macron’s efforts to keep Europe united will be tested by the mounting costs of supporting Ukraine in the war and as Europe battles rising energy prices that threaten to derail the post-pandemic economic recovery.

Macron at the arrival ceremony stressed a need for the U.S. and France to keep the West united as the war continues.

“Our two nations are sisters in the fight for freedom,” Macron declared.

In an interview that aired Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Macron said the U.S. and France were working together well on the war in Ukraine and geopolitics overall, but not on “some economic issues.” The U.S. climate bill and semiconductor legislation, he said, were not properly coordinated with Europe and created “the absence of a level playing field.”

Earlier, he had criticized a deal reached at a recent climate summit in Egypt in which the United States and other wealthy nations agreed to help pay for the damage that an overheating world is inflicting on poor countries. The deal includes few details on how it will be paid for, and Macron said a more comprehensive approach is needed — “not just a new fund we decided which will not be funded and even if it is funded, it will not be rightly allocated.″

Macron planned to make his case to U.S. officials against the subsidies, underscoring that it’s crucial for “Europe, like the U.S., to come out stronger … not weaker” as the world emerges from the tumult of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a senior French government official

Macron also planned to seek exceptions to the U.S. legislation for some European clean energy manufacturers, according to a second French official who requested anonymity under the presidency’s customary practices.

Biden administration officials have countered that the legislation goes a long way in helping the U.S. to meet global goals to curb climate change.

The blunt comments follow another low point last year after Biden announced a deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia, undermining a contract for France to sell diesel-powered submarines. The relationship has recovered since then with Biden acknowledging a clumsy rollout of the submarine deal and Macron emerging as one of Biden’s strongest European allies in the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Macron also raised eyebrows earlier this month in a speech at a summit in Bangkok when he referred to the U.S. and China as “two big elephants” that are the cusp of creating “a big problem for the rest of jungle.” His visit to Washington also comes as both the U.S. and France are keeping an eye on China after protests broke out last weekend in several mainland cities and Hong Kong over Beijing’s “zero COVID” strategy.

The honor of this state visit is a boost to Macron diplomatically that he can leverage back in Europe. His outspoken comments help him demonstrate that he’s defending French workers, even as he maintains a close relationship with Biden. The moment also helps Macron burnish his image as the EU’s most visible and vocal leader, at a time when Europe is increasingly concerned that its economy will be indelibly weakened by the Ukraine war and resulting energy and inflation crises.

Macron and his wife, Brigitte, came to the U.S. bearing gifts carefully tailored to their American hosts, including a vinyl and CD of the original soundtrack from the 1966 film “Un Homme et une Femme,” which the Bidens went to see on their first date, according to the palace.

Biden and First Lady Jill Biden presented the Macrons with a mirror framed by fallen wood from the White House grounds and made by an American furniture maker. It is a reproduction of a mirror from the White House collection that hangs in the West Wing.

Biden also gave President Macron a custom vinyl record collection of great American musicians and an archival facsimile print of Thomas Edison’s 1877 Patent of the American Phonograph. The First Lady gave Mrs. Macron a gold and emerald pendant necklace designed by a French-American designer.

Harris will host Macron for a lunch at the State Department before the evening state dinner for some 350 guests, a glitzy gala to take place in an enormous tented pavilion constructed on the White House South Lawn.

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Corbet reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Frank Jordans in Berlin and Chris Megerian, Colleen Long and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

But the space agency said it will still be watching human-caused carbon pollution but in different ways.

NASA on Tuesday announced that its GeoCarb mission, which was supposed to be a low-cost satellite to monitor carbon dioxide, methane and how plant life changes over North and South America, was being killed because of cost overruns.

When it was announced six years ago, it was supposed to cost $166 million, but the latest NASA figures show costs would balloon to more than $600 million and it was years late, according to NASA Earth Sciences Director Karen St. Germain.

Unlike other satellites that monitor greenhouse gases from low Earth orbit and get different parts of the globe in a big picture, GeoCarb was supposed to be at a much higher altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) from one fixed place in orbit and focus intently on North and South America. That different and further perspective proved too difficult and costly to get done on budget and on time, St. Germain said.

The equipment alone has more than doubled in price and then there were non-technical issues that would have added more, she said. The agency has already spent $170 million on the now-canceled program and won’t spend any more.

“This doesn’t reflect any reduction in our commitment to the science, the observations associated with greenhouse gases and climate change,” St. Germain said in an interview Tuesday. “We’re still committed to doing that science. But we’re going to have to do it a different way because we don’t see this instrument coming together.”

Monitoring of greenhouse gases, the main cause of global warming, is important on many levels. It can help spot leaks, say of methane, or hold to account companies and countries that have pledged to reduce emissions. Beyond governments, many private companies now do satellite monitoring of greenhouse gases.

Instead of its project, NASA is looking to launch a yet-to-be-decided Earth-focused mission, designed to be bigger and less risky. The space agency also is getting methane data from a special instrument on the International Space Station that was meant to look at mineral dust but is monitoring the potent greenhouse gas as a bonus, plus there are methane monitoring satellites from the European and Japanese space agency and some commercial and non-profit firms, she said.

NASA also has two dedicated satellites that monitor carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

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William and his wife, Catherine, will travel to Boston on Wednesday for three days of public engagements before announcing the prize winners on Friday.

Boston, birthplace of John F. Kennedy, was chosen to host the second annual prize ceremony because the late president’s 1962 “moonshot” speech — setting the challenge for Americans to reach the moon by the end of the decade — inspired the prince and his partners to set a similar goal for finding solutions to climate change and other environmental problems by 2030. The first Earthshot Prizes were awarded last year in London just before the U.K. hosted the COP26 climate conference.

But as much as the royals try to focus on the prize, William is likely to face questions about Harry and Meghan, who have criticized the royal family for racism and insensitive treatment in interviews with Oprah Winfrey and other U.S. media. The Netflix series “The Crown” has also resurrected some of the more troubled times of the House of Windsor just as the royal family tries to show that it remains relevant in modern, multicultural Britain following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

“You could say that the royal family, particularly as far as America is concerned, have had a bit of a bumpy ride of late,’’ said Joe Little, the managing editor of Majesty Magazine. “They’ve come in for huge amounts of criticism on the back of ‘The Crown’ and also the Oprah Winfrey interview, which has not particularly reflected well on the House of Windsor, so I think it’s a good opportunity whilst they’re in the U.S. … to sort of redress the balance if at all possible.’’

Whatever those efforts are, they will take place in and around Boston, where William and Kate will remain for their entire visit.

The royal couple will keep the focus on environmental issues, meeting with local organizations responding to rising sea levels in Boston and visiting Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, an incubator hub where local entrepreneurs are working on projects to combat climate change.

But they will also address broader issues, using their star power to highlight the work of Roca Inc., which tries to improve the lives of young people by addressing issues such as racism, poverty and incarceration. They will also visit Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, a leader on research into the long-term impact of early childhood experiences.

William and Kate will also meet with Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and visit the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library and Museum with the late president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy.

“The Prince and Princess are looking forward to spending time in Boston, and to learning more about the issues that are affecting local people, as well as to celebrating the incredible climate solutions that will be spotlighted through the Earthshot Prize,” their Kensington Palace office said in a statement.

Earthshot offers 1 million pounds ($1.2 million) in prize money to the winners of five separate categories: nature protection, clean air, ocean revival, waste elimination and climate change. The winners and all 15 finalists also receive help in expanding their projects to meet global demand.

Among the finalists is a startup from Kenya that aims to provide cleaner-burning stoves to make cooking safer and reduce indoor air pollution. It was the brainchild of Charlot Magayi, who grew up in one of Nairobi’s largest slums and sold charcoal for fuel.

When her daughter was severely burned by a charcoal-fired stove in 2012, she developed a stove that uses a safer fuel made from a combination of charcoal, wood and sugarcane. The stoves cut costs for users, reduce toxic emissions and lower the risk of burns, Magayi says.

Other finalists include Fleather, a project in India that creates an alternative to leather out of floral waste; Hutan, an effort to protect orangutans in Malaysia; and SeaForester, which seeks to restore kelp forests that capture carbon and promote biodiversity.

The winners will be announced Friday at Boston’s MGM Music Hall as part of a glitzy show headlined by Billie Eilish, Annie Lennox, Ellie Goulding and Chloe x Halle. It will include video narrated by naturalist David Attenborough and actor Cate Blanchett.

Prizes will be presented by actor Rami Malek, comedian Catherine O’Hara, and actor and activist Shailene Woodley. The show will be co-hosted by the BBC’s Clara Amfo and American actor and producer Daniel Dae Kim.

The ceremony will be broadcast Sunday on the BBC in the U.K., PBS in the U.S. and Multichoice across Africa.

The deal, gaveled around dawn in this Egyptian Red Sea resort city, established a fund for what negotiators call loss and damage.

It was a big win for poorer nations which have long called for money — sometimes viewed as reparations — because they are often the victims of climate-worsened floods, droughts, heat waves, famines and storms despite having contributed little to the pollution that heats up the globe.

It has also long been called an issue of equity for nations hit by weather extremes and small island states that face an existential threat from rising seas.

“Three long decades and we have finally delivered climate justice,” said Seve Paeniu, the finance minister of Tuvalu. “We have finally responded to the call of hundreds of millions of people across the world to help them address loss and damage.”

Pakistan’s environment minister, Sherry Rehman, said the establishment of the fund “is not about dispensing charity.”

“It is clearly a down payment on the longer investment in our joint futures,” she said, speaking for a coalition of the world’s poorest nations.

Antigua and Barbuda’s Molwyn Joseph, who chairs the organization of small island states, described the agreement as a “win for our entire world.”

“We have shown those who have felt neglected that we hear you, we see you, and we are giving you the respect and care you deserve,” he said.

The deal followed a game of chicken, with nations that supported the fund also signaling they would walk away if there was any backsliding on language on the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Early Sunday morning, delegates approved the compensation fund but had not dealt with the contentious issues of an overall temperature goal, emissions cutting and the desire to target all fossil fuels for phase down. Through the wee hours of the night, the European Union and other nations fought back what they considered backsliding in the Egyptian presidency’s overarching cover agreement and threatened to scuttle the rest of the process.

The package was revised again, removing most of the elements Europeans had objected to but adding none of the heightened ambition they were hoping for.

“What we have in front of us is not enough of a step forward for people and planet,” a disappointed Frans Timmermans, executive vice president of the European Union, told his fellow negotiators. “It does not bring enough added efforts from major emitters to increase and accelerate their emissions cuts.

“We have all fallen short in actions to avoid and minimize loss and damage,” Timmermans said. “We should have done much more.”

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock likewise voiced frustration.

“It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers,” she said.

The agreement includes a veiled reference to the benefits of natural gas as low emission energy, despite many nations calling for a phase down of natural gas, which does contribute to climate change.

While the new agreement doesn’t ratchet up calls for reducing emissions, it does retain language to keep alive the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The Egyptian presidency kept offering proposals that harkened back to 2015 Paris language which also mentioned a looser goal of 2 degrees. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

Nor did the final deal expand on last year’s call to phase down global use of “unabated coal” even though India and other countries pushed to include oil and natural gas in language from Glasgow. That too was the subject of last minute debate, especially upsetting Europeans.

Last year’s climate talks president chided the summit leadership for knocking down his efforts to do more to cut emissions with a forceful listing of what was not done.

“We joined with many parties to propose a number of measures that would have contributed to this emissions peaking before 2025, as the science tells us is necessary. Not in this text,” the United Kingdom’s Alok Sharma said emphasizing the last part. “Clear follow through on the phase down of coal. Not in this text. A clear commitment to phase out all fossil fuels. Not in this text. And the energy text weakened in the final minutes.”

And in his remarks to negotiators, U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell, who hails from Grenada, called on the world “to move away from fossil fuels, including coal oil and gas.”

However, that fight was overshadowed by the historic compensation fund.

“Quite a few positives to celebrate amidst the gloom and doom” of not cutting emissions fast enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, said climate scientist Maarten van Aalst of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, which responds to climate disasters.

It’s a reflection of what can be done when the poorest nations remain unified, said Alex Scott, a climate diplomacy expert at the think tank E3G.

“I think this is huge to have governments coming together to actually work out at least the first step of … how to deal with the issue of loss and damage,” Scott said. But like all climate financials, it is one thing to create a fund, it’s another to get money flowing in and out, she said. The developed world still has not kept its 2009 pledge to spend $100 billion a year in other climate aid — designed to help poor nations develop green energy and adapt to future warming.

Next year’s talks will also see further negotiations to work out details of the new loss and damage fund, as well as review the world’s efforts to meet the goals of the Paris accord, which scientists say are slipping out of reach.

According to the agreement, the fund would initially draw on contributions from developed countries and other private and public sources such as international financial institutions. While major emerging economies such as China wouldn’t automatically have to contribute, that option remains on the table. This is a key demand by the European Union and the United States, who argue that China and other large polluters currently classified as developing countries have the financial clout and responsibility to pay their way.

The fund would be largely aimed at the most vulnerable nations, though there would be room for middle-income countries that are severely battered by climate disasters to get aid.

Martin Kaiser, the head of Greenpeace Germany, described the agreement on a loss and damage as a “small plaster on a huge, gaping wound.”

“It’s a scandal that the Egyptian COP presidency gave petrostates such as Saudi Arabia space to torpedo effective climate protection,” he said.

Many climate campaigners are concerned that pushing for strong action to end fossil fuel use will be even harder at next year’s meeting, which will be hosted in Dubai, located in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.

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Wanjohi Kabukuru, David Keyton, Theodora Tongas and Kelvin Chan contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Ostrava has been working for decades to end its legacy as the most polluted area of the country, transitioning from an industrial working-class stronghold to a modern city with tourist sights. But Russia’s war in Ukraine has triggered an energy crisis in Europe that as paved the way for coal’s comeback, endangering climate goals and threatening health from increased pollution.

Households and businesses are turning to the fuel once considered obsolete as they seek a cheaper option than natural gas, whose prices have surged as Russia slashed supplies to Europe.

Demand for brown coal — the cheapest and most energy inefficient form — used by Czech households jumped by almost 35% in the first nine months of 2022 over a year earlier.

In the same period, production rose more than 20%, the first increase after an almost continuous, decadeslong decline, the Czech Industry and Trade Ministry said.

“We’re worried,” said Zdenka Němečková Crkvenjaš, who is responsible for environment as a member the governing council of the Moravian-Silesian region. “If the prices won’t go down, what might happen is that we’ll be facing an increased pollution.”

The region is part of the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, a large industrialized area straddling the Czech-Polish border with rich deposits of coal and factories producing steel, power and the type of coal used for steel-making that date to the 19th century.

A combination of burning coal for residential heating and industrial plants resulted in “catastrophic” air pollution at the end of the communist era in 1989, said Petr Jančík from Technical University Ostrava, an air pollution expert who cooperated on the Air Tritia project that recently produced an online model of the polluted air on the Czech-Polish-Slovak border.

Coal-fired power is not only disastrous for climate, it’s also a health hazard, releasing heavy particle emissions, nitrogen oxides and mercury, which contaminates fish in lakes and rivers.

A decline of industrial and mining activities and advent of new environmental standards after the Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004 vastly improved air quality.

But big challenges remain.

Airborne dust emissions — PM10 particles — now meet environmental limits in the region, but concentrations of smaller PM2.5 particles that can reach deep into the lungs and bloodstream still do not hit World Health Organization standards.

A 2021 study of more than 800 European cities by Spain’s Barcelona Institute for Global Health, or ISGlobal, puts the regional capital of Ostrava and the nearby towns of Karviná and Havířov among the top 10 most polluted European cities. It estimated that 529 deaths a year could be avoided in those three cities if air quality guidelines are met.

Burning coal also spews the dangerous substance benzo(a)pyrene, whose levels are still high despite government programs that pay to replace old furnaces with more effective ones that reduce pollution.

Some 50,000 furnaces still need to be replaced in the Ostrava region, said Němečková Crkvenjaš, estimating that figure at 500,000 in a more populated and polluted area across the border in Poland.

“I’m afraid this winter won’t be ideal as far the air pollution is concerned,” she said. “I’ll be delighted if I’m wrong.”

Roman Vank, a board member for coal seller Ridera in Ostrava, said coal sales went up some 30% compared with last year. The cheapest form — brown coal — was most in demand.

Jančík, the scientist, said the impact to air quality is hard to predict right away, especially if it’s another mild winter, and that pollution “might get only slightly worse.”

He said a positive development is that high natural gas and electricity prices force people to acquire solar panels, more effective heating systems and try to become less dependent on sources of energy.

“There are two opposing trends: The first one is that people have been trying to use better and more efficient furnaces, and the second one is they consider using more coal and wood,” Jančík said. “That’s perhaps a result of a shock or worries, and they want to get supplies ready.”

Czech Greenpeace spokesman Lukáš Hrábek expected a negative impact in the near future.

“We see conflicting trends right now. We see higher coal consumption, but at the same time, we see a massive investment in renewable energies, in heat pumps, in insulation,” Hrábek said. “So it’s hard to say what the long-term effect will be, but the short-term effect is quite obvious, the air pollution will be worse because of the higher coal consumption.”

In another sign of coal’s revival, the Czech Republic has reversed plans to completely halt mining near Ostrava to help safeguard power supplies amid the energy crunch.

The state-owned OKD company will extend its mining activities in in the Ostrava region until at least the end of next year, citing “enormous” demand. It will be mostly used for generating power and household heating, with coal-fired power plants producing almost 50% of the country’s electricity.

The decision came after the European Union agreed to ban Russian coal starting in August over the war in Ukraine and as it works to reduce the bloc’s energy ties to Russia.

The Czech government aims to phase out coal in energy production by 2033 and increase its reliance on nuclear power.

In “Rebound,” we go behind the scenes with small businesses who are finding ways to pivot as more extreme storms, wildfires, rising sea levels and drought are changing the face of their communities.

As the nation continues to battle challenges brought on by the novel coronavirus, companies are adapting in creative ways – even as employees get laid off and PPP loans remain in limbo.

Lingua Nigra, Goodies, and Kazmaleje have all transformed their businesses in some way to stay thriving through the pandemic. Now, they are offering some inspiration along the way. 

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It’s a hot question.

On one side are people like Tom Chatham, the chairman of Chatham Created Gems & Diamonds, a wholesale business selling laboratory-created gems. Diamond is only carbon, and in the right conditions one can be created in four to six weeks, he said. 

“The natural diamond industry doesn’t really like what we’re doing,” Chatham said. “And they have taken a lot of potshots at us. And we in turn have done the same to them.”

On the other is the natural diamond industry, represented by Natural Diamond Council CEO David Kellie, who argues that the stones are so different as to eliminate any comparison between the two. While chemically and structurally the two are the same, the Council maintains that the meaning and cache of a mined diamond far exceeds its lab-grown sibling. In the early days of lab-grown diamonds, there was competition but that has disappeared, he said.

“Now there is a very clear understanding that these are two very, very different products and markets,” he said. “Natural diamonds are always something that you can’t recreate because they come from the Earth.”

The Federal Trade Commission changed its definition of a diamond in 2018 to include both types, with an important caveat. Lab-created diamonds must be labeled as such.

But many would contend that regardless of origin, diamonds are a luxury – though these days, the definition of luxury is not necessarily reliant on the price tag.

“A luxury purchase doesn’t have to be a huge, expensive indulgence,” said Lara Koslow of the Boston Consulting Group. “Trading up to little small indulgences or luxuries as a key experience for someone who wants a little taste of that luxury feeling and experience to enhance their everyday.”

Koslow says luxury goods can range from expensive jewelry to small indulgences, like treating yourself to a Starbucks coffee or a scented candle. For Dallas-area candlemaker Brant Anderson, providing a luxury experience is key to his business branding. And like many in the business of growing gems in the lab, Anderson has prioritized providing a luxury product that also lessens the impact some luxuries have on the environment.

Selling luxury goods as environmentally friendly products can be tricky, notes a September 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review. In “Research: How to Position a Luxury Brand as Sustainable,” the authors write that some of the traditional methods of signaling a company is ethical and green such as using recycled materials might not work for luxury brands. Consumers could perceive eco-friendly goods as having less status, they write. 

One strategy would be to focus on authenticity, they say.

And that would make the question about which diamonds are real even more important. 

When laboratory-created diamonds entered the market, most customers of Forever Diamonds and More in San Jose, California assumed they were a synthetic alternative, said owner Jonathan Powell. That’s changing. 

He’s selling five or six such diamonds a month, up from one or two a few years ago, as his customers learn about the process. At first those buyers were younger people, who were more likely to be focused on sustainability, but that is changing too, he said.

“Almost everybody that is interested in diamonds is interested in ‘labs’ in some form or fashion,” he said. That may be because lab-grown diamonds are typically 40-50% less expensive than their mined counterparts, or it could be because customers are learning more about the broader impact of retrieving diamonds from underground.

Traditional mining exacerbates political conflict in diamond-mining areas and leaves scars on the planet, visible from space, he said. 

“Is it better that we get these stones and we don’t put huge holes in the Earth?” he asked. “I would say, ‘Yes.’”

Diamond producers commonly use open pit mining to extract stones from underground. According to the International Gem Society, mining companies move 250 tons of earth and release 160kg of greenhouse gases per carat of diamond mined. These pits can be in operation for decades, leaving large pits large enough to be visible by satellite.

For diamonds mined from the ocean, the International Gem Society says it can take two to 10 years for ecosystems on the ocean floor to recover.

Also visible from space, a stream of mining waste released when a dam at a South African diamond mine collapsed in September, killing one person and injuring 40. The mud swamped an electricity substation, shutting down power, and affected drinking water, Reuters reported.

The mine had been owned by De Beers, one of the most recognizable names in diamonds, but had been sold in 2010 to a consortium.

The industry says it is working to restore former mines through closure plans agreed to by local governments and neighboring communities. The former Argyle Diamond Mine owned by Rio Tinto in western Australia, for example, will be reshaped and vegetation grown back. The Natural Diamond Council says for every mile of land used in diamond mining, three others are protected.

The natural diamond industry also argues that lab-created diamonds are energy intensive. Lightbox, a lab-grown diamond brand owned by diamond giant De Beers, claims that every carat of lab-grown stone takes 350 kWh to produce, or about the same energy required to manufacture three pairs of jeans.

But as important as the ecological efforts by industry, the Natural Diamond Council’s Kellie says, is the human impact, particularly the more than 10 million people who make their livelihoods in the modern diamond industry. The council also cites $6.8 billion of benefits for mining communities, including schools and healthcare, and safety nets to ensure diamonds come from ethical practices.

But some customers can still have concerns over whether diamonds have been mined ethically and are “conflict-free,” meaning they do not come from conflict zones and have not been traded illegally to fund conflict. The “Kimberly Process” — named after Kimberly, South Africa — is a way to certify diamonds agreed to by the United Nations, European Union, the governments of 74 countries, the World Diamond Council and groups such as the environmental group, Global Witness. But Global Witness pulled out in 2011, arguing that the process was not successful. 

Jewelers say growing diamonds removes ethical concerns from the buying process as there is no question of a stone’s origin or environmental impact.

“With the lab counterpart, you eliminate that part because it’s guaranteed grown in a lab,” Powell said. 

There are still obstacles to getting diamond buyers on board. In the United States, some 70% of consumers say they are worried about the environment, but for some that concern is only now beginning to influence their buying decisions, said Koslow of the Boston Consulting Group. Luxury consumers tend to be less hesitant in making the leap from expressing interest in sustainable products to actually making sustainable purchases.

In Dallas, Brant Anderson’s business selling luxury candles is less fraught with broader debates over sustainability but not without them. His eco-friendly Olphactory Candles feature 13 scents, ranging from floral to citrus and draw on such ingredients as Sicilian bergamot, vanilla and lavender. Each of his candles celebrates revered jazz musicians, which he hopes elevates the luxury experience for his customers.

Also key to the luxury experience are the materials he uses in each of his candles. Anderson said he chooses high-quality wicks to limit the amount of soot released and coconut wax, one of the most sustainable waxes. 

“Coconuts are a very, very sustainable product. It is a very luxurious wax and it burns super smooth, super clean,” Anderson said. “Paraffin wax is like a petroleum sludge. That is not good for your inhalation.“

But even here there are disagreements. Paraffin wax, a commonly used ingredient in candles, is made from fossil fuels. A 2014 study found that cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene and formaldehyde, were released by paraffin wax candles, though researchers also noted that it was unlikely that normal candle use would release enough to be harmful.

The National Candle Association says that candles made from petroleum products are as safe as candles made from other materials.

A report in 2020 in the scientific journal “Current Biology” looking at the environmental impacts of the coconut industry against the palm oil industry argued that deforestation caused by coconut oil production was harming animals in Southeast Asia. The coconut industry countered that the report’s lead author has ties to the competing palm oil industry. And the Rainforest Alliance told Reuters that because the palm industry is larger it is having more of an impact.

But for a luxury candlemaker such as Anderson, offering an alternative to petroleum-sourced wax is something he is proud to provide.

“These candles are relaxation in a glass,” Anderson said. “And I try to stay as natural as possible.”

It might sound like the start of a humorous riddle, but it’s the subject of a huge scientific inquiry in New Zealand. And the answer could have profound effects on the health of the planet.

More specifically, the question is how to stop cows, sheep and other farm animals from belching out so much methane, a gas which doesn’t last as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but is at least 25 times more potent when it comes to global warming.

Because cows can’t readily digest the grass they eat, they ferment it first in multiple stomach compartments, or rumen, a process that releases huge amounts of gas. Every time somebody eats a beef burger or drinks a milkshake, it comes at an environmental cost.

New Zealand scientists are coming up with some surprising solutions that could put a big dent in those emissions. Among the more promising are selective breeding, genetically modified feed, methane inhibitors, and a potential game-changer — a vaccine.

Nothing is off the table, from feeding the animals more seaweed to giving them a kombucha-style probiotic called “Kowbucha.” One British company has even developed a wearable harness for cows that oxidizes methane as it’s burped out.

In New Zealand, the research has taken on a new urgency. Because farming is central to the economy, about half of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions come from farms, compared to less than 10% in the U.S. New Zealand’s 5 million people are outnumbered by 26 million sheep and 10 million cattle.

As part of a push to become carbon neutral, New Zealand’s government has promised to reduce methane emissions from farm animals by up to 47% by 2050.

Last month the government announced a plan to begin taxing farmers for animal burps, a world-first move that has angered many farmers. All sides are hoping they might catch a break from science.

Much of the research is taking place at a Palmerston North campus, which some have jokingly taken to calling Gumboot Valley, in a nod to Silicon Valley.

“I don’t believe there’s any other place that has the breadth of ambition that New Zealand has in terms of the range of technologies being investigated in any one place,” said Peter Janssen, a principal scientist at AgResearch, a government-owned company that employs about 900 people.

Underpinning the research are studies indicating that reducing methane doesn’t need to harm the animals or affect the quality of the milk or meat. Janssen said the microbes that live in the animals and produce methane seem to be opportunistic rather than integral to digestion.

He’s been working on developing a vaccine for the past 15 years and has focused intensively on it for the past five years. He said it has the potential to reduce the amount of methane belched by cows by 30% or more.

“I certainly believe it’s going to work, because that’s the motivation for doing it,” he said.

A vaccine would stimulate an animal’s immune system to produce antibodies, which would then dampen the output of the methane-producing microbes. One big upside of a vaccine is that it would likely only need to be administered once a year, or even perhaps even once in an animal’s lifetime.

Working in a similar way, inhibitors are compounds administered to the animals that directly dampen the methane microbes.

Inhibitors could also reduce methane by at least 30% and perhaps by up to 90%, according to Janssen. The challenge is that the compounds need to be safe for animal consumption and not pass through the meat or milk to humans. Inhibitors must also be regularly administered.

Both inhibitors and vaccines are some years away from being market ready, Janssen said.

But other technologies such as selective breeding, which could reduce methane output by 15%, will be rolled out onto sheep farms as early as next year, Janssen said. A similar program for cows may not be too far behind.

Scientists have for years been testing sheep in chambers to chart differences in how much methane they belch. The low-emitters have been bred and produced low-emitting offspring. Scientists have also been tracking genetic characteristics common to low-emitting animals that make them readily identifiable.

“I think one of the areas that New Zealand scientists, particularly, have made some great progress is in this whole area of animal breeding,” said Sinead Leahy, the principal science advisor at the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre. “And particularly, a lot of research has been done into breeding low emissions sheep.”

Another target is the feed that animals eat, which scientists believe has the potential for reducing methane output by 20% to 30%.

At one greenhouse on the campus, scientists are developing genetically modified clover. Visitors must wear booties and medical scrubs and avoid putting down objects to prevent any cross-contamination.

The scientists explain that because New Zealand farm animals eat outside in fields most of the time rather than in barns, methane-reducing feed additives like Bovaer, developed by Dutch company DSM, aren’t as useful.

Instead, they are looking to genetically modify the ryegrass and white clover that the New Zealand animals predominantly eat.

With the clover, scientists have found a way to increase tannins, which helps block methane production.

“What this team has done is they’ve actually identified, through their research, a master switch that switches on condensed tannins in the leaves,” said Linda Johnson, a science group manager at AgResearch.

Laboratory analysis indicates the modified clover reduces methane production by 15% to 19%, Johnson said.

The clover program goes hand-in-hand with a ryegrass program.

Richard Scott, an AgResearch senior scientist, said they have been able to increase the oil levels in ryegrass leaves by about 2%, which studies indicate should translate to a 10% drop in methane emissions.

But like the inhibitors and vaccine, the feed program is still some years away from being farm ready. Scientists have completed controlled tests in the U.S. and are planning a bigger field trial in Australia.

However, New Zealand has strict rules that ban most genetically modified crops, a regulatory barrier that the scientists will need to overcome if they are to introduce the modified feed to the nation’s farms.

In other research, dairy company Fonterra is trialing its probiotic Kowbucha concoction and British company Zelp is continuing to trial and refine its wearable harnesses. Other trials have indicated that a red seaweed called Asparagopsis reduces methane when eaten by cows.

But farmers aren’t waiting around for all the research to come to fruition. On the Kaiwaiwai Dairies farm near the town of Featherston, farmer Aidan Bichan said they’ve been reducing their methane output by getting more efficient.

He said that includes increasing the milk production from each cow, using less processed feed, and replacing milking cows less frequently.

“At a farm level, we’ve got to do our bit to help save the planet,” Bichan said.

“We can no longer plead ignorance to the consequences of our actions, or continue to repeat our mistakes,” Biden said.

The president’s brief attendance at the United Nations climate conference, known as COP27, was largely a victory lap as he emphasized new spending on clean energy initiatives that will “change the paradigm” for the United States and the rest of the world.

But Biden glossed over how he’s pushed for more oil and gas production to bring down costs that have been politically troublesome at home, and fueled the invasion of Ukraine by allowing Russia to fetch higher prices for its energy exports.

“This gathering must be the moment to recommit our future and our shared capacity to write a better story for the world,” Biden said.

Biden spent just three hours in Egypt, including a meeting with the country’s autocratic leader, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, before continuing on an around-the-world trip. He arrived Saturday morning for his next stop in Cambodia, where he would participate in a meeting of Southeast Asian leaders, and then Indonesia for the annual Group of 20 summit of the world’s largest economies.

Biden left Washington late Thursday buoyed by a stronger-than-expected showing by the Democratic Party in Tuesday’s midterm elections, earlier congressional passage of the largest climate investment in U.S. history and Russian military setbacks on the Ukrainian battlefield.

At the climate conference, Biden discussed a new supplemental rule that will crack down on methane emissions, expanding on a similar regulation his administration released last year. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to global warming.

Biden also spotlighted one of his key domestic successes — the Democrats’ massive health care and climate change bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act.

The U.S. commitment of some $375 billion over a decade to fight climate change gives Biden greater leverage to press other nations to fulfill their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and shift the global economy toward cleaner energy sources.

“The United States government is putting our money where our mouth is,” he said.

Biden said the spending, part of broader economic legislation he signed into law this year, will ensure the U.S. hits its target for reducing emissions by 2030.

The president was in a far different position from last year’s gathering, which came about during a particularly unhappy stretch in the bill’s tortuous path to passage.

That summit resulted in additional global commitments to meet temperature targets agreed to in the Paris Climate Accord, which Biden rejoined after his predecessor, Donald Trump, pulled the U.S. from the deal.

Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special climate envoy, said Biden “made it very clear that the climate crisis is a major top priority for the United States domestically in getting laws passed, internationally in partnership with other countries.”

She said it contributed “a positive energy coming into this conference.”

Biden argued that “good climate policy is good economic policy,” and he called on all major emitting countries to “align their ambition” to the international goal of trying to limit future global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the White House.

But even with these fresh efforts, America and the world have a long way to go to meet emissions targets that scientists hope will contain global warming. And the political will for more investment is shrinking.

Biden acknowledged that climate crises are “hitting hardest those countries and communities that have the fewest resources to respond and recover,” a reference to a leading issue at the summit.

Known as “loss and damage,” it involves asking rich countries like the United States, the top historic polluting nation, to pay what are essentially reparations for damages caused to poorer vulnerable nations that don’t emit much heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

Biden announced in his speech the U.S. would contribute $150 million “as a down payment” to initiatives to help Africa adapt to the changing climate, but that did not satisfy concerns.

“We would like for the U.S. to step up their game on loss and damage,” Sierra Club President Ramon Cruz said. “We would of course like to see more commitment to that.”

The U.S. in the past has opposed even talking about the issue, but has softened its stance and agreed to discussions. Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, has mentioned the issue in speeches. However, the U.S. doesn’t want liability to be part of any deal. In addition, Congress and the public have been reluctant to embrace many types of climate aid — and this is the most controversial type.

The lack of congressional support has tied Biden’s hands, said Alice Hill, who worked on climate issues in President Barack Obama’s administration.

Even though Biden announced other initiatives, she said, “he couldn’t deliver what the developing world most wants: enough money to adapt to climate extremes.”

Prospects for a significant breakthrough are further dampened as major emitters such as China and India are sending less-senior delegations to the conference. Biden administration officials have tried to lower expectations for results and instead cast the meeting as a return to U.S. leadership on the issue.

Biden left Washington with votes still being tallied in key races that will determine political control of Congress. Still, the president was buoyed as Democrats performed stronger than expected.

After arriving in Egypt, Biden met with el-Sissi. The leaders discussed climate, human rights and the U.S.-Egypt defense partnership, among other issues, the White House said. The Egyptian leader proactively and publicly raised human rights with Biden before their one-on-one meeting, and did so again in the private portion of the sit-down.

“We are very keen on improving this part,” said el-Sissi, who emphasized that Egypt had launched a national strategy on human rights. For his part, Biden said the U.S. and Egypt are “continuing our dialogue on human rights” and added that he hopes they’ll be “closer and stronger in every way.”

During the meeting, Biden and U.S. officials raised the case of imprisoned Egyptian pro-democracy activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah, whose family has said is undergoing an undefined medical intervention amid a hunger strike.

Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said Biden directed his aides to work with the Egyptians on that case and others, and said officials had “intense consultations on that case” while in Sharm El-Sheikh but declined to elaborate further. U.S. did not have an update on his condition, considering the family and the Egyptian government had conflicting accounts.

“This is a circumstance where it’s not trust but verify, it’s verify,” Sullivan told reporters on Air Force One as Biden traveled to Phnom Penh. “And we’ve not been able to do that.”

Sullivan added: “We are doing everything we can to secure his release.”

___

Kim reported from Phnom Penh, Cambodia. AP writers Seth Borenstein in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and Chris Megerian, Aamer Madhani, Matthew Daly and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of climate change at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.

The U.N. Environment Programme said Friday that the new Methane Alert and Response System — MARS for short — is intended to help companies act on major emissions sources but also provide data in a transparent and independent way.

It draws on satellite measurements performed by NASA and the European, German and Italian space agencies. Data from private satellite operators will also be incorporated in future.

“Each of these instruments give us a correct answer to a question that is slightly different, because each of them see different things,” said Manfredi Caltagirone, head of the International Methane Emissions Observatory at UNEP. “So the only way you can have a correct picture is to connect them all together.”

The data will be released 45 to 75 days after it is gathered, meaning companies will have sufficient time to fix the leaks by the time they become public.

“We think it is important not to just create a shaming tool, but to engage the operators and governments so they can act on the specific event,” said Caltagirone.

Releasing the measurements on a U.N.-backed platform would also ensure that it is considered neutral and reliable, providing a standard that prevents companies from “shopping around” for data that makes them look best, he said.

There will be no way to force any emitters to take action though.

“We are realistic that certain companies and certain countries will be more cooperative than others,” said Caltagirone. “But we can make sure this information is available to those who are interested in it.”

The first data will be published in the second half of next year, focusing on large methane leaks. As it matures, the platform will incorporate less dramatic but equally significant sources of emissions such as livestock and rice farms.

Cutting methane emissions worldwide is key to the Paris climate accord’s ambitious goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times. The United States, European Union and others last year launched a pledge to cut overall methane emissions worldwide by 30% by 2030.

Wilson announced on social media that he was changing his name on his social media accounts and “fancy writing paper” to “Rainnfall Heat Wave Rising Sea Levels And We Have To Do Something About It Now Wilson.” The name change is meant to draw attention to the melting arctic ice caps, which he says are melting at millions of liters per second.

The name change also coincides with the United Nations’ global climate summit, known as COP27, which began in Egypt on Nov. 6.

“Our mission.. is to raise awareness for the global risks of Arctic weather change,” Wilson said in a video shared online. “It’s not just bad news for the Arctic, but for us, too. So that’s why I changed my name and you should too, to help tell the world leaders and influencers that we need to act now.”

Wilson also pitched some other name changes for his fellow celebrities, such as “Amy Poehler Bears Are Endangered” and “Cardi The Arctic B Melting.”

The video was made in association with arcticrisk.org, which highlights the damage increasing temperatures is having on the Arctic and the world. The website even has a name generator for those looking to get involved.

Shortly after Wilson announced his name change, he tweeted that he was unable to change his name on Twitter. A disappoint he blamed on the company’s new CEO, Elon Musk.

The United Nations COP27 conference will continue until Nov. 18, and will feature world leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden.

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A 2021 report by the top body of climate scientists provided new analysis of the chance the world has to cap warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 Fahrenheit or to 2 Celsius or 3.6 Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times in the coming decades, in line with global climate goals.

Although scientists estimated it’s still possible to stay within these limits, they said it would require immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s more likely that global temperature will reach or exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the report said.

The 1.5-degree goal is “on life support,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said.

Without major action to reduce emissions, the global average temperature is on track to rise by 2.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius or 4.5 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, scientists say.

And researchers warn that the situation will get very serious before then: Once the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold is reached, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons. When the 2 degrees Celsius mark is crossed, critical tolerance levels for agriculture and health will be reached.

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But all hope is not lost, they urge.

At the time of the report’s release, Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London, said achieving the 1.5-degree goal “is still possible from a physical science point of view.”

“If we reduce emissions globally to net zero by 2040 there is still a two thirds chance to reach 1.5 degrees and if we globally achieve net zero emissions by the middle of the century, there is still a one third chance to achieve that,” she said.

If all human emissions of heat-trapping gases were to stop today, Earth’s temperature would continue to rise for a few decades but would eventually stabilize, climate scientists say. If humans don’t emit any additional planet-warming gasses, then natural processes would begin to slowly remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and global temperatures would gradually begin to decline.

“There is a direct relation between delay and warming, and between warming and risk of what we would call extreme impacts,” said Ajay Gambhir, a senior research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, based at Imperial College London. “ Unfortunately, we’re already seeing all these extreme impacts — whether it’s extreme heat waves, increased risk of crop failures, forest fires or bleaching coral reefs— already happening.”

He added: “The further we delay action on addressing climate change by reducing our emissions, the warmer the world will get.”

___

EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference is being held through Nov. 18 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. This story is part of a series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

He was not the only one preaching with tones of fire and brimstone, alternating with pathos and tragedy, trying to shake up the world’s sense of urgency at this year’s annual U.N. climate conference. “Choose life over death,” former U.S. Vice President Al Gore urged. “It is not time for moral cowardice.”

In calling for a massive overhaul of international development loans and a 10% tax on fossil fuel companies that made “$200 billion in profits in the last three months,” Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said, “Our people on this Earth deserve better.’”

“I don’t need to repeat the horror and the devastation wrecked upon this Earth over the course of the last twelve months since we met in Glasgow,” Mottley said. “Whether the apocalyptic floods in Pakistan or the heat waves from Europe to China or indeed in the last few days in my own region, the devastation caused in Belize by Tropical Storm Lisa or the torrential floods a few days ago in St. Lucia.”

Ahead of this year’s conference, known as COP27, leaders and experts have been ringing alarm bells that time is fast running out to avert catastrophic rises in temperature. But the dire warnings may not quite have the effect as they have had in past meetings because of multiple other challenges of the moment pulling leaders’ attention — from midterm elections in the U.S. to the Russia-Ukraine war.

More than 100 world leaders will speak over the next few days at the gathering in Egypt, most from developing countries demanding greater accountability from the richest, most polluting nations. Much of their focus will be on telling their stories of being devastated by climate disasters, culminating Tuesday with a speech by Prime Minister Muhammad Sharif of Pakistan, where summer floods caused at least $40 billion in damage and displaced millions of people.

“Is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering,” the summit’s host, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, told his fellow leaders. “Climate change will never stop without our intervention… Our time here is limited and we must use every second that we have.’’

El-Sissi, who called for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, was gentle compared to a fiery United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said the world “is on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

He called for a new pact between rich and poor countries to make deeper cuts in emissions with financial help and phasing out of coal in rich nations by 2030 and elsewhere by 2040. He called on the United States and China — the two biggest economies — to especially work together on climate, something they used to do until the last few years.

“Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” Guterres said. “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact.”

Guterres insisted, “Today’s urgent crises cannot be an excuse for backsliding or greenwashing.”

But bad timing and world events hang over the gathering.

Most of the leaders are meeting Monday and Tuesday, just as the United States has a potentially policy-shifting midterm election. Then the leaders of the world’s 20 wealthiest nations will have their powerful-only club confab in Bali in Indonesia days later.

Leaders of China and India — both among the biggest emitters — appear to be skipping the climate talks, although underlings are here negotiating. The leader of the top polluting country, U.S. President Joe Biden, is coming days later than most of the other presidents and prime ministers on his way to Bali.

“There are big climate summits and little climate summits and this was never expected to be a big one,” said Climate Advisers CEO Nigel Purvis, a former U.S. negotiator.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was initially going to avoid the negotiations, but public pressure and predecessor Boris Johnson’s plans to come changed his mind. New King Charles III, a longtime environment advocate, won’t attend because of his new role. And Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine created energy chaos that reverberates in the world of climate negotiations, won’t be here.

“We always want more” leaders, United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said in a Sunday news conference. “But I believe there is sufficient (leadership) right now for us to have a very productive outcome.”

In addition to speeches given by the leaders, the negotiations include “innovative’’ roundtable discussions that “we are confident, will generate some very powerful insights,” Stiell said.

The leaders showing up in droves are from the host continent Africa.

“The historical polluters who caused climate change are not showing up,’’ said Mohammed Adow of Power Shift Africa. “Africa is the least responsible, the most vulnerable to the issue of climate change and it is a continent that is stepping up and providing leadership.”

“The South is actually stepping up,” Adow told The Associated Press. “The North that historically caused the problem is failing.’’

For the first time, developing nations succeeded in getting onto the summit agenda the issue of “loss and damage” — demands that emitting countries pay for damage caused by climate-induced disasters.

Nigeria’s Environment Minister Mohammed Abdullahi called for wealthy nations to show “positive and affirmative” commitments to help countries hardest hit by climate change. “Our priority is to be aggressive when it comes to climate funding to mitigate the challenges of loss and damage,” he said.

Monday will be heavily dominated by leaders of nations victimized by climate change — not those that have created the problem of heat-trapping gases warming up the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuel. It will be mostly African nations and small island nations and other vulnerable nations that will be telling their stories.

And they are dramatic ones, droughts in Africa and floods in Pakistan, in places that could least afford it. For the first time in 30 years of climate negotiations, the summit “should focus its attention on the severe climate impacts we’re already seeing,” said World Resources International’s David Waskow.

“We can’t discount an entire continent that has over a billion people living here and has some of the most severe impacts,’’ Waskow said. “It’s pretty clear that Africa will be at risk in a very severe way.’’

Leaders come “to share the progress they’ve made at home and to accelerate action,’’ Purvis said. In this case, with the passage of the first major climate legislation and $375 billion in spending, Biden has a lot to share, he said.

While it’s impressive that so many leaders are coming to the summit, “my expectations for ambitious climate targets in these two days are very low,” said NewClimate Institute’ scientist Niklas Hohne. That’s because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which caused energy and food crises that took away from climate action, he said.

The women used superglue to attach themselves to poles holding up the skeleton of a large four-legged dinosaur that lived tens of millions of years ago.

“Unlike the dinosaurs, we hold our fate in our own hands,” protester Caris Connell, 34, said as museum visitors milled around the display. “Do we want to go extinct like the dinosaurs, or do we want to survive?”

Fellow activist Solvig Schinkoethe, 42, said that as a mother of four she feared the consequences of the climate crisis.

“This peaceful resistance is the means we have chosen to protect our children from the government’s deadly ignorance,” she said.

The museum didn’t immediately comment on the protest.

The activists were part of the group Uprising of the Last Generation, which has staged numerous demonstrations in recent months, including blocking streets and throwing mashed potatoes at a Claude Monet painting.

EU negotiators sealed on Thursday night the first agreement of the bloc’s “Fit for 55″ package set up by the Commission to achieve the EU’s climate goals of cutting emissions of the gases that cause global warming by 55% over this decade.

The EU Parliament said the deal is a “clear signal ahead of the UN COP27 Climate Change Conference that the EU is serious about adopting concrete laws to reach the more ambitious targets set out in the EU Climate Law.”

According to the bloc’s data, transport is the only sector where greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past three decades, rising 33.5% between 1990 and 2019. Passenger cars are a major polluter, accounting for 61% of total CO2 emissions from EU road transport.

The EU wants to drastically reduce gas emission from transportation by 2050 and promote electric cars, but a report from the bloc’s external auditor showed last year that the region is lacking the appropriate charging stations.

“This is a historic decision as it sets for the first time a clear decarbonization pathway — with targets in 2025, 2030 and 2035 and aligned with our goal of climate neutrality by 2050,” boasted Pascal Canfin, the chair of the environment committee of the European Parliament. “This sector, which accounts for 16% of European emissions at the moment, will be carbon neutral by 2050.“

World leaders agreed in Paris in 2015 to work to keep global temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F) by the end of the century. Scientists even the less ambitious goal will be missed by a wide margin unless drastic steps are taken to reduce emissions.

Greenpeace said the 2035 deadline is too late to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

“The EU is taking the scenic route, and that route ends in disaster,” said Greenpeace EU transport campaigner Lorelei Limousin. “A European 2035 phase-out of fossil fuel-burning cars is not quick enough: New cars with internal combustion engines should be banned by 2028 at the latest. The announcement is a perfect example of where politicians can bask in a feel-good headline that masks the reality of their repeated failures to act on climate.”

The EU Parliament and member states will now have to formally approve the agreement before it comes into force.

The Senate ratified the so-called Kigali Amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone pollution last month in a rare bipartisan vote. The measure requires participating nations to phase down production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, also known as HFCs, by 85% over the next 14 years, as part of a global phaseout intended to slow climate change.

HFCs are considered a major driver of global warming. Nearly 200 nations reached a deal in 2016 in Kigali, Rwanda, to limit HFCs and find substitutes more friendly to the atmosphere. More than 130 nations, including China, India and Russia, have formally ratified the agreement, which scientists say could help the world avoid a half-degree Celsius of global warming.

Biden pledged to embrace the Kigali deal during the 2020 presidential campaign and submitted the agreement to the Senate last year. In a related action, the Environmental Protection Agency has issued a rule limiting U.S. production and use of HFCs in line with the Kigali agreement. The EPA rule followed a 2020 law passed by Congress authorizing a 15-year phaseout of HFCs in the U.S.

White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said formal ratification of the Kigali agreement — with Biden’s signature — “means the U.S. is all-in on reducing HFCs” and advancing global efforts to combat climate change.

The agreement should lead to tens of thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in exports as clean technologies are developed to replace HFCs around the world, Zaidi said.

“It’s a real boost for investments in these cleaner technologies” — many of which have been developed in the U.S. — ”that also helps us tackle the climate crisis,” he said in an interview.

Ratification of the amendment was supported by an unusual coalition that included major environmental and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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”This is one of those truly rare things you get in the policy world where it is a win-win” for the environment and business, Chris Jahn, president and CEO of the American Chemistry Council, an industry group, said after the Senate vote. Ratification of the amendment should allow U.S. businesses to meet growing demand refrigerators and air conditioning units in Asia, South America and Europe, Jahn and other business leaders said.

Some Republican senators opposed the treaty, saying it would give China preferential treatment by designating it as a developing country.

The Senate approved a largely symbolic amendment by GOP Sens. Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Mike Lee of Utah declaring that China is not a developing country and should not be treated as such by the United Nations or other intergovernmental organizations.

“More bad news for the planet,” the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement along with its latest annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. It’s one of several reports released in recent days looking at several aspects of humanity’s struggle with climate change in the run up to the U.N.’s latest climate conference, in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.

Of the three main types of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — the biggest jump from 2020 to 2021 was in methane, whose concentrations in the air came in with the biggest year-on-year increase since regular measurements began four decades ago, WMO said.

“The continuing rise in concentrations of the main heat-trapping gases, including the record acceleration in methane levels, shows that we are heading in the wrong direction,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Methane is more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, but doesn’t stay in the atmosphere nearly as long as carbon dioxide and there’s 200 times more carbon dioxide in the air than methane. Over a 20-year time-period, a molecule of methane traps about 81 times the heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide but over a century it goes down to trapping 28 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since pre-industrial times, which WMO sets at around the year 1750, CO2 concentrations in the air have increased by nearly 50% to 415.7 parts per million, with the U.S., China and Europe responsible for the bulk of emissions. Methane is up 162% to 1,908 parts per billion, and nitrous oxide — whose human-made sources are things like biomass burning, industrial processes and fertilizer use — is up about one-quarter to 334.5 parts per million.

Earlier on Wednesday the U.N’s climate office said current pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions put the planet on course to blow past the limit for global warming countries agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

It said its latest estimate based on 193 national emissions targets would see temperatures rise to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages by the end of the century, a full degree higher than the ambitious goal set in the Paris pact to limit warming by 1.5 C (2.7 F).

“We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required to put us on track toward a 1.5 degrees Celsius world,” the head of the U.N. climate office, Simon Stiell, said in a statement. “To keep this goal alive, national governments need to strengthen their climate action plans now and implement them in the next eight years.”

The report found that emissions will also increase by 10.6% by 2030 from 2010 levels, a slight decrease from the 13.7% estimates last year.

A report published Wednesday by Climate Action Tracker who track nations’ pledges to reduce warming found that of 40 indicators for reducing emissions — like weaning off coal, ramping up electric vehicles or reducing deforestation — the world wasn’t on track for any of them to match the levels of emissions reductions scientists say are needed to limit warming to 1.5C. Over half of the indicators showed the world is “well off track” to cutting emissions but added that promising progress has been made.

Climatologists and environmental advocates have been raising their voices for years about the impact of climate change, by pointing to vast changes in the weather in recent decades like forest fires in China and western United States, drought in the horn of Africa and unprecedented flooding in Pakistan – to name only a few.

CO2 remains the single most important greenhouse gas generated by human activity — mainly from burning of fossil fuels and cement production — amounting to about two-thirds of the warming effect on the climate, known as radiative forcing. Over the last decade, carbon dioxide has been responsible for about four-fifths of that warming effect.

Methane accounts for about more than one-sixth of the warming effect, said WMO. Three-fifths of methane reaches the atmosphere through the burps and farts of livestock, rice farming, use of fossil fuels, biomass burning and landfills; the rest comes from natural sources like wetlands and termites.

Rob Jackson, who heads the Global Carbon Project, suggested that the spikes in methane over the last two years were “mysterious” — either blips related to the coronavirus pandemic, which temporary dented emissions, or a sign of “a dangerous acceleration in methane emissions from wetlands and other systems we’ve been worrying about for decades.”

“Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide are not just rising, they’re rising faster than ever. While not losing our focus on carbon dioxide, we need to pay more attention to the ‘other’ greenhouse gases,” he added. “Fortunately, methane is beginning to get the attention it deserves” through initiatives like the Global Methane Pledge, a capping effort supported by the U.S. and European Union, among others.

Nitrous oxide remains “mostly ignored,” he added.

Taalas, who has been repeating warnings about global warming for years, says the focus should remain on CO2.

“As the top and most urgent priority, we have to slash carbon dioxide emissions which are the main driver of climate change and associated extreme weather, and which will affect climate for thousands of years through polar ice loss, ocean warming and sea level rise,” he said.

NASA announced that an instrument on the International Space Station designed to look at mineral dust turned out to be a useful tool to find “super emitters” of methane from orbit. NASA shared three images showing plumes several miles long that are spewing methane.

A group of a dozen leaks from pipeline and other gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan is leaking 55 tons of methane per hour, about the same as the infamous 2015 Aliso Canyon leak, drilling in New Mexico that’s spewing 18 tons per hour and a landfill in Iran that’s emitting 8 tons per hour.

“We’re looking in places where no one is planning to look for methane,” said NASA instrument scientist Robert Green. “If it’s there we’ll see it.”

They proved it couldn’t be anything but carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.

For more than 30 years top scientists from across the globe have worked together every several years to draft a report on climate change and what causes it and with each report — and increases in global temperatures — they have become more and more certain that climate change is caused by human activities. In the latest version of their report they said: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”

Scientists — including the late Ralph Cicerone, the former president of the National Academy of Scientists — have told The Associated Press their confidence in climate change being a human caused problem is equivalent to their certainty in understanding that cigarettes are deadly.

One way to show humans caused the warming “is by eliminating everything else,” said Princeton University climate scientist Gabe Vecchi.

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Scientists can calculate how much heat different suspects trap, using a complex understanding of chemistry and physics and feeding that into computer simulations that have been generally accurate in portraying climate, past and future. They measure what they call radiative forcing in watts per meter squared.

The first and most frequent natural suspect is the sun. The sun is what warms Earth in general providing about 1,361 watts per meter squared of heat, year in year out. That’s the baseline, the delicate balance that makes Earth livable. Changes in energy coming from the sun have been minimal, about one-tenth of a watt per meter squared, scientists calculate.

But carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is now trapping heat to the level of 2.07 watts per meter squared, more than 20 times that of the changes in the sun, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Methane, another powerful heat-trapping gas, is at 0.5 watts per meter square.

The sun’s 11-year cycle goes through regular but small ups and downs, but that doesn’t seem to change Earth’s temperature. And if anything the ever so slight changes in 11-year-average solar irradiance have been shifting downward, according to NASA calculations, with the space agency concluding “it is therefore extremely unlikely that the Sun has caused the observed global temperature warming trend over the past century.”

In other words, the sun had an alibi.

The other natural suspects — volcanoes and cosmic rays — had even less influence during the last 150 years of warming, scientists conclude.

The other way to show that it is carbon dioxide causing warming is by building what Vecchi calls “a causal chain.”

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records measured on a Hawaiian volcano show rising carbon dioxide levels as do ice records that go back thousands of years. But the key is what type of carbon dioxide.

There are three types of carbon-containing material. Some contain light carbon, or carbon-12. Some contain heavy carbon or carbon-13 and still others contain radioactive carbon-14.

Over the last century or so, there’s more carbon-12 in the atmosphere compared to carbon-13 and less carbon-14 in recent decades, according to NOAA. Carbon-12 is essentially fossil carbon from long ago, as in fossil fuels. So the change in the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 tells scientists the carbon in the air is more from burning fossil fuels than natural carbon, Vecchi said.

That’s the fingerprint of burning coal, oil and natural gas.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Two activists from the group Last Generation, which has called on the German government to take drastic action to protect the climate and stop using fossil fuels, approached Monet’s “Les Meules” painting at Potsdam’s Barberini Museum and threw a thick substance over the painting and its gold frame.

The group later confirmed via a post on Twitter that the mixture was mashed potatoes. The two activists, both wearing orange high-visibility vests, also glued themselves to the wall below the painting.

“If it takes a painting – with #MashedPotatoes or #TomatoSoup thrown at it – to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all: Then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting!” the group wrote on Twitter, along with a video of the incident.

In total, four people were involved in the incident, according to German news agency dpa.

The Barberini Museum said later Sunday that because the painting was enclosed in glass, the mashed potatoes didn’t cause any damage. Part of Monet’s “Haystacks” series, “Les Meules” which is commonly known in English as “Grainstacks” was painted in 1890 and sold for $110.7 million at a 2019 auction. It is expected to be back on display on Wednesday.

“While I understand the activists’ urgent concern in the face of the climate catastrophe, I am shocked by the means with which they are trying to lend weight to their demands,” museum director Ortrud Westheider said in a statement.

Police told dpa they had responded to the incident, but further information about arrests or charges was not immediately available.

The Monet painting is the latest artwork in a museum to be targeted by climate activists to draw attention to global warming.

The British group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in London’s National Gallery earlier this month.

Just Stop Oil activists also glued themselves to the frame of an early copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and to John Constable’s “The Hay Wain” in the National Gallery.