BERLIN (AP) — Officials from 40 countries met Monday in Berlin to discuss how to stay focused on fighting the increasing impacts of climate change while the world reels from the economic fallout of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.N. secretary general admonished countries to take action instead of playing a “blame game.”

European nations vowed to fulfill their climate targets even as the war in Ukraine prompts some to seek new fossil fuel sources and turn at least temporarily to coal to make up for shortfalls in Russian energy deliveries, something viewed with suspicion by developing countries.

Organizers have billed the two-day gathering in Berlin as an opportunity to rebuild trust between rich and poor nations ahead of November’s U.N. climate summit in Egypt, after technical talks last month achieved little progress on key issues such as climate aid for developing nations.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that the global warming limit of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) agreed in the 2015 Paris climate accord was slipping further out of reach even as more people are being hit by extreme floods, droughts, storms and wildfires.

“No nation is immune,” he said. “Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”

Guterres, appearing by video, criticized countries for continuing “to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future,” and urged rich nations to keep the promises they have made to the poor.

Developing countries are still waiting for rich nations to provide $100 billion in climate aid each year, a target they were meant to reach by 2020.

“At the minimum, stop paying lip service to the $100 billion a year pledge,” Guterres said. “Give clarity through deadlines and timelines and get concrete on its delivery.”

The issue of “loss and damage ” plays a prominent role in the Berlin meeting, where ministers will break into small groups for discussions in hopes of building trust ahead of the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November.

Antiguan Environment Minister Molwyn Joseph, speaking for small-island developing nations that are among those most at risk, underlined the urgency of the issue.

“What it is described as crisis, for us it is catastrophe,” he told delegates. “There are small islands that are disappearing.”

Big polluters, however, have long resisted the idea that they should pay for the destruction their greenhouse gas emissions are causing around the world.

Meanwhile, scientists say the extreme heat slamming large parts of the northern hemisphere in recent weeks could become the new normal in summer if global warming continues.

“As this meeting is taking place, parts of Europe are baking, indeed they’re burning. And sadly, it’s an experience that is all too familiar to many millions across the globe,” said Alok Sharma, the British official who led last year’s climate talks in Glasgow. He told delegates: “My plea to you all is, please, let’s speed up our work.”

His successor for the upcoming climate talks, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, said it’s essential to ensure that “the current state of affairs is not taken as a pretext to backtrack or renege on previous commitments, especially those related to supporting developing countries.”

The question of energy sources endangered by Russia’s war in Ukraine looms over the Berlin meeting — in which China was participating, but Russia wasn’t invited.

Environmental activists warn that recent efforts by countries such as Germany to tap new sources of fossil fuels such as gas could undermine countries’ already fragile climate actions.

Germany’s climate envoy, Jennifer Morgan, acknowledged that “the Russian war of aggression is forcing us to take short-term decisions we don’t like, including the increased use of coal for a very limited period of time.”

“But we are not only sticking rock-solidly to our climate goals — we are accelerating the energy transition and will phase out the use of fossil energy even faster,” she told The Associated Press, citing a newly approved plan to ramp up solar and wind power generation in Germany.

Some appeared skeptical. South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy said that “we cannot have backtracking” on coal by rich nations.

“Developed countries must continue taking the lead with ambitious action,” she said. “The ultimate measure of climate leadership is not what countries do in times of comfort and convenience, but what they do in times of challenge and controversy.”

The vice president of the European Union’s executive Commission, Frans Timmermans, responded that even if “some of our member states have to increase the use of fossil fuels now … this will not take us away from the goals we’ve set.”

The U.S. also comes to the talks following setbacks for President Joe Biden in his efforts to regulate pollution and boost renewable energy such as wind and solar power.

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If nations do all that they’ve promised to fight climate change, the world can still meet one of two internationally agreed upon goals for limiting warming. But the planet is blowing past the other threshold that scientists say will protect Earth more, a new study finds.

The world is potentially on track to keep global warming at, or a shade below, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than pre-industrial times, a goal that once seemed out of reach, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

That will only happen if countries not only fulfill their specific pledged national targets for curbing carbon emissions by 2030, but also come through on more distant promises of reaching net zero carbon emissions by mid-century, the study says.

This 2 degree warmer world still represents what scientists characterize as a profoundly disrupted climate with fiercer storms, higher seas, animal and plant extinctions, disappearing coral, melting ice and more people dying from heat, smog and infectious disease. It’s not the goal that world leaders say they really want: 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. The world will blast past that more prominent and promoted goal unless dramatic new emission cuts are promised and achieved this decade and probably within the next three years, study authors said.

Both goals of 1.5-degrees and 2-degrees are part of the 2015 Paris climate pact and the 2021 Glasgow follow-up agreement. The 2-degree goal goes back years earlier.

“For the first time we can possibly keep warming below the symbolic 2-degree mark with the promises on the table. That assumes of course that the countries follow through on the promises,” said study lead author Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist.

That’s a big if, outside climate scientists and the authors, say. It means political leaders actually doing what they promise

The study “examines only this optimistic scenario. It does not check whether governments are making efforts to implement their long-term targets and whether they are credible,” said Niklas Hohne of Germany, a New Climate Institute scientist who analyzes pledges for Climate Action Tracker and wasn’t part of this study. “We know that governments are far from implementing their long-term targets.”

Hohne’s team and others who track pledges have similarly found that limiting warming to 2 degrees is still possible, as Meinshausen’s team has. The difference is that Meinshausen’s study is the first to be peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal.

Sure, the 2-degree world requires countries to do what they promise. But cheaper wind and solar have shown carbon emissions cuts can come faster than thought and some countries will exceed their promised cuts, Meinshausen said. He also said the way climate action works is starting with promises and then policies, so it’s not unreasonable to take countries at their word.

Mostly, he said, limiting warming to 2 degrees is still a big improvement compared to just five or ten years ago, when “everybody laughed like ‘ha we’ll never see targets on the table that bring us closer to 2 degrees’,” Meinshausen said. “Targets and implemented policies actually can turn the needle on future temperatures. I think that optimism is important for countries to see. Yes, there is hope.”

About 20% to 30% of that hope is due to the Paris climate agreement, but the rest is due to earlier investments by countries that made green energy technologies cheaper than dirty fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, Meinshausen said.

Yet, even if that’s good news, it’s not all good, he said.

“Neither do we have a margin of error (on barely limiting to 2 degrees) nor do the pledges put us on a path close to 1.5 degrees,” Meinshausen said.

In 2018 the United Nations’ scientific expert team studied the differences between the 1.5- and 2-degree thresholds and found considerably worse and more extensive damages to Earth at 2 degrees of warming. So the world has recently tried to make the 1.5 degrees goal possible.

Earth has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, often considered the late 1800s, so 2 degrees of warming really means another 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now.

Meinshausen’s analysis “looks good and solid, but there are always assumptions that could be important,” said Glen Peters, a climate scientist who tracks emissions with Global Carbon Project.

The biggest assumption is that nations somehow get to promised net zero carbon emissions, most of them by 2050 but a decade or two later for China and India, said Peters, research director of the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway.

“Making pledges for 2050 is cheap, backing them up with necessary short-term action is hard,” he said, noting that for most countries, there will be five or six elections between now and 2050.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Houston-based oil company and two subsidiaries were indicted Wednesday for a crude spill that fouled Southern California waters and beaches in October, an event prosecutors say was caused in part by failing to properly act when alarms repeatedly alerted workers to a pipeline rupture.

Amplify Energy Corp. and its companies that operate several oil rigs and a pipeline off Long Beach were charged by a federal grand jury with a single misdemeanor count of illegally discharging oil.

Investigators believe the pipeline was weakened when a cargo ship’s anchor snagged it in high winds in January, months before it ultimately ruptured Oct. 1, spilling up to about 25,000 gallons (94,600 liters) of crude oil in the ocean.

U.S. prosecutors said the companies were negligent six ways, including failing to respond to eight leak detection system alarms over a 13-hour period that should have alerted them to the spill and would have minimized the damage. Instead, the pipeline was shut down after each alarm and then restarted, spewing more oil into the ocean.

Amplify blamed the unnamed shipping company for displacing the pipeline and said workers on and offshore responded to what they believed were false alarms because the system wasn’t functioning properly. It was signaling a potential leak at the platform where no leak was occurring, the company said.

The leak, in fact, was from a section of undersea pipe 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) miles away, Amplify said.

“Had the crew known there was an actual oil spill in the water, they would have shut down the pipeline immediately,” the company said.

The Associated Press first reported last week that Amplify’s leak detection system was not fully functional. At the time, the company declined to explain what that meant.

AP in October reported on questions surrounding the company’s failure to respond to an alarm.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday that it was responding to a report of a sheen off the coast of Bolsa Chica State Beach but hadn’t determined the source and planned to fly over the scene Thursday morning.

The area is in the same general vicinity as that of the October leak, although the pipeline currently is out of service.

In that case, the first pipeline rupture alarm sounded at 4:10 p.m. Oct. 1, but the leak was not discovered until well after sunrise the next morning and reported about 9 a.m. Citizens on shore called 911 to report the strong smell of crude that first afternoon, and an anchored cargo vessel reported seeing a large sheen on the water before sunset.

Local authorities who went looking for a spill Oct. 1 didn’t find it. The Coast Guard said it was too dark to go out and search for the spill by the time they received a report about it. They went out after sunrise, finding it around the time the company reported it.

Just days after the spill, Amplify CEO Martyn Willsher had refused to answer questions at news conferences about the timeline surrounding the spill and a report that an alarm at 2:30 a.m. Oct. 2 alerted controllers about a possible spill. He maintained the company didn’t learn of the spill until a boat saw a sheen on the water at 8:09 a.m. that morning.

Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley said the indictment validates residents who had detected the spill a day earlier and reported it.

“It’s terrible that they basically lied to the community during the press briefings and caused people to believe that what they saw with their own eyes or smelled or knew was actually not true,” she said. “What we know now is that the company knew this, and the alarms went off like they were supposed to, and nobody did anything.”

Even after the eighth and final alarm sounded, the pipeline operated for nearly an hour in the early morning, prosecutors said.

Pipeline safety advocate Bill Caram said the indictment paints a picture of a reckless company.

“I understand there are false positives on leak detection systems but this is our treasured coastline,” said Caram, director of the Bellingham, Washington-based Pipeline Safety Trust. “The fact that they kept hitting the snooze button and ignoring alarms, stopping and starting this pipeline and all the while leaking oil in the Pacific Ocean is reckless and egregious.”

Prosecutors also found that the pipeline was understaffed and the crew was fatigued and insufficiently trained in the leak detection system.

The indictment’s description of company personnel as fatigued pointed to a long-standing industry problem, said pipeline expert Ramanan Krishnamoorti with the University of Houston.

“Fatigue and overworked staff is old and trite and inexcusable,” he said. “This has been demonstrated over and over again as being the single most important vulnerability.”

It’s not clear why it took so long for the 1/2-inch (1.25-centimeter) thick steel line to leak after the apparent anchor incident, or whether another anchor strike or other incident led to the rupture and spill.

The spill came ashore at Huntington Beach and forced about a weeklong closure of the city’s beaches and others along the Orange County coast. Fishing in the affected area resumed only recently, after testing confirmed fish did not have unsafe levels of oil toxins.

If convicted, the charge carries up to five years of probation for the corporation and fines that could total millions of dollars.

___

Brown reported from Billings, Montana. Associated Press reporter Amy Taxin contributed.

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Those high temperatures were recorded at the Frederick Douglass Greater Rochester International Airport and serve as shorthand for the region. The reality, though, is more complicated.

An aerial view of the city of Rochester shows the southeast quadrant to be blanketed in green. That is due in part to large parks but also to a generous tree canopy. In these neighborhoods, the residents are mostly white, the houses are single-family and home values reflect the attractiveness of the tree cover.

On some privileged streets, hundred-year-old maples and oaks arch entirely over the roadway, making it possible to walk several blocks at a stretch in the cool shade. The heat is mediated by the shade. It is warm, to be sure, but there is some respite.

Across town the experience on a hot June day is much different. Trees are less mature, if they exist at all. The sun blasts the pavement, generating ambient heat and making the sidewalk feel like a toaster oven. Residents here are mostly not white, and mostly do not own the houses and apartments where they live. Hot days are just that – hot.

The effect of this difference goes beyond temporary discomfort. A vast body of research shows major benefits for people living near trees or significant greenery, in particular in urban settings.

Perhaps the fundamental difference is in air temperature and quality. Trees not only create shade but prevent heat from building up in and radiating out from sidewalks. Some studies have found differences of five degrees Fahrenheit or more from street trees alone; urban parks, even small ones, have a greater effect. At the same time, trees filter out pollutants from the air; each individual tree has a demonstrable effect on air quality in its immediate surroundings, and the benefit is amplified with the number of trees planted.

Those air temperature and quality effects in turn have been shown to improve the health of people living around them. Lower temperatures and cleaner air can prevent respiratory illness, including asthma. Studies also demonstrate a link between access to trees and improved mental health.

If trees can do so much good, why aren’t they planted equally throughout the city? The answer, as with so many societal ills, goes back to discriminatory and racist actions by the government and private actors throughout the 20th century as Rochester and Monroe County were being built.

Parks were placed in comparatively wealthy sections of the city, as were lush thoroughfares like Seneca Parkway in Maplewood and Nunda Boulevard in the Cobbs Hill neighborhood. Often, these green parcels were donated and maintained by private developers.

The blossoming magnolia trees on Oxford Street, for example, date back to the late 19th century, when the street was part of Henry Hooker’s farm. He developed part of it for housing and laid the magnolias out himself. The city and local volunteers have maintained them ever since.

By contrast, housing built for European immigrants and southern Black migrants in the early- to mid-20th century was conceived in strictly economic terms, with no serious consideration for green space.

One critic in the early 1970s, for example, described Rochester’s first public housing project, the Hanover Houses, as illustrating “an approach which implies that housing for low income families must be esthetic wastelands, so as not to offend ‘the silent majority taxpayer.’”

Climate change has added even greater urgency to address inequity in the urban forest. Pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and making cities more livable are crucial steps to making a cooler, more resilient planet.

Yet the answer is not as simple as dropping seeds in the ground and walking away. For some people, trees are a nuisance and a hazard. They add pollen to the air, drop leaves in the fall and can provide cover for unsavory activities. Eventually they die, sometimes taking a chunk of roof with them.

My reporting on the urban forest in Rochester under the auspices of the 2021 Data Fellowship, then, will include three main strands. One is data on tree distribution and effects on air quality and human health. The second is the historical context of how trees came to be where they are, and why. The third is what ties it together: gathering the voices of Rochester residents to explain how they are affected by the trees that stand, or do not stand, in their communities.

Together, those three elements provide an important insight into the inequitable way that our community was built. At the same time, they hopefully will offer a roadmap toward a more just and sustainable future.

Justin Murphy | Columnist

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The Center for Biological Diversity and about three dozen organizations sent a petition Wednesday to the Department of the Interior, arguing it has the authority to end these leases. The groups say offshore drilling threatens wildlife, fisheries and tourism and the decades-old platforms off the coast of California are especially susceptible to problems due to their age.

The move comes several weeks after an undersea pipeline that shuttles oil from offshore platforms to the coast leaked about 25,000 gallons (94,635 liters) of crude into the ocean off Orange County.

“Federal officials have the power and the duty to stop the oil industry from killing our birds, fouling our beaches and polluting our climate,” Emily Jeffers, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “The Biden administration needs to bring the hammer down on offshore drilling in California’s federal waters.”

The Department of the Interior declined to comment on the petition.

The department is required to respond to the petition, Jeffers said. If it doesn’t, she said the groups could take legal action.

The spill washed blobs of oil ashore affecting wildlife and the local economy, though the environmental damage so far has been less than initially feared. But environmental advocates say the long-term impact on sensitive wetland areas and marine life is unknown and shop owners in surf-friendly Huntington Beach fear concern about oil will keep tourists away even once the tar is gone.

Federal investigators are examining whether a 1,200-foot (366-meter) cargo ship that was dragging anchor in rough seas caught the pipeline operated by Houston-based Amplify Energy and pulled it across the seafloor early this year. They have not determined if the Panama-registered MSC DANIT caused the spill or if the line was hit by something else or failed due to a preexisting problem.

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The virtual conversation, the first in the School’s Centennial Distinguished Speakers Series, took place ahead of World Food Day on October 16 and the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow, which starts on October 31.

McKibben joined the discussion from a Washington D.C. hotel room only hours after getting arrested outside the White House in a protest with indigenous groups demanding bold action on climate change. He began by citing the many ways the climate crisis is a public health crisis, beginning with the millions of annual deaths linked to fossil fuel combustion. In early September, 200 journals around the world, including the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, published an urgent joint editorial warning that global temperature rise and loss to biodiversity “risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”

Turning to the risks to the food system, McKibben said climate-related disasters are already making it harder to grow food, contributing to an uptick in hunger around the world—a sharp reversal after decades of nutrition gains. “The most basic human question is ‘what’s for dinner?’ or even more basically, ‘is there going to be any?’” he said. “That’s a question we thought we had begun to lick in the 20th Century. It’s now a question that is being deeply reopened.”

Ziska, a plant physiologist with expertise in climate change, said the changing climate was stressing food systems in many ways, from desertification to whip-sawing temperature changes, to the spread of insects and diseases. “Things are changing with a rapidity that hasn’t been seen before. Farmers are having a hard time trying to adjust,” he said. At the same time, climate change threatens food safety and nutrition. “Numerous studies show that recent and projected changes in carbon dioxide are going to have a negative effect on the quality of your food.”

CHANGING THE FOOD SYSTEM

Even as climate change is leading to hunger and malnutrition, the industrial food system itself is contributing about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions if you count the fuel used to grow and fertilize crops and transport food, as well deforestation for pasture and methane produced by cattle. While changing our diets to eliminate beef or meat altogether is commendable, McKibben says these kinds of individual lifestyle changes are nowhere near sufficient to address the climate crisis.

“We’re past the point where the climate math [cutting emissions in half by 2030] is going to be made work one vegan dinner at a time, one Tesla at a time, one anything at a time,” McKibben stated. “The most important thing that individuals can do is be a little less individual and join together in the movements large enough to make changes in the basic political and economic ground rules.” These needed changes include those to the agricultural system.

Ziska, whose book Agriculture, Climate Change, and Food Security in the 21st Century: Our Daily Bread comes out on October 1, said the current industrial food system where “everything has to be cheap; everything has to be fast; everything has to be uniform” only works so long as the climate is relatively stable. Now, as extreme weather becomes commonplace, he says farmers need to diversify the crops they grow. “Growing the same crop variety year after year is asking for trouble,” he said.

To make these adaptations, food scientists have to answer urgent questions such as what crop varieties are best suited to respond to or adapt to climate change. Or how new agricultural techniques can make a difference. For example, switching to a less water-intensive way of growing rice would conserve water, cut methane emissions, and save farmers money. “Research is one of the cornerstones of moving this forward,” he said.  

DEAL OR NO DEAL?

How the U.S. chooses or chooses not to address climate change hangs in the balance in Congress. The $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill would incentivize the transition to renewable energy with a goal of achieving net-zero by 2050. While climate activists worry that its climate goals are not nearly bold enough, two so-called moderate Democrats are successfully pushing to water down its strongest provisions. Nevertheless, McKibben said passing the bill has extra urgency given that the biggest global climate talks in six years are starting in Glasgow in less than two weeks.

“We need to send our envoy, John Kerry, there with something in his pocket,” McKibben said. “[The bill] also has wonderful provisions about health, education, nutrition, and so forth. It’s an effort to build a working society on all counts. But the bottom line for a working society it has to have a climate that we can actually adapt to and live in.”

Courtesy of Columbia Mailman School of Public Health

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BIG SUR, Calif. (AP) — Good weather continued to help firefighters Thursday as they worked to suppress a forest fire in rugged and almost inaccessible California coastal mountains near a remote Buddhist monastery south of Big Sur.

Below average temperatures and increased relative humidity significantly reduced activity of the nearly 4.5-square-mile (11.6-square-kilometer) fire in Los Padres National Forest, but it still posed a threat to about 125 homes and other buildings, including the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

Seven firefighting monks have been clearing brush and running a sprinkler system dubbed “Dharma rain,” which helps keep moisture around the buildings, said Sozan Miglioli, president of San Francisco Zen Center, which operates the monastery.

Containment increased to 19% but authorities noted the forecast called for a transition back to warmer and drier conditions on Friday and into the weekend, raising the possibility of increased fire activity.

“If the fire becomes more active it could reposition on the steep slopes and begin to burn aggressively,” the firefighting command’s daily summary said.

In the Sierra Nevada, air and ground firefighting gained 20% containment of a 586-acre (237-hectare) wildfire ignited by lightning in the Whitney Portal area, Inyo National Forest officials said.

Firefighters were wrapping buildings there in fire-resistant material.

Whitney Portal is a major starting point for hikers climbing Mount Whitney — the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S. Hikers on Thursday managed to retrieve some of the more than two dozen cars that were trapped there after the fire ignited on June 18.

In the south, another fire erupted Wednesday near the Pala Casino north of San Diego. It covered a few hundred acres and prompted some evacuation warnings that were later lifted. Authorities said the blaze was spreading dangerously but it had slowed by nightfall. It did not cause any building damage.

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The annual peak of global heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air has reached another dangerous milestone: 50% higher than when the industrial age began.

And the average rate of increase is faster than ever, scientists reported Monday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average carbon dioxide level for May was 419.13 parts per million. That’s 1.82 parts per million higher than May 2020 and 50% higher than the stable pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million, said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans.

Carbon dioxide levels peak every May just before plant life in the Northern Hemisphere blossoms, sucking some of that carbon out of the atmosphere and into flowers, leaves, seeds and stems. The reprieve is temporary, though, because emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas for transportation and electricity far exceed what plants can take in, pushing greenhouse gas levels to new records every year.

“Reaching 50% higher carbon dioxide than preindustrial is really setting a new benchmark and not in a good way,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the research. “If we want to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we need to work much harder to cut carbon dioxide emissions and right away.”

Climate change does more than increase temperatures. It makes extreme weather — storms, wildfires, floods and droughts — worse and more frequent and causes oceans to rise and get more acidic, studies show. There are also health effects, including heat deaths and increased pollen. In 2015, countries signed the Paris agreement to try to keep climate change to below what’s considered dangerous levels.

The one-year jump in carbon dioxide was not a record, mainly because of a La Nina weather pattern, when parts of the Pacific temporarily cool, said Scripps Institution of Oceanography geochemist Ralph Keeling. Keeling’s father started the monitoring of carbon dioxide on top of the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Loa in 1958, and he has continued the work of charting the now famous Keeling Curve.

Scripps, which calculates the numbers slightly differently based on time and averaging, said the peak in May was 418.9.

Also, pandemic lockdowns slowed transportation, travel and other activity by about 7%, earlier studies show. But that was too small to make a significant difference. Carbon dioxide can stay in the air for 1,000 years or more, so year-to-year changes in emissions don’t register much.

The 10-year average rate of increase also set a record, now up to 2.4 parts per million per year.

“Carbon dioxide going up in a few decades like that is extremely unusual,” Tans said. “For example, when the Earth climbed out of the last ice age, carbon dioxide increased by about 80 parts per million and it took the Earth system, the natural system, 6,000 years. We have a much larger increase in the last few decades.”

By comparison, it has taken only 42 years, from 1979 to 2021, to increase carbon dioxide by that same amount.

“The world is approaching the point where exceeding the Paris targets and entering a climate danger zone becomes almost inevitable,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of the research.

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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The water crisis along the California-Oregon border went from dire to catastrophic this week as federal regulators shut off irrigation water to farmers from a critical reservoir and said they would not send extra water to dying salmon downstream or to a half-dozen wildlife refuges that harbor millions of migrating birds each year.

In what is shaping up to be the worst water crisis in generations, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said it will not release water this season into the main canal that feeds the bulk of the massive Klamath Reclamation Project, marking a first for the 114-year-old irrigation system. The agency announced last month that hundreds of irrigators would get dramatically less water than usual, but a worsening drought picture means water will be completely shut off instead.

The entire region is in extreme or exceptional drought, according to federal monitoring reports, and Oregon’s Klamath County is experiencing its driest year in 127 years.

“This year’s drought conditions are bringing unprecedented hardship to the communities of the Klamath Basin,” said Reclamation Deputy Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, calling the decision one of “historic consequence.” “Reclamation is dedicated to working with our water users, tribes and partners to get through this difficult year and developing long-term solutions for the basin.”

The canal, a major component of the federally operated Klamath Reclamation Project, funnels Klamath River water from the Upper Klamath Lake just north of the Oregon-California border to more than 130,000 acres (52,600 hectares), where generations of ranchers and farmers have grown hay, alfalfa and potatoes and grazed cattle.

Only one irrigation district within the 200,000-acre (80,940-hectare) project will receive any water from the Klamath River system this growing season, and it will have a severely limited supply, the Klamath Water Users Association said in a statement. Some other farmers rely on water from a different river, and they will also have a limited supply.

“This just couldn’t be worse,” said Klamath Irrigation District president Ty Kliewer. “The impacts to our family farms and these rural communities will be off the scale.”

At the same time, the agency said it would not release any so-called “flushing flows” from the same dam on the Upper Klamath Lake to bolster water levels downstream in the lower Klamath River. The river is key to the survival of coho salmon, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. In better water years the pulses of water help keep the river cool and turbulent — conditions that help the fragile species. The fish are central to the diet and culture of the Yurok Tribe, California’s largest federally recognized tribe.

The tribe said this week that low flows from drought and from previous mismanagement of the river by the federal agency was causing a die-off of juvenile salmon from a disease that flourishes when water levels are low. Yurok fish biologists who have been testing the baby salmon in the lower Klamath River are finding that 70% of the fish are already dead in the traps used to collect them and 97% are infected by the parasite known as C. shasta.

“Right now, the Klamath River is full of dead and dying fish on the Yurok Reservation,” said Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe. “This disease will kill most of the baby salmon in the Klamath, which will impact fish runs for many years to come. For salmon people, a juvenile fish kill is an absolute worst-case scenario.”

Irrigators, meanwhile, reacted with disbelief as the news of a water shut-off in the canals spread. A newsletter published by the Klamath Water Users Association, which represents many of the region’s farmers, blared the headline, “Worst Day in the History of the Klamath Project.” Farmers reported already seeing dust storms that obscured vision for 100 yards (91 meters), and they worried about their wells running dry.

About 30 protesters showed up Thursday at the head gates of the main dam to protest the shut-off and ask the irrigation district to defy federal orders and divert the water. The Herald and News reported that they were with a group called People’s Rights, a far-right organization founded by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, both Democrats, have declared drought emergencies in the region, and the Bureau of Reclamation has set aside $15 million in immediate aid for irrigators. Another $10 million will be available for drought assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Ben DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, urged his members to remain peaceful and not let the water crisis “be hijacked for other causes.”

The seasonal allocations are the region’s most dramatic development since irrigation water was all but cut off to hundreds of farmers in 2001 amid another severe drought — the first time farmers’ interests took a backseat to fish and tribes.

The crisis made the rural farming region hundreds of miles from any major city a national political flashpoint and became a touchstone for Republicans who used the crisis to take aim at the Endangered Species Act, with one GOP lawmaker calling the irrigation shutoff a “poster child” for why changes were needed. A “bucket brigade” protest attracted 15,000 people who scooped water from the Klamath River and passed it, hand over hand, to a parched irrigation canal.

The situation in the Klamath Basin was set in motion more than a century ago, when the U.S. government began draining a network of shallow lakes and marshlands, redirecting the natural flow of water and constructing hundreds of miles of canals and drainage channels to create farmland. Homesteads were offered by lottery to World War II veterans.

The project turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse — some of its potato farmers supply In ’N Out burger — but permanently altered an intricate water system that spans hundreds of miles and from southern Oregon to Northern California.

In 1988, two species of sucker fish were listed as endangered under federal law. Less than a decade later, coho salmon that spawn downstream from the reclamation project, in the lower Klamath River, were listed as threatened.

The water necessary to sustain the coho salmon downstream comes from Upper Klamath Lake — the main holding tank for the farmers’ irrigation system. At the same time, the sucker fish in the lake need at least 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimeters) of water covering the gravel beds they use as spawning grounds.

The drought also means farmers this summer will not flush irrigation water into a network of six national wildlife refuges that are collectively called the Klamath National Wildlife Refuge Complex. The refuges, nicknamed the Everglades of the West, support up to 80% of the birds that migrate on the Pacific Flyway. The refuges also support the largest concentrations of wintering Bald Eagles in the lower 48 states.

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PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — The city of Pasadena’s historic Central Library has been ordered closed pending further review due to seismic safety concerns.

The nearly century-old Mediterranean Revival-style building had just reopened for in-person services following a pandemic closure when the closure order was issued Monday, the city said in a statement.

A recent structural assessment revealed that most of the building is constructed with unreinforced masonry bearing walls that support concrete floors and walls.

So-called URM buildings are known to be a life-safety hazard because they can collapse in an earthquake.

“While Pasadena passed an ordinance in 1993 mandating all URM buildings to be retrofitted, vacated or demolished, no record has been found as to why Central Library was not identified and addressed as a URM building,” the city said.

“This is devastating news for us all,” said City Manager Steve Mermell. “Central Library is more than just a building; it’s where generations of families have grown up, and an iconic building that completes our Civic Center as one of Pasadena’s treasures.”

Central Library was designed by architect Myron Hunt in 1924 and completed in 1927. The building was expanded in the mid-1960s and modified in the 1980s. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Pasadena’s ornate domed City Hall, also completed in 1927, underwent a seismic retrofit more than a decade ago.

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