Before he was a presidential candidate, he said global warming was “a hoax” invented by China to kneecap the American economy.

“The climate has always been changing,” he shrugged more recently.

If he’s elected president, Trump says, one of his “Day One” priorities will be increasing oil and gas production — or, as he puts it: “Drill, baby, drill!”

With more fossil fuels, he promises, “we will be rich again and happy again.”

Those positions are at the heart of Trump’s campaign to regain the White House. And they put him on a collision course with California, where the Democratic-led government, supported by most voters, has made a clean-energy economy a major goal.

“It’s breathtaking how easily manipulated this man is,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “His only interest is pleasing Big Oil CEOs, and mortgaging our kids and the planet in the process.”

A large majority of Californians support their state’s ambitious climate goals, the Public Policy Institute of California found in a survey last year. Almost two-thirds said they believe protecting the environment should be a priority even at the risk of curbing economic growth.

“If you look at California, it’s got brownouts and blackouts every single day,” he claimed in a campaign video last year. “People can’t turn on their air conditioners.” (Not true; California hasn’t had significant power grid problems since 2020.)

If he wins a second term, Trump plans to scrap President Biden’s programs encouraging renewable energy. He has said he would offer tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers; repeal federal subsidies for solar, wind and other renewable energy projects; and roll back Biden’s efforts to encourage the use of electric vehicles.

“First day in office, I’ll be ending all of that,” Trump said last year, referring to EV tax credits and other subsidies. (In fact, he couldn’t repeal the tax credit on Day One — that would take an act of Congress — but he could add requirements to limit the cars and trucks that qualify for the subsidy.)

Former aides say Trump is also likely to revive two of his first-term goals that spurred clashes with California: revoke the state’s tough vehicle emissions standards and open more federal waters to oil drilling, including off the Pacific coast.

He failed at both partly because of opposition from California and other states but also because of his administration’s incompetence.

“In the first term, the Trump administration had a kind of blunderbuss approach. Their proposals weren’t well thought out. They often didn’t hold up under close review,” said Richard M. Frank, a professor of environmental law at UC Davis School of Law. “Now they appear to be trying to learn from those mistakes. … They could be a lot more strategic the second time.”

The clearest example is Trump’s attack on California’s tough automotive emissions standards.

The 1970 Clean Air Act allows the federal Environmental Protection Agency to limit air pollution from automobiles. It also allows California to impose tougher standards because of its decades-long battle to reduce smog, under a “waiver” the EPA normally grants each year.

Congress also allowed other states to adopt the California standards; 17 states and the District of Columbia have done so.

In 2019, after automobile manufacturers complained that the California standards were a burden, Trump announced that he was revoking the state’s waiver “in order to produce far less expensive cars for the consumer.”

His decision was part of a broad effort to scale back federal rules requiring auto fleets to reduce fuel consumption.

Newsom and then-Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra sued the federal government, charging that the EPA had overstepped its authority. The case meandered through the courts until Biden took office and restored California’s waiver.

Trump hasn’t talked explicitly about attacking California’s waiver again. But last year, the conservative Heritage Foundation assembled a team of former Trump aides to compile a policy agenda called “Project 2025.” The approximately 900-page document includes a detailed strategy for revoking or limiting California’s emissions standards.

It suggests that instead of revoking the waiver, the EPA could limit California’s standards to smog-producing pollutants like ozone, not greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. If that fails, the agenda says, the EPA could try to block other states from adopting greenhouse gas standards.

“They’re recognizing that they screwed up the first time and laying out a road map to try to do better the second time,” said Dan Becker, an environmental lawyer at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “They’re basically choosing each of the areas in which California can act and going after each of them.”

Becker said the strategy may be aimed at getting the case into the Supreme Court, where a second Trump administration could try its luck before a 6-3 conservative majority.

If a second Trump administration tried to revoke the waiver, Newsom said at a February news conference, the state would go to court again.

“We know the playbook,” he said. “We were successful over and over [in Trump’s first term] in the courts, and we have confidence that will continue.”

Offshore oil drilling could produce another standoff.

In 2018, Trump proposed opening federal waters along the entire Pacific Coast, as well as Alaska and the Atlantic Coast, to drilling for oil and gas. That kicked up a storm of opposition, including — to Trump’s surprise — from Republicans.

And Trump’s administration found itself tied up in the federal rule-making process.

“They made procedural errors that slowed everything down,” said Kassie Siegel, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

If he wins a second term, Trump would have broad authority to open the continental shelf to oil leases, but he would run into other problems.

One is economics: Deep-water drilling in the North Pacific is expensive and risky. Oil companies are more interested in drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, where known reserves are larger.

The other is local politics. In 2018, when Trump proposed opening the Pacific Coast to drilling, the California Legislature quickly passed a law banning new oil pipelines, piers or other infrastructure within three miles of shore. That could make it prohibitively expensive to move oil from offshore wells to onshore refineries or terminals.

Oil companies know that any attempt to drill new wells off California would spark massive opposition. A PPIC poll in 2021 found that 72% of Californians, including 43% of Republicans, oppose the idea.

A third potential conflict: wind. Offshore wind farms are a big part of California’s clean energy plans, aimed at supplying about 13% of the state’s power supply by 2045. But wind is Trump’s least favorite energy source.

“Windmills rot. They rust. They kill the birds. It’s the most expensive energy there is,” he charged last year. There’s much more to say about that, and I’ll return to it in a later column.

Newsom says he doesn’t believe Trump will get a second term.

“It won’t happen,” he said at the February news conference. Still, just in case, “we’re definitely trying to future-proof California in every way, shape or form.”

“We’re hardly just a punching bag on this,” the governor added. “We’re trying to assert ourselves.”

But environmentalists are still worried.

“The problem is, a second Trump term would come when the climate crisis is more dire than it was in his first term,” Becker said. “Everything the scientists predicted is happening more quickly than they expected. … But Trump doesn’t believe it’s a problem, doesn’t want to solve it and would only make it worse.”

Which helps explain why so many environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, have endorsed Biden’s reelection, even though they have criticized many of his decisions: They’ve considered the alternative.

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Human-caused global warming made July hotter for four out of five people on Earth, with more than 2 billion people feeling climate change-boosted warmth daily, according to a flash study.

More than 6.5 billion people, or 81% of the world’s population, sweated through at least one day where climate change had a significant effect on the average daily temperature, according to a new report issued Wednesday by Climate Central, a science nonprofit that has figured a way to calculate how much climate change has affected daily weather.

“We really are experiencing climate change just about everywhere,” said Climate Central Vice President for Science Andrew Pershing.

Researchers looked at 4,711 cities and found climate change fingerprints in 4,019 of them for July, which other scientists said is the hottest month on record. The new study calculated that the burning of coal, oil and natural gas had made it three times more likely to be hotter on at least one day in those cities. In the U.S., where the climate effect was largest in Florida, more than 244 million people felt greater heat due to climate change during July.

For 2 billion people, in a mostly tropical belt across the globe, climate change made it three times more likely to be hotter every single day of July. Those include the million-person cities of Mecca, Saudi Arabia and San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The day with the most widespread climate-change effect was July 10, when 3.5 billion people experienced extreme heat that had global warming’s fingerprints, according to the report. That’s different than the hottest day globally, which was July 7, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.

The study is not peer-reviewed, the gold standard for science, because the month just ended. It is based on peer-reviewed climate fingerprinting methods that are used by other groups and are considered technically valid by the National Academy of Sciences. Two outside climate scientists told The Associated Press that they found the study to be credible.

More than a year ago Climate Central developed a measurement tool called the Climate Shift Index. It calculates the effect, if any, of climate change on temperatures across the globe in real time, using European and U.S. forecasts, observations and computer simulations. To find if there is an effect, the scientists compare recorded temperatures to a simulated world with no warming from climate change and it’s about 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) cooler to find out the chances that the heat was natural.

“By now, we should all be used to individual heat waves being connected to global warming,” said Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi, who wasn’t part of the study. “Unfortunately, this month, as this study elegantly shows, has given the vast majority of people on this planet a taste of global warming’s impact on extreme heat.”

In the United States, 22 U.S. cities had at least 20 days when climate change tripled the likelihood of extra heat, including Miami, Houston, Phoenix, Tampa, Las Vegas and Austin.

The U.S. city most affected by climate change in July was Cape Coral, Florida, which saw fossil fuels make hotter temperatures 4.6 times more likely for the month and had 29 out of 31 days where there was a significant climate change fingerprint.

The farther north in the United States, the less of a climate effect was seen in July. Researchers found no significant effect in places like North Dakota and South Dakota, Wyoming, northern California, upstate New York and parts of Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Heat waves in the U.S. Southwest, the Mediterranean and even China have gotten special analysis by World Weather Attribution finding a climate change signal, but places like the Caribbean and Middle East are having huge climate change signals and not getting the attention, Pershing said. Unlike the other study, this one looked at the entire globe.

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When it comes to measuring global warming, humidity, not just heat, matters in generating dangerous climate extremes, a new study finds.

Researchers say temperature by itself isn’t the best way to measure climate change’s weird weather and downplays impacts in the tropics. But factoring in air moisture along with heat shows that climate change since 1980 is nearly twice as bad as previously calculated, according to their study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The energy generated in extreme weather, such as storms, floods and rainfall is related to the amount of water in the air. So a team of scientists in the U.S. and China decided to use an obscure weather measurement called equivalent potential temperature — or theta-e — that reflects “the moisture energy of the atmosphere,” said study co-author V. “Ram” Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Cornell University. It’s expressed in degrees, like temperature.

“There are two drivers of climate change: temperature and humidity,” Ramanathan said. “And so far we measured global warming just in terms of temperature.”

But by adding the energy from humidity, “the extremes — heat waves, rainfall and other measures of extremes — correlate much better,” he said.

That’s because as the world warms, the air holds more moisture, nearly 4% for every degree Fahrenheit (7% for every degree Celsius). When that moisture condenses, it releases heat or energy, “that’s why when it rains, now it pours,” Ramanathan said.

In addition, water vapor is a potent heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere that increases climate change, he said.

From 1980 to 2019, the world warmed about 1.42 degrees (0.79 degrees Celsius). But taking energy from humidity into account, the world has warmed and moistened 2.66 degrees (1.48 degrees Celsius), the study said. And in the tropics, the warming was as much as 7.2 degrees (4 degrees Celsius).

When judging by temperature alone, it looks like warming is most pronounced in North America, mid-latitudes and especially the poles — and less so in the tropics, Ramanathan said.

But that’s not the case, he said, because the high humidity in the tropics juices up storm activity, from regular storms to tropical cyclones and monsoons.

“This increase in latent energy is released in the air which leads to weather extremes: floods, storms and droughts,” Ramanathan said.

University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles, who wasn’t part of the study, said it makes sense because water vapor is key in extreme rainfall. “Both heat and humidity are important,” Wuebbles said.

Environmental scientist Katharine Mach of the University of Miami, who wasn’t part of the study, said “humidity is key in shaping the impacts of heat on human health and well-being, at present and into the future.”

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GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) — Governments and big investors announced fresh plans Wednesday to pour trillions of dollars into curbing global warming, reflecting the financial world’s growing embrace of efforts to fight climate change as both a business necessity and opportunity.

But some social justice activists called for scrutiny of investors’ motives, warning that the same financial institutions that profited from funding fossil fuel firms were now being presented as green champions.

There is a growing consensus that the private sector must be involved if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming. Speaking at the U.N. climate summit in the Scottish city of Glasgow, Britain’s Treasury chief Rishi Sunak said that while countries such as his are stumping up more cash to fund the shift to low carbon economies around the world, “public investment alone isn’t enough.”

He praised a pledge Wednesday by a group of over 450 major financial institutions to align their investments with the 2015 Paris climate accord — which calls for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and other efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

“This is a historic wall of capital for the net-zero transition around the world,” Sunak said at the conference known as COP26.

The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero — launched this year by former Bank of England chief Mark Carney — promised to follow scientific guidelines for cutting carbon emissions to “net zero” by 2050.

That goal — which means limiting greenhouse gas emissions to the amount that can be absorbed again through natural or artificial ways — is increasingly being embraced by companies and governments around the world.

Experts say fossil fuel use has to drop drastically over the coming decade to cap warming at 1.5C, meaning investors would likely have to dramatically cut back money going to oil, gas and coal producers.

“It is huge that financial institutions managing $130 trillion in assets are now leading the charge to a net-zero future,” said Helen Mountford, a senior climate expert at the World Resources Institute think tank.

She said that mobilizing massive public and private finance will be key to tackling global warming.

To that end, Sunak said U.K. financial institutions and publicly traded companies will be required to publish plans detailing how green their investments and their own businesses are — in order to ensure they’re actually contributing to reductions in global warming.

As home to the City of London, one of the world’s major financial centers, the U.K. “has a responsibility to lead the way” in financing efforts to fight global warming, said Sunak, potentially becoming “the world’s first net-zero aligned financial center.”

But James Thornton, founder of the environmental law charity ClientEarth, questioned how effective the U.K. effort would be.

“The U.K. market is still hooked on fossil fuels,” he said, calling for a task force to ensure companies don’t “greenwash” their activities — that is, using high-profile announcements of so-called green initiatives to mask other “dirty” activities. Experts also caution there are various ways to calculate net zero — and deciding on one standard definition is one of the big challenges going forward.

Some campaigners were distrustful of the motives of big investors in general.

“Many of the financial institutions meeting today have made a killing from the climate and ecological crisis, and we should be deeply suspicious of any attempt to spin them as the heroes,” said Dorothy Guerrero, head of policy at the nongovernmental group Global Justice Now. “Governments must regulate the process and lead the transition, instead of just handing it over the corporations.”

But Alok Sharma, the British official chairing the talks in Glasgow, insisted the shift was genuine.

“What we have seen over the last few years is a big move in the private sector and the financial services sector to go green,” he said, adding that this was not the case when he became a financial advisor in the 1990s. “I do believe it is now mainstream.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen noted one of the reasons that may be the case: She described combatting climate change as both a huge financial challenge, with a price tag of $100 trillion, but also “the greatest economic opportunity of our time.”

“Many renewables are now cheaper than carbon-based fuel alternatives and have lower long-term operating costs,” she said. “In many cases, it’s simply cost effective to go green.”

U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order earlier this year aimed at requiring companies to disclose climate-related financial risks.

Investing with an eye on the environment has been one of the biggest trends reshaping the financial industry for years, graduating from niche to a major force.

Around the world, $35.3 trillion was invested in sustainable funds at the start of 2020, according to the most recent data from the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance. That accounted for nearly $36 of every $100 invested under professional management, and it includes everything from funds that directly finance environmentally friendly projects to funds that simply refuse to buy shares of the most-polluting companies.

While that’s still the minority of all investments, it’s been growing faster than other areas of the market. Four years earlier, sustainable investments accounted for less than $28 of every $100.

But an analysis of the holdings of 130 climate-themed funds this summer by London-based think tank InfluenceMap found more than half weren’t as green as they purported to be. Some that were classified as “fossil fuel restricted” owned shares of oil refiners and distributors, for example.

Alina Averchenkova, an expert on climate change policy at the London School of Economics, said the announcements by investors and governments were an important step in the right direction — but independent audits would be required going forward.

She also noted the growing urgent need for rich nations to fund climate-related projects in parts of the world that can’t afford the measures themselves.

“We need finance to help developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change, for example, to adapt to increased flooding to extreme weather events such as hurricanes,” she said.

Poorer countries were angered last month by news that wealthy nations had failed to meet a previous commitment to provide them with $100 billion in climate finance each year by 2020.

That target is now expected to be met in 2023.

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Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”

“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal” and “an established fact,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.

Each of five scenarios for the future, based on how much carbon emissions are cut, passes the more stringent of two thresholds set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. World leaders agreed then to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above levels in the late 19th century because problems mount quickly after that. The world has already warmed nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since then.

Under each scenario, the report said, the world will cross the 1.5-degree-Celsius warming mark in the 2030s, earlier than some past predictions. Warming has ramped up in recent years, data shows.

“Our report shows that we need to be prepared for going into that level of warming in the coming decades. But we can avoid further levels of warming by acting on greenhouse gas emissions,” said report co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences at the University of Paris-Saclay.

In three scenarios, the world will also likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times — the less stringent Paris goal — with far worse heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours unless there are deep emissions cuts, the report said.

“This report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” said IPCC Vice Chair Ko Barrett, senior climate adviser for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

With crucial international climate negotiations coming up in Scotland in November, world leaders said the report is causing them to try harder to cut carbon pollution. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called it “a stark reminder.”

The 3,000-plus-page report from 234 scientists said warming is already accelerating sea level rise and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.

For example, the kind of heat wave that used to happen only once every 50 years now happens once a decade, and if the world warms another degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), it will happen twice every seven years, the report said.

As the planet warms, places will get hit more not just by extreme weather but by multiple climate disasters at once, the report said. That’s like what’s now happening in the Western U.S., where heat waves, drought and wildfires compound the damage, Mearns said. Extreme heat is also driving massive fires in Greece and Turkey.

Some harm from climate change — dwindling ice sheets, rising sea levels and changes in the oceans as they lose oxygen and become more acidic — is “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” the report said.

The world is “locked in” to 15 to 30 centimeters (6 to 12 inches) of sea level rise by mid-century, said report co-author Bob Kopp of Rutgers University.

Scientists have issued this message for more than three decades, but the world hasn’t listened, said United Nations Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen.

For the first time, the report offers an interactive atlas for people to see what has happened and may happen to where they live.

Nearly all of the warming that has happened on Earth can be blamed on emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. At most, natural forces or simple randomness can explain one- or two-tenths of a degree of warming, the report said.

The report described five different future scenarios based on how much the world reduces carbon emissions. They are: a future with incredibly large and quick pollution cuts; another with intense pollution cuts but not quite as massive; a scenario with moderate emission cuts; a fourth scenario where current plans to make small pollution reductions continue; and a fifth possible future involving continued increases in carbon pollution.

In five previous reports, the world was on that final hottest path, often nicknamed “business as usual.” But this time, the world is somewhere between the moderate path and the small pollution reductions scenario because of progress to curb climate change, said report co-author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the U.S. Pacific Northwest National Lab.

While calling the report “a code red for humanity,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres kept a sliver of hope that world leaders could still somehow prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, which he said is “perilously close.”

Alok Sharma, the president of the upcoming climate negotiations in Scotland, urged leaders to do more so they can “credibly say that we have kept 1.5 degrees alive.”

“Anything we can do to limit, to slow down, is going to pay off,” Tebaldi said. “And if we cannot get to 1.5, it’s probably going to be painful, but it’s better not to give up.”

In the report’s worst-case scenario, the world could be around 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now by the end of the century. But that scenario looks increasingly unlikely, said report co-author and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate change director of the Breakthrough Institute.

“We are a lot less likely to get lucky and end up with less warming than we thought,” Hausfather said. “At the same time, the odds of ending up in a much worse place than we expected if we do reduce our emissions are notably lower.”

The report also said ultra-catastrophic disasters — commonly called “tipping points,” like ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents — are “low likelihood” but cannot be ruled out. The much talked-about shutdown of Atlantic ocean currents, which would trigger massive weather shifts, is something that’s unlikely to happen in this century, Kopp said.

A “major advance” in the understanding of how fast the world warms with each ton of carbon dioxide emitted allowed scientists to be far more precise in the scenarios in this report, Mason-Delmotte said.

In a new move, scientists emphasized how cutting airborne levels of methane — a powerful but short-lived gas that has soared to record levels — could help curb short-term warming. Lots of methane the atmosphere comes from leaks of natural gas, a major power source. Livestock also produces large amounts of the gas, a good chunk of it in cattle burps.

More than 100 countries have made informal pledges to achieve “net zero” human-caused carbon dioxide emissions sometime around mid-century, which will be a key part of the negotiations in Scotland. The report said those commitments are essential.

“It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts,” Barrett said.

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More than one-third of the world’s heat deaths each year are due directly to global warming, according to the latest study to calculate the human cost of climate change.

But scientists say that’s only a sliver of climate’s overall toll — even more people die from other extreme weather amplified by global warming such as storms, flooding and drought — and the heat death numbers will grow exponentially with rising temperatures.

Dozens of researchers who looked at heat deaths in 732 cities around the globe from 1991 to 2018 calculated that 37% were caused by higher temperatures from human-caused warming, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

That amounts to about 9,700 people a year from just those cities, but it is much more worldwide, the study’s lead author said.

“These are deaths related to heat that actually can be prevented. It is something we directly cause,” said Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The highest percentages of heat deaths caused by climate change were in cities in South America. Vicedo-Cabrera pointed to southern Europe and southern Asia as other hot spots for climate change-related heat deaths.

Sao Paulo, Brazil, has the most climate-related heat deaths, averaging 239 a year, researchers found.

About 35% of heat deaths in the United States can be blamed on climate change, the study found. That’s a total of more than 1,100 deaths a year in about 200 U.S. cities, topped by 141 in New York. Honolulu had the highest portion of heat deaths attributable to climate change, 82%.

Scientists used decades of mortality data in the 732 cities to plot curves detailing how each city’s death rate changes with temperature and how the heat-death curves vary from city to city. Some cities adapt to heat better than others because of air conditioning, cultural factors and environmental conditions, Vicedo-Cabrera said.

Then researchers took observed temperatures and compared them with 10 computer models simulating a world without climate change. The difference is warming humans caused. By applying that scientifically accepted technique to the individualized heat-death curves for the 732 cities, the scientists calculated extra heat deaths from climate change.

“People continue to ask for proof that climate change is already affecting our health. This attribution study directly answers that question using state-of-the-science epidemiological methods, and the amount of data the authors have amassed for analysis is impressive,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin.

Patz, who wasn’t part of the study, said it was one of the first to detail climate change-related heat deaths now, rather than in the future.

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MECOSTA, Mich. (AP) — For generations, Brian Sackett’s family has farmed potatoes that are made into chips found on grocery shelves in much of the eastern U.S.

About 25% of the nation’s potato chips get their start in Michigan, where reliably cool air during September harvest and late spring has been ideal for crop storage. That’s a big reason why the state produces more chipping potatoes than any other.

But with temperatures edging higher, Sackett had to buy several small refrigeration units for his sprawling warehouses. Last year, he paid $125,000 for a bigger one. It’s expensive to operate, but beats having his potatoes rot.

“Our good, fresh, cool air is getting less all the time, it seems like,” he said on a recent morning as a front-end loader scooped up piles of plump, light-brown potatoes that would be packed into a tractor trailer for shipment to chip factories.

The situation here illustrates a little-noticed hazard that climate change is posing for agriculture in much of the world. Once harvested, crops not immediately consumed or processed are stored — sometimes for months. The warming climate is making that job harder and costlier.

The annual period with outdoor air cool enough to store potatoes in Michigan’s primary production area likely will shrink by up to 17 days by mid-century and up to a month by the late 2100s, according to an analysis by Julie Winkler, a Michigan State University geography and climate scientist.

The window for unrefrigerated storage is also narrowing for apples in the Northwest and Northeast, peanuts in the Southeast, lettuce in the Southwest and tomatoes in the Ohio valley, according to follow-up research published last year by plant physiology scientist Courtney Leisner at Auburn University.

Techmark Inc., an agricultural engineering company based in Lansing, Michigan, designed the Sackett farm’s equipment. Co-owner Todd Forbush, whose customers also include growers of sugar beets, onions and carrots, said storage of those crops increasingly will need refrigeration.

Growers will face tough choices about the economics of their operations. Producers who install equipment to regulate temperature and humidity will see power costs rising as the outside air gets hotter.

“Whose pocket is it going to come out of? Probably the consumer,” Leisner said, adding that the potential effects of global warming on storage had been “largely ignored.”

“There’s a big disconnect in our minds about the chain of events between the field and the grocery store and onto our plate,” she said. “Just a few degrees can make all the difference in whether it’s economical to store the fruits and vegetables that we expect to have on our dinner table 365 days a year.”

Aside from potentially higher prices, climate change may worsen food shortages caused by spoilage. About 14% of food produced globally — and 20% of fruits and vegetables — goes bad between harvest and retail, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Wasted food is a significant source of greenhouse gases.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, small farmers lose up to one-third of their stored grain to insects and mold, which can produce toxins. Rising temperatures will make it easier for pests to survive winters, said Tanya Strathers, an associate professor with the University of Greenwich’s Natural Resources Institute in London.

Stored grain will be more susceptible to rotting, Strathers said.

“When people are getting production off just an acre or two of land, their margin for error is very low,” said Jake Ricker-Gilbert, a Purdue University agricultural economist who has worked in several African nations including Malawi and Tanzania.

For delicate fruits and vegetables in the U.S. and Europe, a leading storage hurdle comes immediately after harvest, when temperatures must be lowered quickly to avoid decay. Lettuce and leafy greens such as kale are especially vulnerable, said Deirdre Holcroft, a plant biologist who worked previously for Dole Food Co. Inc.

Climate change is “going to add more and more pressure into the system,” Holcroft said.

In Mecosta, Michigan, the Sackett potato operation long needed only fans to cool down freshly dug potatoes to 60 degrees (15.5 degrees Celsius) or lower, and keep them there for months.

A computer-controlled system pulls in outside air, which industrial-sized wall fans blow across a humidifying pad. Floor slats in the 16 storage bins enable the air to rise through mounds of potatoes, regulating their temperature and moisture so they won’t dry out or get too wet and spoil.

But as the weather warms, it isn’t always enough.

During the 1990s, there were three years when Michigan’s average temperature in September and October was above normal. The 2000s had six such years. From 2010-2020, the total rose to eight.

Sackett began investing in small refrigeration units about a decade ago. The larger, custom-made device he got last year can be wheeled around to different bins, helping cool things down as needed.

“Definitely not a cheap purchase,” he said, adding that another may become necessary.

What all this means for the price of a bag of potato chip isn’t clear. But producers will have to offset their rising costs somehow, said Forbush of Techmark, the equipment company.

“We as a society need to do a better job of not wasting food,” he said. “If we don’t put the necessary energy into storing that product, it could get worse.”

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The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds.

But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say.

For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied.

But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times.

Previous estimates, including those accepted by international science panels, were about a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than that amount of committed warming.

International climate agreements set goals of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, with the more ambitious goal of limiting it to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) added in Paris in 2015. The world has already warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).

“You’ve got some … global warming inertia that’s going to cause the climate system to keep warming, and that’s essentially what we’re calculating,” said study co-author Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Think about the climate system like the Titanic. It’s hard to turn the ship when you see the icebergs.”

Dessler and colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Nanjing University in China calculated committed warming to take into account that the world has warmed at different rates in different places and that places that haven’t warmed as fast are destined to catch up.

Places such as the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica are a bit cooler, and that difference creates low-lying clouds that reflect more sun away from earth, keeping these places cooler. But this situation can’t keep going indefinitely because physics dictates that cooler locations will warm up more and when they do, the clouds will dwindle and more heating will occur, Dessler said.

Previous studies were based on the cooler spots staying that way, but Dessler and colleagues say that’s not likely.

Outside experts said the work is based on compelling reasoning, but want more research to show that it’s true. Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the new work fits better with climate models than observational data.

Just because the world is bound to get more warming than international goals, that doesn’t mean all is lost in the fight against global warming, said Dessler, who cautioned against what he called “climate doomers.”

If the world gets to net zero carbon emissions soon, 2 degrees of global warming could be delayed enough so that it won’t happen for centuries, giving society time to adapt or even come up with technological fixes, he said.

“If we don’t, we’re going to blow through (climate goals) in a few decades,” Dessler said. “It’s really the rate of warming that makes climate change so terrible. If we got a few degrees over 100,000 years, that would not be that big a deal. We can deal with that. But a few degrees over 100 years is really bad.”

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Whenever I read or hear statements like “estimates show nearly 20% of oxygen produced by the Earth’s land comes from the Amazon rain forests, often being called the ‘planet’s lungs’, and that Brazil has had more than 75,000 fires so far this year, with more than half in the Amazon Region, Robin Chazdon, Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut has stated that “what’s happening in the Amazon has actually been happening for several years, but it’s reaching a critical point.” Environmentalists blame the fires on Brazilian President Bolsonaro; they say he’s encouraging cattle ranchers and loggers to build on the land. “What we’re seeing is an unprecedented deliberate setting of fires to clear land for agricultural use,” Bolsonaro said nongovernmental groups might have set fires to draw criticism of his government. He has deployed Brazilian armed forces to help combat and prevent fires, while smoke can be seen thousands of miles away in Sao Paulo and is visible from space. “The forest in Amazonia and those including countries outside of Brazil constitutes about 25 percent of the carbon sink globally.  And that’s why losing this carbon to the atmosphere has such enormous consequences for global warming.” According to the World Wildlife Foundation, the Amazon region contains one in 10 known species on earth. Scientist says the Amazon could irreversibly degrade into a dry savannah. “Currently the level of deforestation in the Amazon is about 15% that’s already been destroyed if that level reaches 20 to 25%, there’s some concern that this could create conditions that will make it difficult for forest to continue to function. And so the ecosystems are going to change.  

Once the fires die down and it’s no longer on the news, people tend to forget about it.  But this is going to have a lasting impact and one that will reverberate not only through Brazil, but also globally. The Amazon rainforest, covering much of northwestern Brazil and extending into Colombia, Peru, and other South American countries, is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, famed for its biodiversity. It’s crisscrossed by thousands of rivers, including the powerful Amazon River towns, with l9th-century architecture from rubber-boom days, include Brazil’s Manaus and Belém and Perú’s Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado.  

The Amazon Rainforest contains over 3,000 fruits, 200 of which are consumed in the western world. Environmentalists are concerned about the loss of biodiversity that will result from the destruction of the forest, and also about the release of the carbon contained within the vegetation, which could accelerate global warming.  

As indigenous territories continue to be destroyed by deforestation and ecocide, such as the Peruvian Amazon, indigenous people’s rainforest communities continue to disappear, while others, like the Urarina, continue to struggle to fight for their cultural survival and the fate of their forested territories.  In April 2019, the Ecuadorian court stopped oil exploration activities in 1,800 square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest, and on July 2019, the Ecuadorian court forbade the government to sell territory with forests to oil companies.

In 2005, parts of the Amazon Basin experienced the worst drought in one hundred years, and there were indications that 2006 may have been a second successive year of drought.  A 23 July 2006 article in the UK newspaper The Independent reported the Woods Hole Research Center results, showing that the forest in its present form could survive only three years of drought.  Scientists at the Brazilian Institute of Amazonian Research argued in the article that this drought response, coupled with the effects of deforestation on regional climate, are pushing the rainforest towards a “tipping point” where it would irreversibly start to die.  It concluded that the forest is on the brink of being turned into savanna or desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate.

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