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MEGAN THOMPSON: This summer, when President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate accord — a voluntary pact to cut emissions of gases that cause global warming — some opposition came from what is perhaps a surprising place: big business.

In response, hundreds of large U.S. companies publicly pledged to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and increase energy efficiency. In tonight’s signature segment, NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Stephanie Sy reports on some big companies leading the way. This story is part of our ongoing series “Peril and Promise: The Challenge of Climate Change.”

STEPHANIE SY: With sprawling supercenters and close to twelve thousand stores worldwide, Wal-Mart, may be best known for low prices that local stores can’t match. Now, the planet’s number one company, by revenue, wants to be known as a leader in the fight against climate change.

KATHLEEN McLAUGHLIN, CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER, WAL-MART: At Wal-Mart, Sustainability really is core to our mission.

STEPHANIE SY: Kathleen McLaughlin is Wal-Mart’s Chief Sustainability Officer, she’s charged with selling Wal-Mart’s climate vision to shareholders.

KATHLEEN McLAUGHLIN: It’s critical for business. It’s important for customers and for communities. We’re seeing effects already in things like supply security of different food commodities.

STEPHANIE SY: Wal-Mart’s response to climate change began more than a decade ago. In 2005, then CEO Lee Scott pledged to curb Wal-Mart’s emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which cause the atmosphere to trap heat and warm the earth.

Scott started moving the company toward clean power sources like wind and solar, with a goal of eventually getting 100 percent of its energy from renewables.

KATHLEEN McLAUGHLIN: It was a realization about capability and about scale and about how we can use that for good. Wal-Mart has unique assets as a retailer, just given the reach that we have across categories, the reach we have across countries and across suppliers, and the recognition that we could bring those capabilities to bear on the most pressing social and environmental issues that our customers face in ways that are really relevant for business..

STEPHANIE SY: Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, began by improving the fuel efficiency of its vast fleet of trucks that deliver goods to its stores.

ERIC BENGE, WAL-MART: So Mike, when you’re ready, we’ll crank it up…

STEPHANIE SY: Using a simulator, Wal-Mart retrains its truck drivers on gear-shifting to increase their fuel savings. Operators can have up to a 30 percent impact on fuel efficiency based on how they drive, and their job performance is judged accordingly.

The company says, improved driving and upgraded trucks have saved the retailer nearly $1 billion since 2005.

MARK VANDERHELM, WAL-MART: Wal-Mart has been the driver of a lot of new technologies in the energy efficiency space.

STEPHANIE SY: Mark Vanderhelm is Wal-Mart’s Vice President of Energy.

Wal-Mart has saved energy and money in its store operations by demanding more efficient equipment from vendors that provide its lighting, refrigeration, and heating and cooling systems.

In its push for more renewable energy, the company has installed solar panels on the rooftops of 364 Wal-Mart and Sam’s Clubs. That only about eight percent of all its stores in the U.S., but the panels make Wal-Mart the nation’s second biggest commercial generator of solar power.

KATHLEEN McLAUGHLIN: The biggest challenge in the U.S. is making it economic. We would love to see more availability of renewable energy sources that is at price parity with other sources.

STEPHANIE SY: In other words, Wal-Mart’s ambitious energy goals aim also to save money.

So, in its home base of Arkansas, where a lack of state government incentives for renewables make conventional fossil fuel power cheaper, you won’t see any solar panels on the local Wal-Mart stores.

While the company has pledged to be 100 percent powered by renewables, it hasn’t said when, and right now only 17 percent of Wal-Mart’s domestic power comes from renewable sources.

To provide guidance in achieving its climate change goals, Wal-Mart has partnered with the Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF. Fred Krupp is the group’s president.

Is Wal-Mart doing enough?

FRED KRUPP, ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND: The scale of Wal-Mart is hard to wrap your head around. They have 220 million people shopping there every week. In the United States, they sell about a third of all the food that we buy at retail stores. They can always do more. But what they have shown so far is a serious commitment, and the journey is an ongoing one of improvement.

STEPHANIE SY: Jenny Ahlen is an EDF supply chain specialist based in Bentonville, Arkansas.

JENNY AHLEN, ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND: The things that we buy and consume and how they are made and used and disposed of have a huge impact on the planet. So grocery is contributing half of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. retail sector. And that’s due to both the volume, but also the high level of greenhouse gas impacts embedded in that food.

STEPHANIE SY: And Wal-Mart is the largest grocer in the world.

JENNY AHLEN: They are.

STEPHANIE SY: So this is a hot spot.

Wal-Mart’s mission has grown to not only reduce its own stores’ impact on climate change, but to compel its tens of thousands of suppliers to transform their practices.

At Wal-Mart’s urging, EDF helped pork producer Smithfield to optimize fertilizer use on crops used to feed its pigs, reducing the amount of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere.

The reductions by Smithfield and other suppliers contributed to Wal-Mart taking credit for meeting a goal, in 2015, of reducing emissions by 20 million metric tons, the equivalent of taking nearly four million cars off the road for a year.

Wal-Mart’s newest initiative is called “Project Gigaton,” which aims to persuade suppliers to remove 50 times more greenhouse gases — or one billion metric tons — by 2030, about the same amount of pollution as Germany emits in a year.

Wal-Mart, known for squeezing suppliers to keep prices low, is putting a green squeeze on them now, though one that’s voluntary.

FRED KRUPP: It sends a message to their 100,000 suppliers all around the world: If you want your products on our shelves, cut your pollution.

STEPHANIE SY: Ninety percent of Wal-Mart’s overall greenhouse gas impact comes from its supply chain, and dozens of its major suppliers have already signed on to project gigaton. Wal-Mart hopes that encouraging its suppliers to cut emissions will have a multiplier effect.

One of those participating suppliers was already forging its own path to sustainability.

The candy maker Mars, Inc, best known for M&M’s and Snickers bars, has set an aggressive target of using “zero carbon” in its operations by 2040, eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions.

BARRY PARKIN, MARS, INC. CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER: Field is actually 18 acres, so it’s pretty big…

STEPHANIE SY: Barry Parkin, Mars’s Chief Sustainability Officer, showed us the vast solar farm in New Jersey the company built eight years ago.

It now provides about five percent of the power used by the Mars chocolate factory in nearby Hackettstown, which churns out half of the M&M’s sold in the U.S.Parkin says the falling price of renewable energy technology, like solar, makes the investments pay off.

BARRY PARKIN: We’ve done this at cost parity or better. In some cases, our costs are now lower as a result of using renewable energy.

STEPHANIE SY:So we’re not going to see the price of M&M’s skyrocketing because Mars has made commitments to the environment?

BARRY PARKIN: No, absolutely not. So this is not just good for the environment. It’s it’s good for Mars. It’s good for consumers, and it’s also good for the landowners that we’re working with.

STEPHANIE SY: Mars has a long-term contract to buy the power produced by this massive wind farm in West Texas – enough to offset the electricity used in its entire U.S. operation.

Parkin believes that global efforts to curb climate change will eventually lead to fossil fuels becoming more expensive.

BARRY PARKIN: We believe there will at some point be a price on carbon. We’re thinking long term, we’re thinking that if we are ahead of the curve here and we’re reducing our carbon footprint in line with the science faster than our competitors, then we can have a competitive advantage.

STEPHANIE SY: Food companies like Mars are also planning for disruptions to their agricultural supplies caused by climate change, including the cocoa for its chocolate.

BARRY PARKIN: Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa comes from a small region in West Africa. And all of the climate models say that that region is going to become drier and that is not good for cocoa. So those millions of farmers there, all the predictions say is they’re going to start to struggle.

STEPHANIE SY: This month, Mars announced it is investing a billion dollars over the next three years, in part, to help its suppliers reduce carbon emissions, including hundreds of thousands of small farmers around the world. Mars hopes the effort will help the company’s supply chain reduce emissions by 67 percent by 2050.

The risks of climate change to business have now led half of the world’s 500 largest public companies to set sustainability goals. And a report released this April by several environmental researchers found energy efficiency projects saved these companies nearly $4 billion last year.

In addition, after President Trump pulled the United States government out of the Paris Climate Accords, Wal-Mart and Mars were among the companies that signed a letter pledging to continue to meet their voluntary targets.

But Wal-Mart’s growing business may be in conflict with its sustainability mission. Wal-Mart’s total retail square-footage has expanded by 43 percent in the past decade, and along with it, its self-reported carbon emissions went up 9 percent, even as the pace of its emissions slowed.

Wal-Mart is still building new stores. It is still increasing its carbon footprint. How do you answer the broader question of whether Wal-Mart can ever be truly Earth-friendly?

KATHLEEN McLAUGHLIN: We’re expanding our footprint, but we believe that our model, so the way we manage our own store operations, the way we work with suppliers, actually optimizes and lowers the footprint to deliver the same amount of product to people. If you look at the scale and ambition of our efforts and what we’ve actually achieved, I’m actually quite excited about it.

STEPHANIE SY: By 2025, Wal-Mart says it plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 18 percent from its 2015 levels. As ever, the company that has transformed communities and consumers is striking a path… and expecting others to follow.

Peril and Promise is an ongoing series of reports on the human impact of, and solutions for, Climate Change. Lead funding for Peril and Promise is provided by Dr. P. Roy Vagelos and Diana T. Vagelos. Major support is provided by Marc Haas Foundation.

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MILES O’BRIEN: In addition to the grueling work of rescue and recovery on the ground, Hurricane Harvey has stirred up political challenges and marked the first natural disaster on President Trump’s watch.

For what’s at stake, we get the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Gentlemen, good to have you with us.

To what extent has the storm on Friday and what has ensued changed what’s going to happen in Washington in September? Do you think this is a reset in a sense, David?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: I have decided to take the most willfully confident or least optimistic point of view just maybe post-flood, that the dove comes bearing the olive branch.

And I do think there’s potential for things to get better. The Republicans were headed toward dysfunction this fall with the budget showdowns, with this fight over the wall, possible government shutdown.

And now they at least have a pretext, all the while knowing they look dysfunctional and they have to get something done. Now they have a pretext to change the subject, to put some budget relief in there for the flood, without doing offsets, without trying to rip the money out from other programs.

And they could say, hey, we can’t do the wall right now. We got to rebuild Texas. And, by the way, on the background, a lot of people are going to need a lot of construction workers in Texas. And this is a construction with a construction worker flourish.

So, maybe this isn’t the time to crack down on immigration. And so I think there’s a possibility, if they want to look functional, to seize this moment, whether they will or not. But I’m going for maximal optimistic unrealism.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, Mark, would you agree that the storm has given Republicans some cover for a kumbaya moment?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Not necessarily kumbaya moment, because I think that’s impossible with Donald Trump, because he’s so mercurial, so volatile and so self-obsessed.

But I think it’s great political opportunity for Republicans, partly for the reasons that David said. The old maxim in combat in World War II was, there are no atheists in a foxhole. There no libertarian, conservative, small-government people at a time when they’re in the wake of a hurricane.

People turn — what’s the government going to do? I want it done. Even the much ridiculed — and legitimately so — Ted Cruz, who ran for president proclaiming he was the most unpopular man in the Senate, earned that epithet, sobriquet by opposing any hurricane aid to the citizens of New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy.

And 22 of the 23 Republican members of Congress from Texas, including John Cornyn, the senator and Cruz, opposed it. Now, of course, they are the biggest exhorters for federal aid, federal involvement, national government rushing in.

But I do think it’s an opportunity for Republicans to unite and to get away from the wall and president’s empty threat to close the government if it weren’t funded.

MILES O’BRIEN: I want to talk a little bit about what is going on in Washington in just a moment.

But let’s — a couple of things about the actual, the response on the ground. We didn’t have a Brownie moment this go-round, as we did in Katrina. Is your sense that, politically, the Trump administration did well in the way things happened on the ground as far as the immediate response in Texas and Louisiana, David?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I would say the range of government programs seemed to go well.

The people on this program and all the ones we have seen and interviewed, I think they have generally been impressive. They had tough calls to make, the mayor of Houston, on whether to evacuate or not. That was a tough call. You could argue it either way. The people seem to be responding.

To me, the two biggest things that happened was, first, Houston came together. And that is significant, because Houston is the most ethnically diverse city in this country. And there’s an argument that is sometimes made, oh, we will never have solidarity as a nation if we’re so ethnically diverse.

Well, Houston does it. And so if they can do it, I think that argument against making our country diverse or opening up more immigration falls down. The second thing is that I think, as Washington becomes more dysfunctional, power is going to the cities and states.

And I thought the basic efficacy of the Houston government this week is further sign that that may have to happen even more.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, Mark, would you agree that maybe the lessons of Katrina, for example, bore out and perhaps not only were the localities better equipped, but people themselves were better prepared? Is that possible? Or is this something the Trump administration can take credit for?

MARK SHIELDS: I don’t know if there’s credit.

I think that, certainly, early returns are encouraging. I think the public sector, I think the private sector, I think the voluntary sector, I think citizens, whether it’s the Cajun navy, whether it’s corporate involvement, and citizens helping citizens, I think has been impressive.

It’s been encouraging. At a time of dysfunction, of almost malaise in the country, in the midst of this national tragedy and personal tragedy, it’s been a source of some inspiration, of some elevation at least. So I think, in that sense, it’s good.

I think the president, not to belabor it, but I think he made a mistake by trying to lift the morale of folks by saying, it’s going to be quick.

It’s not going to be quick. It’s going to be long and arduous and difficult and painful and dislocating. But I think we got a good start.

MILES O’BRIEN: Yes, these are — it’s a much longer road than I think people fully appreciate.

Once we in the media and the nation kind of moves on to the next thing, it gets very difficult for these people on the ground. They still have a huge problem.

Quick. The administration wants to move as quickly as possible, it says, to get a relief package under way. How realistic is that, David? Do you think that there’s — given all that happened post-Hurricane Sandy and the efforts that you mentioned of Senator Cruz and others to try to block that aid package, will there be obstacles?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think the first tranche of this package, they will get.

The second issue is whether they have what I talked about before, the offsets. And this is what Republicans have traditionally demanded. If we’re going to pay for Sandy relief, if we’re going to pay for Katrina relief, we got to rip the money from some other program.

And that seems to me an insane way to do government. You have got these permanent domestic policy programs. Then we have a pretty steady slate of disasters that we have to pay for. Every we have a disaster, to rip money from the permanent programs just seems, like, crazy.

Will they insist on the offsets this time? I think, in the first tranche, probably no, but the second tranche, $15 billion maybe in the first, but they’re talking about a $150 billion need. And so that’s just a gigantic budget lift.

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, and the proposal was to take money away from FEMA to help fund the border wall, right?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. That’s right.

MILES O’BRIEN: I guess that’s probably a dead issue at the moment.

MARK SHIELDS: I don’t think that’s going to be revitalized, or run back up the flagpole.

I do think that Republicans are flirting, of course, with their tax cut, which has always been the narcotic of Republicans, that they in fact have to at some point, with any remote pretense of candor, abandon any pretense of a balanced budget.

I mean, they talk about — because they are going to finance the tax cut by tax cuts. That’s how they’re going to do it. And I do think — I do think that the will is there right now in the Congress to act. There will not be a Ted Cruz from the Northeast opposing aid to help people in Texas and Louisiana.

I think they will be as close to unity as you will see on Capitol Hill this year.

MILES O’BRIEN: All right, so what about the talk of government shutdown, which was in play before the storm came in? Is that gone now, you think?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, if this were a normal country with a normal government, you would think there’s no way. I think we’re…

(LAUGHTER)

MILES O’BRIEN: But that is not the case.

DAVID BROOKS: That is not the case.

So, I think there is still some chance. I have trouble. I do think this was a moment where they was some unification. Republicans know they can’t be total disasters as the governing party.

And I just wish there was some more forward-looking enthusiasm. The Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, these were moments of revitalization for those cities, a chance to take the disaster and really build something.

So far, I haven’t seen much of a chance. What are we going to do with this and how are we going to make Houston a different city and a better city than even it was?

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, I suppose you could make an argument that, instead of talking, we should be talking about seawalls, right? Why not?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, the problem is that every study I’m aware of, which is probably not that many, has indicated that a dollar spent in preparation and avoidance of natural disasters is worth $15 that is spent in relief.

But there’s no political payoff for preparation. So, who benefits? I mean, the governor or senator or the president? Bill Clinton at Oklahoma City, his performance there helped him enormously.

John Lindsay almost ended his career on a snowstorm in New York City. And so — and, certainly, George Bush in Katrina. So, there doesn’t seem to be any political reward for making the preparation, doing the hard work, of building seawalls and taking — and part of Houston’s charm has been that there has been no zoning.

And so there really hasn’t been any regulation that would, in fact, interfere with environmental disaster. So, it’s a tradeoff that they have made in Houston that has led to the fact that there is affordable housing, even though it might be next to a machine shop and a junkyard.

MILES O’BRIEN: It seems we prefer to fund the fire department, rather than buying fire insurance. It’s kind of the way we roll in this country in some ways.

So, all right, so I got to ask this because it has come into play a lot this week. Is there any chance that there will be some sort of sea change, if you will, in political discussions about climate change, in the wake of this? How many of these storms do we have to go through before politicians come around on this one, David?

DAVID BROOKS: I would be stunned.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Climate change, in the way it wasn’t 20 years ago, it’s a total partisan issue now.

MILES O’BRIEN: Is that because Al Gore ran for…

(CROSSTALK)

MILES O’BRIEN: That’s the moment, isn’t it? Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: I happen to think he had some positive effects with the movement. I think he had a very negative effect.

You used to have John McCain and a lot of Republicans with climate change legislation.

MILES O’BRIEN: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: And once it became a Democratic issue, the Republicans had to go on the other side. And there was perverse effect of what Al Gore did.

MILES O’BRIEN: What do you think? Any chance of this?

(CROSSTALK)

MARK SHIELDS: Denial is more than a river in Egypt.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, Eddie Bernice Johnson, the Republican — Democratic congresswoman from Texas, pointed out to her Republican colleagues, she said, this is the third once-in-500 storm that we have had in the past three years.

At some point, you have to say, what’s going on here? Is there something that I’m not considering?

But I agree with David that they will not — they’re not going to move on it. There’s — certainly, I don’t see the leadership anywhere.

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, you don’t have to be a math guy to realize that’s not working out very well. Right?

So, as far as the funding issues, they got to fund the government. They’re going to have to take care of the debt ceiling. All that is going to happen, do you think, now? What’s your thoughts on that? That’s a lot of work to do right now.

DAVID BROOKS: An inglorious trudge-through.

I think what’s happening — what has happened on Capitol Hill is, they have divorced the Trump administration. They have said, he’s — this guy is an independent. We’re going to have to do this thing ourselves.

And if they can’t do this, then the whole Republican Party is in big trouble.

MILES O’BRIEN: What about tax reform? That was something that, in the midst of this storm, President Trump was talking about. Is there any chance there will be any traction on that?

MARK SHIELDS: There is no tax reform.

What it is, is a tax cut. And they have concluded that there’s a real problem in this country when it comes to money distribution, that the poor have too much and the rich don’t have enough. And this is the solution.

DAVID BROOKS: Just to make Mark feel good, I don’t think anything is going to pass.

I was thinking, who was in office, who was in power in 1986? You had Dan Rostenkowski in the House, a guy named Bob Packwood in the Senate, James Baker,

MARK SHIELDS: Patrick Moynihan.

DAVID BROOKS: Patrick Moynihan, Bill Bradley.

MARK SHIELDS: Bill Bradley. Dick Gephardt. Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: This was like the dream team of legislative skill.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And there’s just nobody like that, because they don’t — people do not have the experience to pass complicated legislation, let alone a White House.

Tax reform is incredibly hard, because every time you cut a loophole, there’s an army that wants to preserve it. And it’s just hard to…

MARK SHIELDS: Dick Darman.

DAVID BROOKS: Dick Darman is another figure.

(CROSSTALK)

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: We have sort of lost human capital in Washington of people who know how to do complicated stuff.

MARK SHIELDS: It’s a good point. We have devalued it.

When you run against Washington long enough, and deprecate public service, I mean, after a while, you stop attracting or making it appealing for talented people to come and to stay. And then public service was an honorable and important…

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: The talent is a side, but the experience is low.

Those people had put through, over the previous 20 or 30 years, lots of complicated legislation, especially under Johnson, and even under Nixon.

And the people now, they just don’t have the experience of doing that.

MILES O’BRIEN: Experience counts, said the gray-haired guys sitting at the table, right?

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I have always been a big fan of term limits, especially in surgeons, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

MILES O’BRIEN: Absolutely.

All right, just quickly, just as the White House staff turns. The piece that came out today indicating that the president has become disenchanted with his new chief of staff, John Kelly.

Basically, the 15 people anonymously sourced in this story said, Donald Trump doesn’t like to be handled.

Any news here? Is this any surprise to either of you? And is John Kelly on his way out, you think?

MARK SHIELDS: There’s an old aphorism that is, someone who is always finding everyone else to be a horse’s ass, when you meet three horse’s asses in one day, the horse’s ass is you.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: The problem is the guy who is still there.

It’s not — he was going to get the best people, because he knew the best people. He was going to bring them to Washington and going to just get everything done and get everything passed.

He brought the best people to Washington. They have all left. And now we’re working on, what, the second, third round? I mean, at some point, you have got to conclude, it is — the problem is the person who is there.

MILES O’BRIEN: All right, button it up quickly for us.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

Well, we — actually, it was the B-team that went out first.

MARK SHIELDS: OK.

DAVID BROOKS: So, now, if he starts firing people, he’s really firing what to him is the A-team.

MARK SHIELDS: I never thought of Mike Flynn as the A-team.

DAVID BROOKS: I don’t think he’s going to end up doing it.

But the guy is always fuming about something. And the fuming doesn’t often lead to anything. And I suspect that’s the case here.

MILES O’BRIEN: David Brooks, Mark Shields, have a great holiday weekend. Thank you.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you. Thanks, Miles.

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MILES O’BRIEN: And the Associated Press now confirms that the death toll from Harvey has risen to 12.

But as we focus on Texas and Louisiana, nature is also taking a devastating toll elsewhere. Heavy monsoons are paralyzing Mumbai, India, right now. More than 1,200 people have died so far.

Connecting the dots between a global warming and extreme weather is not a simple job for science.

That is the topic of our Leading Edge segment this week.

Scientists are loathe to get ahead of their data, but what they see in Houston fits like a key piece in a giant complex puzzle.

First, the disclaimers:

KERRY EMANUEL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: It’s difficult to say anything about individual events.

MILES O’BRIEN: Kerry Emanuel is a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

KERRY EMANUEL: We have a lot of extreme weather events. Whether or not the climate changes, to attribute a particular event to climate change is next to impossible.

RADLEY HORTON, Columbia University: Because, for those really rare events, it’s hard to even know how common they are before you get to climate change.

MILES O’BRIEN: Radley Horton is a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

RADLEY HORTON: You probably want to have 500 years of data, 1,000 years of data to estimate those statistics. And, of course, we don’t have data records to go back 500 years or 1,000 years.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD, University of Georgia: I’m very uncomfortable talking about causation of one particular storm, in the same way that I can’t identify what particular home run was hit by a baseball player because of steroid use.

MILES O’BRIEN: Marshall Shepherd is a professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: I think that we know that steroid use likely increases the probability or chance that there will be more home runs in baseball. But can I conclusively say that that particular player hit that particular home run because of steroid use? I don’t know that for a fact.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, let’s begin on the firmer ground, the facts. Over the past hundred years, global temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and global sea level has risen about eight inches. No dispute about that.

RADLEY HORTON: It doesn’t sound like much, but for a lot of the coastal cities in the U.S., places like Norfolk, Virginia, we’re already seeing much more frequent nuisance flooding events.

MILES O’BRIEN: And, in fact, while our eyes have been fixed on Texas and Louisiana this week, large parts of Norfolk are underwater because of a run-of-the-mill tropical system. And in India, monsoon rains caused floods that killed 1,000.

RADLEY HORTON: We’re getting high water along the coast when there’s no storm at all, water levels that used to happen maybe once every decade or so happening every couple of years.

MILES O’BRIEN: And while the atmospheric temperature has increased, the real heating has occurred in the oceans. And warm water is like high-octane fuel for a hurricane.

RADLEY HORTON: Once those upper ocean temperatures, especially near the surface, get to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer, you now have a source of warm, moist air. That is the fundamental fuel of a hurricane.

MILES O’BRIEN: This is where the science gets a little bit harder. Does this warmer water necessarily mean that there will be more powerful hurricanes?

KERRY EMANUEL: What all the models and theories seem to agree on, at least globally, at this point is that the frequency of the very high intensity, Category 3 or 4 or 4 events, should go up.

If you look at the most powerful hurricanes on the planet, they have winds near the surface of about 200 Miles per hour. It’s conceivable that, 100 years from now, the top-ranking hurricanes will have wind speeds of, say, 220 miles per hour, OK, about a 10 percent increase.

MILES O’BRIEN: Scary and foreboding as that is, the strength of a hurricane is just part of the picture. A warmer climate means more moisture in the air, and that is leading to more rainfall.

RADLEY HORTON: Even if the hurricane strengths stay the same, we will probably see more rainfall in those hurricanes in the future, because the upper oceans are going to be warmer, because that warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. That means that, even if the storm strength is the same, you will probably see a little more rainfall occurring during those powerful hurricanes.

KERRY EMANUEL: We’re very confident that freshwater flooding will become more problematic as the climate warms, freshwater flooding in particular from hurricanes.

Models show that. It’s a very simple theory. That’s a big worry.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: We’re seeing quite a bit of urban flooding around the world, and particularly in this country, many of our storm water management and built environment infrastructure is developed for what I call the 1950s rainstorm.

MILES O’BRIEN: We have built our civilization right to the edge of safety for a very specific, and until recently, very stable climate.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: There’s something called stationarity. And what that essentially means is that storm water management, roads, building design, built infrastructure, assume that the intensity of rainfall would basically stay the same forever.

And what we’re seeing in the scientific literature is that the most intense rainstorms are now more intense, and this overwhelms that built infrastructure.

Going forward, I think the built environment infrastructure planning, engineering communities will have to increasingly consider these weather and climatic changes in their design.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This is going to happen quickly. That’s what I’m signing today.

MILES O’BRIEN: But 10 days before Harvey hit Houston, the Trump administration moved in the opposite direction, overturning an Obama era rule that federal projects be designed to account for the risk posed by climate change.

And yet the data is clear: There will be more events like this to follow.

RADLEY HORTON: We see that when those climate models are run in the future, with those higher greenhouse gas concentrations, we see more extreme events of certain types, more heat waves, more heavy rain events and more frequent coastal flooding.

KERRY EMANUEL: We’re inside the experiment. It’s the largest experiment we have ever done on the Earth system, for sure.

MILES O’BRIEN: We produced that story in conjunction with PBS NOVA and the online weather app MyRadar, part of an upcoming series on the link between weather and climate.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: A serious drought has swept southern Europe this summer. Some farmers in Italy and Spain are predicting the worst crop yields in 20 years. Agricultural damage and loss are expected to be in the billions.

NewsHour special correspondent Christopher Livesay bring us this report from Italy.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: For three generations, Daniel Granieri and his family have farmed olives in the tiny hilltop town of Nerola, producing extra-virgin olive oil from these fields outside Rome.

This summer, things took a turn, and for the worst.

DANIEL GRANIERI, Olive Farmer (through interpreter): I started to get very worried. From being worried, that turned into being absolutely certain about the drought. There’s never been anything like this, not in 20 years. This is the worst it’s ever been.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Granieri is also the regional president of the Italian Farmers Association, Coldiretti. He shows me some of the damage up close.

DANIEL GRANIERI (through interpreter): Look here, there’s hardly anything compared to the olives that should be on this branch. Raising the price won’t offset the loss. But we’ll have to raise them at least 10 to 15 percent. We’ve lost up to 70 percent of our harvest in the region.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: The drought is so relentless that his town now rations water. For eight-hour blocks every day, they can’t turn on their taps. And they aren’t alone. So far, 20 nearby towns have had to follow suit. Roughly $200 million in crops have been lost in the Central Lazio region alone. And two billion dollars have gone up in smoke nationwide, due to drought and related brush fires, according to Coldiretti.

Conditions have gotten so dire that even Rome, the city of aqueducts, has warned it too may have to ration water for a million and a half Rome residents, and the tourists who flock there.

There are almost 3,000 of these drinking fountains like this all over Rome, and there’s a trick to getting a good drink.

But that could soon be a thing of the past. The city is currently turning off 30 fountains a day because of the drought.

Romans call them nasoni, or “big noses” for their curved spigots. The water utility says it’s the first time in history they’ve had to turn them off, a radical move in a city where water plays such a central role, from the Trevi fountain, to the Tiber River.

TOM RANKIN, La Sapienza University: Rome was founded where it is because of this water, because of the Tiber Tiber.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Tom Rankin is a professor of urbanism at Rome’s La Sapienza University.

TOM RANKIN: The Romans were smart. They started removing the groundwater where it was undesired, using for their water source, wells.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: So, the ancient Romans were master engineers of water.

TOM RANKIN: They really were. They really were. And when you think about it, the sewer system, they were certainly in place in the 4th century B.C., and it’s still functioning today. It’s probably the most cost- effective public works project ever built.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: But modern city planning has fallen short. The drought is one thing, he says. But long-term mismanagement is also to blame.

Officials from both the city and the water utility declined requests for an interview.

TOM RANKIN: Rome, of all the European capitals, is the only city that has a fully sustainable water supply, meaning that the water table is recharged faster than the city can use the water. The real problem, though, is not that there wouldn’t be enough water to provide for the population, it’s the waste of water.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: The waste of water?

TOM RANKIN: The waste of water. The water system is damaged. And therefore, at least 25 percent of it, some say up to half of it, leaks out before getting to its destination.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Leaks like this one, that’s caused foliage to overgrow a path along the river.

TOM RANKIN: Because you see, this water isn’t actually stagnant, it’s flowing. It’s flowing from the city’s water system.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: And this one, which has formed stalactites.

The water utility says it’s working to repair city pipes in order to avoid rationing water. But the lingering threat frightens Roman shaved-ice vendor, Maria di Pascale.

MARIA DI PASCALE, Shaved Ice Vendor (through interpereter): It would be a tragedy because without water, you can’t survive, you can’t work. It’s essential for humans to survive. But especially us, because we need it for our business.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: The threat is especially acute for some of Rome’s most vulnerable. The Red Cross says turning off public fountains poses a serious risk to the city’s thousands of homeless, which include a growing number of migrants.

Volunteer Marzia di Mento distributes food and water to migrants and refugees outside Rome’s Tiburtina Train Station.

MARZIA DI MENTO, Boabab Experience (through interpreter): We need those fountains. We use those that are closest to the camp. We use this pipe for the people to bathe in.

We’re afraid it could be turned off at any moment. It’s their only water source. It would be a huge loss.

Many of the migrants have skin diseases from the trip over here by boat. They need water to clean those wounds. Water is fundamental.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: For the moment, Rome says it’s averted water rationing by tapping Lake Bracciano, about 30 miles outside the city. But that’s caused still more problems, as water levels plummet to alarming lows, threatening local plants and wildlife.

Back in the Rome countryside, farmer Daniel Granieri survey’s his olives. This year, he’ll have to pick them early in order to save what isn’t already lost.

DANIEL GRANIERI (through interpreter): Drought has absolutely become a recurring event. A farm like mine now has to decide either to change business, or make some serious changes in infrastructure. If this happens again next year, farms will go out of business.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: For urbanism professor Tom Rankin, Rome’s drought is a wake-up call, not just for the Eternal City, but for cities around the world coping with a changing climate.

TOM RANKIN: If Rome, which is by definition a great water city, if it can no longer manage its abundant resource, then how can we expect places which have a very limited supply of water to survive? On the other hand, if Rome were able to demonstrate its ability to engineer a solution, providing fresh, clean water for free to a growing population, then it would set a model for the rest of the world.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Is that what we’re seeing, Rome rising to the occasion?

TOM RANKIN: Not yet.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Christopher Livesay, in Rome.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now a look at a yet-to-be-released climate change report making headlines for what it tells us about the current state of science and politics.

The New York Times, which acquired a draft of the document, reports today that among its key findings are that evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans, and that — quote — “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse or heat-trapping gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change.”

The Times also reports that scientists are expressing concerns that the Trump administration has yet to indicate how or whether it will act on the findings.

For more, we turn to New York Times reporter Lisa Friedman, who wrote today’s article.

Lisa Friedman, welcome to the NewsHour.

And we should say that, late today, the White House put out a report saying that it didn’t understand why the story was necessary, that it hasn’t made a decision on the release of this report.

But setting that aside for a moment, who commissioned this report? Where did it come from?

LISA FRIEDMAN, The New York Times: Sure. Thanks for having me.

This report is part of what’s called the National Climate Assessment. It comes out every four years. It’s congressionally mandated. And the larger report, this National Climate Assessment, will presumably come out next year.

This special report started under the Obama administration, and it was designed to be a state-of-the-science report, to tell us what we know about climate change, what we know about climate science, what we know about how it’s affecting us here and now in the United States.

So, it’s important to note that hundreds of scientists have commented on this study, but the White House has until August 18 to decide what to do with it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And I just cited a couple of the key findings, I guess, from this report, but what would you say the significance of it is? What’s in there that’s new and that matters that we hadn’t heard before?

LISA FRIEDMAN: I think a couple big things, one of which is that this report finds that half of the temperature rise that has occurred in the past four decades can be linked to human activity.

You know, that’s something that directly goes against what we hear from many members of the administration. We have heard many members of the administration say that climate change exists, that the climate is changing, even saying that humans have a role to play, but that the science is unclear about how much humans are contributing to climate change.

This report, done by scientists at 13 federal agencies and outside the government as well, says, effectively, no, we do know how much humans are affecting climate change — pardon me — how much humans are affecting temperature rise.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And so there are significant findings in here.

And what I think is also interesting is a number of the scientists you talked to who contributed to this report or who are aware of it have a concern about whether it is going to be released. Tell us what their concern is.

LISA FRIEDMAN: Sure.

Well, like I said, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has until August 18 to decide whether or not this goes forward. If it does go forward, it will publish sometime this fall.

You know, what I have heard from a number of scientists is that, as the date approached, there was increasing concern that the report would either be suppressed or changed. So far, there has been no evidence of that.

So far, many scientists tell me that there has been very little direction, in fact, from the White House about the report altogether. In fact, our reporting also notes that people who do not believe in the established science behind climate change are also worried that this report and the broader National Climate Assessment will come out, because they fear that there are not enough people paying attention to this at the White House.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And for those — well, for those in the first category — and I will ask you about the other ones next — is the concern that there won’t be actions taken at the federal level? What is the main concern if it’s not made public?

LISA FRIEDMAN: Sure.

This report doesn’t offer policy prescriptions. This is not political in any way, this report. This is a study of the science. And, you know, what I have heard from the scientists is that the real worry, if it’s not made public, is that it won’t be useful to people on the ground.

They tell me that the people who really use this report are city planners, are people in places like Florida who are trying to figure out how to best assess sea level rise around Miami Beach, people who design building codes to make them more resilient to the impacts of extreme weather.

Those are the folks who use this kind of report the most. And the concern overwhelmingly was that, if it’s not widely shared, these folks would never see it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And was that a — that was a widely held concern?

LISA FRIEDMAN: I spoke to several scientists, yes, who are concerned that this report wouldn’t get out.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And so when the White House issues this report today and says this is a draft, it’s still in the internal phase, we have days to go, it is the case that they don’t — as you said several times now, they don’t have to make a decision yet.

LISA FRIEDMAN: That’s right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, by your report being out there and these scientists speaking through it, they’re making their concerns known.

LISA FRIEDMAN: You know, a lot of people talked to me about this being a test case.

This is the first major federal climate science report that has been issued under the Trump administration. And all eyes are on this administration to see how they handle it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, we’re going the leave it there and continue to watch this story, as I know you will.

Lisa Friedman with The New York Times, thank you.

LISA FRIEDMAN: Thank you.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, what do you do when your job changes, but you don’t agree with the change?

For one government scientist, it forced him into the role of a reluctant whistle-blower.

Our William Brangham has our conversation.

Recently, Joel Clement had been working as a senior policy official in the Department of the Interior. His work included the Arctic and the dangerous climate change posed.

But, in June, he was reassigned, along with several dozen others, to a completely different position unrelated to his previous work.

Last week, Clement went public in a The Washington Post op-ed alleging that he was reassigned because of his work on climate change. He said he was now — quote — “a whistle-blower on an administration that chooses silence over science.”

Joel Clement joins me now.

Welcome to the NewsHour.

JOEL CLEMENT, Former Director, Department of Interior Office of Policy Analysis: Thank you, William. Good to be here.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, you were one of several dozen people were reassigned. And you allege that this was because of your work on climate change.

And I’m curious. Let’s talk a little bit about what that work was that you were doing before you were reassigned. What did you do?

JOEL CLEMENT: Year, I was — here in Washington, I was the director of the Office of Policy Analysis. I had a team of analysts and economists and scientists.

And we were looking at a lot of cross-cutting issues, one of which in particular we spent a lot of time on was addressing the risks that climate change poses for the Alaska native communities in the Arctic. They are on these very narrow islands, barrier islands, that are in a very dire situation.

Because the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, the permafrost that locks those islands in place is starting to fall apart. And the sea ice that used to protect them from the oncoming storms and floods during the season of harsh weather has receded during that season.

So, now these bits of land are not only falling apart under their feet and buildings sliding into the sea, but they’re at the mercy of these storms that come through. And each episode can be quite dramatic.

And, honestly, we worry very much that one superstorm, and one or more villages could be wiped right off the map.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You argued in your piece that you believed you were reassigned for raising concerns about these communities.

You wrote — quote — “The Trump administration clearly retaliated against me for raising awareness of this danger.”

What evidence do you have that that’s really why you got moved?

JOEL CLEMENT: Well, it’s clear that there’s been an ongoing effort to suppress this climate change stuff, right? We didn’t worry about that as much at Interior, because we work on climate adaptation and resilience issues, right? We’re addressing the impacts that we know are coming, that are baked into the system, no matter what we do, about mitigating greenhouse gases.

So, I guess, naively, we thought that the focus would be on greenhouse gases and EPA. But, really, in I think it was May, President Trump rescinded an executive order from last December that set up a tribal advisory council and some other boards that would help get this work done.

That’s when we realized it doesn’t matter whether it’s resilience adaptation or mitigation. They’re coming after anything that has the scent of climate change to it.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And what were you doing specifically to raise awareness about this issue that you think put you in the crosshairs?

JOEL CLEMENT: Well, I spoke very publicly about the issue. I raised it to leadership at the Department of Interior. I raised it with leadership at the White House.

I spoke on several occasions to the public about it. And just the week before I received the reassignment letter I spoke about it at the United Nations.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Now, a spokesman for the Interior Department says that this move, transferring you from A to B, was completely appropriate. They say it’s — Interior Secretary Zinke said he was going to reorganize the department on day one, and that they argue that you signed up for this job knowing that this was likely going to happen.

So what is your response to that?

JOEL CLEMENT: We absolutely know that the Senior Executive Service is a mobile work force. That’s what it was intended for.

Anyone who becomes an SES, a senior executive, is aware that they could at some point be reassigned, even involuntarily.

What it doesn’t allow, however, is for the administration to retaliate against employees by reassigning them or try and get them to — to coerce them into quitting their jobs. And it was very clear to me, based on the job they put me in, that that was their intent.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But they never said to you, we didn’t like that you were talking about this or raising this issue? They simply said, we think you’re better positioned to do this other job?

JOEL CLEMENT: Yes, they actually never said anything. I didn’t talk to anybody. No one reached out before the reassignment, and no one reached out after the reassignment, except to tell me where my new office was.

And my notice office is in the office, the accounting office that collects royalty checks from oil and gas companies.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That’s your current job now?

JOEL CLEMENT: That’s where I sit now. It’s not really a job. I’m a senior adviser, so it’s a job title with no duties, so I think it was understood that I would quit the job before moving.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Do you see some irony there, that you were working on climate change largely driven by the consumption of oil and gas, and now you’re cashing checks from the oil and gas industry?

JOEL CLEMENT: Year, the irony is not lost on me, nor is the very clear intent of that reassignment.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You have filed a complaint now with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. What is it you hope comes of this?

JOEL CLEMENT: Well, I’m going to trust the process. They will do an investigation. I certainly hope that they will then ask the department to reinstate me in my old job, so I can get back to work looking out for these Alaska native communities, looking out for the health and safety of Americans.

That’s what makes this work meaningful. And, of course, I hope to be able to do that. I also, though, hope that others that are contemplating speaking out realize they do have rights, and they do have a voice, and there’s an opportunity if they need to, if they’re told to do things they don’t approve of or not to do their job, that they should speak out.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, Joel Clement, thank you very much for talking with us.

JOEL CLEMENT: Thank you very much.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR:  Finding and traversing the fabled ice-clogged northwest sea passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the Canadian Arctic was a dream of explorers for centuries.  But it wasn’t until 1906 that famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen completed the voyage for the first time.

This weekend, a Finnish icebreaker completed the most recent transit, one that glaringly revealed the effects of climate change on the fragile Arctic environment.  The trip from Vancouver Canada to Greenland’s capital city Nuuk took 24 days.  Onboard to document the voyage was a team of “Associated Press” reporters.

Joining us now via Skype from Nuuk, Greenland, is one of the “A.P.” reporters, Frank Jordans.

So, Frank, the fact that it’s 24 days, that’s a new record.  What does that tell us?

FRANK JORDANS, REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS:  What is new this year is that the Finnish ice break in Nordica, was able to go from Vancouver to Nuuk and arrived by July 29th, which is the earliest passage that’s ever been recorded.

SREENIVASAN:  So, that means the ice is thinner and it’s happening earlier in the year.  Meaning that it’s a warmer temperature?

JORDANS:  Yes, the ice coverage fluctuates year by year.  Sometimes it increases a little bit.  Sometimes, it’s less.  What that meant for our trip was that we were able to enter the Northwest Passage earlier and found remarkably little ice.  And the ice that we did find was quite thin.

SREENIVASAN:  What are the consequences if the ice is thinning earlier, and if this passage is opening?

JORDANS:  Well, there’s been a lot of speculation in the last few years ago about whether or not the Northwest Passage might become a new shipping highway.  Cargo ships, tourist ships, pleasure boats, those kinds of things.  And if the Northwest Passage becomes completely ice-free or virtually ice-free sort of large parts of the summer, then that does become a distinct possibility.

SREENIVASAN:  There were several researchers on board this vessel.  What were they studying?

JORDANS:  The impact of global warming on societies in the Arctic, some were taking records of the marine animals that we were encountering.  And some were looking at the Northwest Passage from an economic point of view.

SREENIVASAN:  I take it most of this is uninhabited area.  For anyplace that you ran into any communities that were living off the ice, what’s the consequence to them if this passage keeps opening up sooner and sooner?

JORDANS:  Well, the area is not entirely uninhabited, but it is certainly very sparsely inhabited.  There are small communities along the way, and sometimes they’re hundreds of kilometers or miles from other communities.  They actually depend on the ice for travel.  Those are their highways for much of the year.

So, when the Northwest Passage is frozen over, they can travel from one community to another very quickly by sled for example.  When the ice breaks up, then they can’t do that anymore.  The whole situation changes for them.  So, as the Northwest Passage changes, due to global warming, these communities will have to adapt.

SREENIVASAN:  All right.  Frank Jordans of the “Associated Press”, joining us via Sky from Nuuk, Greenland, today, thanks so much.

JORDANS:  You’re very welcome.

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CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Venice is a world class wonder. A city built on more than 100 small islands, connected by a maze of bridges and canals. The largest is the Grand Canal with its famous Rialto Bridge. Over the centuries, Venice has stood the test of time, but today this island city is under siege like never before…from “rising” seas and a “flood” of tourists.

MONICA CHOJNACKA: The fact that we are still waiting for any kind of solution of these problems of tourism and flooding is deeply depressing.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Historian Monica Chojnacka was born in Venice and proudly calls this city her home.

MONICA CHOJNACKA: That was the step you got on when you got off of your gondola or your boat to get into the house.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: But she’s concerned about its future.

MONICA CHOJNACKA: This is a step that, of course, when it was built was never designed to be submerged in water. Now it’s always underwater even in this relatively low tide.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: “Acqua Alta,” meaning high water, has always been a fact of life here. Several times a year, high tides and storm surges flood the city, especially the famous Piazza San Marco. The worst flood occurred in November 1966, when the Venice lagoon rose more than six feet above sea level.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: After the deluge, the city designed an alert system which has kept pace with the times.

MONICA CHOJNACKA: What happens is we are alerted via an app as well as text messages and in addition, we have sirens that are blasted through the city.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Those warning sirens are coordinated from this command center on the Grand Canal. A siren is followed by pitched whistles. One whistle means about 12% of the city will be flooded, water is ankle deep, and shopkeepers barricade their doors. Two whistles means the water will be higher. Almost one-third of the city will be flooded.

MONICA CHOJNACKA: Three means run for the hills, because it’s going to be high!

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Venetians generally take “Acqua Alta” in stride. Like the manager of the Gran Caffe Lavena, Massimo Milanese. He showed us pictures of his cafe during a recent flood. Tables and chairs sitting in the water.

MASSIMO MILANESE: See the special doors here.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Like others in the Piazza, he has flood doors to protect his business. He took us behind the cafe, where those flood doors are stored.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: So the water can actually get this high?

MASSIMO MILANESE: The maximum that I saw — this.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Whoa. So just a couple of inches more, and this would have been useless.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: He also keeps waterproof boots on hand for his employees.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Acqua Alta events are usually less than boot high, last just a few hours, and the city cleans up and goes back to normal. But floods also eat away at the soft, permeable bricks that sit above the foundations of the buildings. Over time, Venetians have raised their doorways and in some cases abandoned their ground floors. But the flooding is getting worse as the water level in the Adriatic Sea and Venice Lagoon rises due to climate change. The sea level alone has risen five and half inches since 1900, according to city officials.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: The Italian government does have a plan to protect Venice. It’s called the MOSE project. Conceived in the 1970s, it’s a series of 78 underwater gates secured to the floor of the Venice lagoon. During especially high tides, they will be pumped with air and rise to the surface to block rising water from reaching the city. Four giant barriers across three inlets are scheduled to be operational by 2019.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Is MOSE able to defend Venice?

DARIO BERTI: Yes, MOSE will be able to protect the city of Venice from exceptionally high water. That means water that exceeds three-and-half feet above sea level.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: So this is what the gate looks like when it’s down?

DARIO BERTI: Yes, this is the gate when it it standing on the bottom of the inlet.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Dario Berti is engineering and production manager with the company building the MOSE project. Construction began in 2003, testing, in 2013.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: If this is the first project of its kind, how can you be so sure that it’s going to work?

DARIO BERTI: Well, this is the result of years and years of planning and experiments on models, trials in tanks. It’s been tested in all possible conditions. So, we’re certain it will work.

MONICA CHOJNACKA: One question about the MOSE project, these seawalls is whether it will be effective?

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: If it will be effective? They’ve spent billions of Euros on it. Shouldn’t it be effective?

MONICA CHOJNACKA: Yes, the latest estimates are between 5 and 6 billion Euros having been spent on this project. Certainly a portion of that money has not gone towards the building of the project but rather towards payoffs to local and regional politicians and business folk. Three years ago, about 35 of our leading citizens were arrested along with our mayor.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: The mayor of Venice was arrested?

MONICA CHOJNACKA: The mayor of Venice was arrested as well on charges of corruption connected to this project.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: A verdict on the case of that former mayor is expected this fall. Considering the corruption scandals, environmental scientist Jane Da Mosto says the Italian government should have gone back and reviewed the engineering and scientific basis for MOSE.

JANE DA MOSTO: There hasn’t been any kind of technical review about whether or not they are doing the right thing, and that I do find seriously alarming.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Da Mosto is executive director of a nonprofit group called “We are here Venice,” which is trying to raise awareness of the challenges facing Venice.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: So there’s a lot of concern among Venetians that the work at MOSE isn’t being done properly?

JANE DA MOSTO: It’s not just amongst Venetians. Articles have been published in national newspapers, international journals. They have a problem about sand going into the indentations in the lagoon floor, where the panels then have to lie back down again. They found that the hinges, they’ve started corroding much sooner than they thought they would. They also keep delaying when they say it’s going to be ready. Not a good sign.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: MOSE engineers say they are addressing the issues of sand obstructing the barriers and of rusting hinges.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: But Luca Zaggia, from the Institute of Marine Sciences National Research Council of Italy, warns assuming they work, there’s a limit to how many times the defensive flood barriers can be deployed before they damage the lagoon.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: How many times can you raise the flood barriers in a year?

LUCA ZAGGIA: We say 10 times a year is the best amount. Maybe 15 or 20 but no more.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: But the climate is changing. The water level is rising. What happens 20 years from now, 30 years from now? Is that still going still to be the case?

LUCA ZAGGIA: No. Sure. We will close more frequently. Up 100 times a year.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: 100 times a year? What is that going to do to the lagoon?

LUCA ZAGGIA: It will be a terrible disaster for the ecosystem. Stagnation first and then contamination and growth of microalgae.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: It sounds very harmful.

LUCA ZAGGIA: Yeah, it is. You can have massive deaths of fishes in summer.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: Most tourists are oblivious to the barrier system and seriousness of the flooding problem. They are busy taking selfies, marveling at the beauty of this car-free city, or trying to escape from the summer heat, like these tourists from Ireland we found in the shade of the tower in Piazza San Marco. They had no idea, until we told them, this plaque marks the historic flood of 1966, when the water level was so high, their children would have been neck deep.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: The 25 million tourists who visit every year are actually another major threat to Venice. Souvenir shops and high-end boutiques catering to them have replaced vegetable stands, hardware stores, and other shops necessary for daily life. Housing prices have soared with speculators buying up property to rent to tourists. As a result, Venetians are moving away. At the end World War Two, there were 150,000 full-time residents of Venice. Now, there are only 54,000.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: On some days, there are actually more tourists than residents, and that upsets Venetians like Matteo Secchi.

MATTEO SECCHI: The Venetian way of life is at risk, simply because we’re vanishing. There’s always fewer of us. We’re losing our culture. Because when a Venetian leaves the city, he doesn’t just leave the city, he leaves a way of life and culture.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: In this fragile city, some residents say huge tourist cruise ships are making matters worse. Tommaso Cacciari is the founder of the group “No Grandi Navi,” meaning ‘No Large Ships.” It wants to ban large cruise ships from entering the Venice lagoon.

TOMMASO CACCIARI: There’s a mass amount of water that pushes back and forth. It’s called siphoning. It’s like an accordion that sucks the foundation of the city. There’s no concrete under here. There’s mud, soft material that gets sucked out.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: This pier, he says, rebuilt seven years ago is already showing signs of damage from the cruise ships.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: When they pass by, they create this huge pressure that basically sucks the sediment out from underneath us and actually lowers the foundation. You can see it really right before your eyes here with these bricks here.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: The cruise ships employ five thousand Venetians, but the Venice Port Authority says only about a quarter of their passengers get off them and spend money in the city. Reining in the ships and the tourists is one challenge humans can control. Controlling the seas is not. Which is why Marine scientist Luca Zaggia is putting his faith in the MOSE project to save Venice for future generations.

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY: So the system must work. The alternative is what?

LUCA ZAGGIA: The system must work. We have no alternatives at this point. It has to work.

Peril and Promise is an ongoing series of reports on the human impact of, and solutions for, Climate Change. Lead funding for Peril and Promise is provided by Dr. P. Roy Vagelos and Diana T. Vagelos. Major support is provided by Marc Haas Foundation.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Scientists are predicting a 110-mile sheet of ice — a chunk the size of the state of Delaware — will break off Antarctica in the coming days or weeks. The cause is warming ocean waters, and the ice melt has implications for sea level rise well beyond the South Pole region.

“The National Geographic” July issue cover story is called “Antarctica is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks are Just the Start”.

Joining me now from Birmingham, Alabama, to discuss this is Robert Kunzig, the senior environmental editor for “National Geographic.”

Thanks for joining us.

First of all, a chunk of ice the size of Delaware seems almost impossible to, you know, put our heads around, but that’s actually a small piece when you think of the size of Antarctica.

ROBERT KUNZIG, SENIOR ENVIRONMENTAL EDITOR, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: Yes, it is, and it’s even just a small piece, Hari, of the Larsen C Ice Shelf that it’s breaking off of. Larsen C is a floating slab of ice size that’s the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

And what’s happening there is that a rift that has been growing for years now, this year really accelerated. As you said, it’s about 15 miles wide, it — and it’s been growing from south to north, basically going to slice a big chunk of ice off the ice shelf and that chunk will be the size of Delaware.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we have a picture of one of the cracks that are going through. Scientists have been looking and studying and trying to get at some of these cracks for a long time. How deep does it go down and why are they so concerned?

KUNZIG: The crack in Larsen C where Larson C meets the sea, it’s about 600 feet thick. And most of that is under water. So, there’s an ice cliff of about 60 feet that towers above the waves. So, the crack goes about, at least 600 feet.

If this iceberg goes, the worry is that the whole ice shelf might collapse as other ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula have already collapsed. And ice shelves there and elsewhere around Antarctica are really kind of the canaries in the coal mine that they’re a sign of what’s happening all over, which is that Antarctica is melting faster than scientists had expected.

SREENIVASAN: So, this isn’t just about the fact that the water is already in the water and it’s just melting in a glass of water, say. We’re actually adding new ice cubes to that glass, which is what makes, what, the sea level rise?

KUNZIG: Well, yes. That’s the perfect analogy. This ice, the Larsen C Ice Shelf is floating. It is like an ice cube in a glass of water. So, even if all of it collapses, that, itself, does not add to sea level.

But the thing about ice shelves is that they function like corks. They’re bottling up a much larger amount ice that’s on the ground, on the land in this case behind them. And when — that’s the glaciers that are carrying ice from the interior of Antarctica towards the sea. The ice shelves are really just sort of the floating ends of the glaciers. And so, when that flow increases, more ice is falling into the sea and raising sea level.

SREENIVASAN: In the article, it talks about how scientists measure what’s happening kind of under water. What’s happening underneath these ice sheets? How is there warmer water and what’s the interaction of salt water do to this all?

KUNZIG: Well, the big thing that’s been happening in recent years is that warmer ocean water, and when I say warm, warmer, I don’t mean really warm. We’re talking about four, five degrees above freezing. That water is penetrating further up towards the coast of Antarctica under the ice shelf and it is undermining the ice shelves. It’s melting them and thinning them from below and weakening them.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you have a large map that you have in “The National Geographic” article that kind of puts this in perspective and there’s areas of kind of purple that are the areas that are kind of floating off. And there’s a couple of patches of red, where it’s really happening at an incredible rate.

Tell us about how fast it’s happening in, say, the Pine Glacier.

KUNZIG: Basically, it’s been an acceleration by several times. All over Antarctica, the loss of ice from the floating ice shelves has increased by a factor of 12 in the past two decades. So where in the mid ‘90s, they were losing six billion tons of ice. Now, they are losing 74.

What it is, it’s natural for these glaciers to float in the sea. But what’s happening is the speed has increased.

SREENIVASAN: Robert Kunzig, the senior environment editor for “National Geographic”, thanks so much for joining us.

KUNZIG: Thank you, Hari.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has launched the formal process to review and challenge mainstream climate science. The critique will reportedly be modeled on how the U.S. military identifies battlefield vulnerabilities. Emily Holden from “E&E News’s” climate wire broke the story on Friday and joins me now from Washington to discuss it.

So, explain, how this process is going to work?

EMILY HOLDEN, REPORTER, E&E NEWS: So, what we know so far is essentially that Administrator Pruitt wants to recruit scientists who work on this red team/blue team to sort of look at any potential vulnerabilities, any sort of uncertainty in climate change report. So, the red team would do that. The blue team would be the team producing and defending the reports.

SREENIVASAN: So, this kind of flies in the face of peer-reviewed scientific journal and how they actually put science forward.

HOLDEN: It does and that’s absolutely what you’ve heard from the scientific community in response to this. They’re saying, look, this is exactly how science is made. So, before we publish anything on climate change or any other matter, we’ve had it reviewed by other scientists who have looked to see that we’ve done everything correctly and that we come to the correct conclusions.

SREENIVASAN: And what about the fact that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that this is really not up for dispute? So, if you wanted to do this red team/blue team, would it be red team, three, and blue team, 97?

HOLDEN: Right. So, we don’t know a lot about what the specifics would look. It’s a pretty small group of people who are dissenters who do not agree with the vast majority of climate scientists who say that climate change is happening, that humans are a cause, a main cause, and that action needs to be taken as soon as possible to try to stall climate change.

SREENIVASAN: And how w did you find out this information on Friday?

HOLDEN: I actually was at an event where the president was speaking at the Energy Department headquarters and had a chat with Bob Murray who’s the CEO of Murray Energy, one of the biggest coal companies in the U.S. And he mentioned to me that he had had a meeting with Scott Pruitt that same morning at a coal lobby board meeting and that he had spoken to him about this issue and what he planned to do, and also whether he plans to challenge a legal finding that is the basis for U.S. greenhouse gas regulations.

SREENIVASAN: Put this in perspective on the other steps that Scott Pruitt has taken when it comes to climate.

HOLDEN: So, for the budget proposal, he has cut pretty much anything related to climate science that his agency does right now. It’s unclear whether Congress is going to approve the numbers that he and the president are looking at. But, essentially, he’s nixed anything that would work on climate science within the EPA. He has taken everything down from the Web site that he can.

So, that part is not a surprise. He’s also expressed that even that he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a main cause of climate change.

SREENIVASAN: Emily Holden from “E&E News”, thanks so much for joining us.

HOLDEN: Thank you.

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By Saskia de Melker and Melanie Saltzman

SASKIA DE MELKER: The documentary “Chasing Coral” tells the story of a three-year effort to capture the loss of the world’s coral reefs through time-lapse, underwater photography.

The film focuses on the process called coral bleaching. When ocean water becomes too warm, corals become stressed and expel the algae living in their tissue causing the coral to turn completely white.

“The coral bleaches, and what you’re seeing is the skeleton underneath.”

Coral bleaching is happening more often as climate change raises the temperature of oceans, which have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat created by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

One area the film focuses on is Australia’s Great Barrier Reef where the average ocean water temperature has warmed by about 1.2 degrees fahrenheit over the last century.

Jeff Orlowski directed “Chasing Coral”.

JEFF ORLOWSKI: Coral reefs are the backbone for the entire ocean. They are the nursery for the ocean. About a quarter of all marine life in the ocean spends part of its lifecycle on a coral reef. And there are about a billion or so people that depend on coral reefs for fish for their food, for protein.

A team of divers, photographers, and scientists logged 650 hours underwater in 30 countries to make “Chasing Coral”. Orlowski says the challenge was gathering multiple images a day in the same places for months to show changes to the reef in real time.

JEFF ORLOWSKI: From the beginning, we knew that if we could figure out a way to do time lapse of this change happening in the ocean, that it would be the most powerful visual that we could create. There’s something about creating evidence. When you look at a piece of ice calving or you look at a wildfire burning, because that’s part of this normal cycle, it doesn’t register in the same way as when you can document the change over time

SASKIA DE MELKER: Why did you specifically focus on the event of coral bleaching?

JEFF ORLOWSKI: The really valuable thing about documenting coral bleaching is that it is this straight, very direct visual indicator of how hot the oceans are getting. If the temperature of the water passes a certain threshold, the corals turn white. It’s that simple. There’s nothing natural about the cycle that’s going on right now. In 2016, we lost 29 percent of the Great Barrier Reef. So 29 percent of the Great Barrier Reef died in a single year, because the water was hot.

SASKIA DE MELKER: The film shows how Richard Vevers, a former advertising executive turned ocean activist, was inspired to document coral bleaching, which corals can recover from, but can also often lead corals to die.

RICHARD VEVERS: I was truly shocked by what I saw. The reef was white as far as the eye could see. To be honest, I didn’t have the knowledge to know how to process it. Was this dead? Was it alive? This is Airport Reef. So this is in December. And this is it now.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Is there something about coral bleaching though that is a little bit counterintuitive, because it doesn’t look like dying?

JEFF ORLOWSKI: There’s a huge challenge around coral bleaching specifically, because when most people think about coral, they think about the beautiful, white sculpture sitting on their mantle. And it looks so pristine and clean and beautiful. It’s not supposed to look like that when it’s in the ocean. It has color, it has animal flesh living on it, it has plants living inside of that. They look very, very different when they’re healthy in the ocean than they do when they’re sitting in somebody’s home.

SASKIA DE MELKER: The film documents a lot of the challenges that you have in getting those images. How did you approach taking these underwater images?

JEFF ORLOWSKI: We had to align the cameras manually every day. You get the camera positioned in the right spot, panning in the right way. I actually had underwater lasers zip-tied to the camera system. Literally the ground that you’re putting the camera on is changing every day. So to get the camera in the same exact spot in this three-dimensional space was really, really challenging. We would let it roll for a couple minutes, then pick all the equipment up, go to another site and do it again.

SASKIA DE MELKER: This isn’t Orlowski’s first film documenting climate change. His 2012 film “Chasing Ice” chronicled the melting of the world’s glaciers and won an Emmy for outstanding nature programming.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Was it more difficult to chase ice and document what’s happening in the glaciers or to chase the corals and document what’s happening in the oceans?

JEFF ORLOWSKI: Working in the Arctic is definitely colder, but not necessarily harder. There were different challenges. And in many ways, Chasing Coral was even more of a struggle for me personally. And more of a struggle to capture. Glaciers right now are changing very consistently. The interesting thing that we realized with Chasing Coral was that the corals reefs. They can go from living to dead in two months. And if you’re not there at the right time to capture that before and after, you just show up and it’s a dead reef. So it was a challenge to be at the right place at the right time.

SASKIA DE MELKER: This isn’t a political film, but it’s coming out in a time when climate change is highly politicized. What’s that challenge in terms of making people aware of this but not getting sucked into that debate?

JEFF ORLOWSKI: I think it is massively unfortunate for human civilization that this issue has become politicized. And what I’m trying to work on and what our team is trying to work on is how do we depoliticize it. We need to get to a place where everybody just acknowledges, okay, there are challenges, and we know there are solutions, and let’s talk about what those solutions are. Denying the problem just prolongs the problem.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Global sea level rise went up 50 percent between 1994 and 2014, according to a study published this week in the journal “Nature Climate Change.” In 2014 alone, it went up an eighth of an inch. But if you want to see what those numbers actually mean, take a look at the increasing number of flooding events along the east coast of the United States. The nonprofit Climate Central looked at 90 cities from Massachusetts to Florida. Included in that list are Atlantic City and other towns on the New Jersey shore.

I recently spoke to the reporter of that story, John Upton.

SREENIVASAN: You worked on this for six months. Why focus on Atlantic City? I mean, Atlantic City to a lot of us think, we think casinos. The Trump Taj Mahal, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s a lot more people that live there.

JOHN UPTON, REPORTER, CLIMATE CENTRAL: The Climate Central scientists actually conducted analysis. They looked at hundreds of U.S. coastal cities and examined the increases that are expected in the flooding risks in each of those. They identified about 90 that face vey sharp increases in flooding risks.

A lot of these cities tend to be built along bays, along rivers, near the massive estuaries. So, they have a very low topography and the highest risk ones tend to be along the mid-Atlantic and Atlantic City simply showed up as being one of the cities that faces the greatest risks. But in addition to that, it is also has great inequity among the rich and poor, it’s a city in economic decline right now. So, I want to examine (ph) how they’re adapting to the changes in sea level there.

SREENIVASAN: You also took video in your article. I know you spent six months working on this project. There’s a piece of sound that we have from one of the residents there. Let’s take a listen to her.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t bad when we first moved in here. It was eight inches before. And now, it’s ten inches. It’s going to be in the house. Right now, we’re going to try to put a washer and drier up, in our living. It’s replaceable but it’s very hard and very inconvenient and money, you know.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: This is not after Hurricane Sandy. This is after what kind of weather?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UPTON: This is when there’s a full moon or a new moon, you get higher tides at normal times. And just yesterday, I was retweeting some pictures from the street Arizona Avenue and Atlantic Avenue that were flooding, simply because there was a high tied associated with a full moon. At the same time, there was a storm. The storm pushed water from the coast towards the land. So, you have the tide actually rising up in the streets, coming through the storm water drains.

And the same time as that, you have heavy rain or any rain, and the rain can’t drain away. So, what you get is a very substantial flooding in some of these neighborhoods that are built along bays in Atlantic City and that was the case in the video that you just saw

SREENIVASAN: And this is just people getting used to this as a fact life on — if the circumstances are right, basically a full moon and heavy rain or storm and it’s over.

UPTON: This can happen — this is happening monthly. This is happening all the time. The residents have their own systems for dealing with it. They alert each other when they see the water rising.

They’ve all lost cars. They move their cars. They pack them in a garage in the downtown area or higher land.

They put their furniture up on blocks. They take precautions because they’ve all experienced serious floods. And so, they just take measures to minimize the impact each time it floods.

SREENIVASAN: What does this do to property value? I’m imagining right now, after I see the story or at least people who know what they’re looking for, I’m not going to buy a house that’s on that street. And so, the people are there if they can’t sell it.

UPTON: And so, that it’s not only that it’s unappealing because it’s flooding but Atlantic City is in such serious economic climate. It had 5 percent of their population leave just over the last decade. All the jobs are drying up. The tax base is drying up. Nobody wants to be buying property in Atlantic City, let alone in these very vulnerable areas.

And over the last 12 months, two houses in this one block street that I went to Arizona Avenue, two of them had sold for less than $35,000 each. And what that means is that residents who are some out of work, all of that equity is tied up in the house. They now have no equity left.

They can’t sell their house. They don’t have work in Atlantic City. They want to move but they can’t sell their property. They feel very trapped. Some of them really express very strong emotions to me. They feel stuck.

SREENIVASAN: Isn’t the Army Corps of Engineers working at a different part of the same town or the same city to try to shore up the defenses to downtown?

UPTON: Sure. So, using Sandy recovery funds, the Army Corps is engaging two fairly major projects quite close to Arizona Avenue, close to these, you know, working class neighborhoods in Atlantic City.

One is in the downtown area. That’s a big sea wall being built to protect the casinos and downtown area. They’re also about to spend tens of millions on sand dunes to protect ocean front homes, often costing millions of dollars, often occupied only during the summer. These are holiday houses. So, they’re getting protection, even though they’ve actually sued to try to prevent the project because they don’t want to lose their views.

So, all around these residents, they can see the federal government working to alleviate flooding risks. But these working class residents of Atlantic City are getting nothing.

SREENIVASAN: You focused on Atlantic City but you also have an interactive map on the site. It’s just very interesting and it points out how this is happening in different coastal populations all over the country. I mean, you know, if you kind of click through and you see kind of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, and you have the sort of bar graph that talks about what the flood risks are going to be now and then, you know, 20, 30 years from now. Almost in every one of those places, obviously, it’s getting worse.

UPTON: Yes. And the areas that are built along bays, the areas that are built along river, these working class neighborhoods, they face the greatest risks.

You know, we have to be serious here. We have to stop putting so much pollution into the atmosphere. That’s causing the seas to rise. We need to take measures to stop that.

But even if we — even if we stop polluting the atmosphere tomorrow, we locked in so much sea level rise at this point, it’s such a slow-moving disaster that we’ve begun that we’re still going to see the risks increasing very dramatically in a number of these cities around the U.S. and also around the world.

SREENIVASAN: How is a house insurable in a neighborhood like this? So, when you look at downtown Miami, these condos are expensive and they’re there. And here, we have a situation that 30 years from now, all the projections say it’s actually going to worse.

So, if I’m on a 30-year mortgage, A, who’s getting me that mortgage. And then, what’s the insurance? Who’s giving me the insurance?

UPTON: The only reason that you can get insurance in these areas is that the federal government has always subsided, has always provided flood insurance. It’s promoted and encouraged and effectively subsidized house building urban development, home buying, in very vulnerable coastal areas. And —

SREENIVASAN: And we’re all paying for it.

UPTON: We are all paying for it. The flood insurance program is currently more than $20 million in arrears. And so, there have been attempts to reform this flood insurance program. The problem is what Congress discovered is that once you take these subsidies away, the homeowners, the voters suddenly see very sudden and substantial increases in their insurance rates and they’re suddenly paying what the market would have to offer and that’s very unpopular, it’s a very hard thing to change now that we got that in place.

SREENIVASAN: All right. The report is on Climate Central’s website. John Upton, thanks so much for joining us.

UPTON: Great to be here. Thanks for your interest.

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By Mori Rothman and Melanie Saltzman

MIKE TAIBBI: Two men mix sand and shovelfuls of cement, spending hours on end building their seawall— no, re-building it, and higher each time.

Banga Roriki is working with his nephew, Robin, who has been living in this house, on Majuro, one of the Marshall Islands, for 22 years.

BANGA RORIKI: The high tide comes very high.

MIKE TAIBBI: He says the wall is meant to stop massive high tides, known here as king tides, like the one that surged through his home last year.

On another of the Marshall Islands, Ebeye, those same tides eat away the shoreline everywhere you look. Tombstones shoved free and even swept out to sea. What used to be a park surrounding Ebeye’s power plant, gone.

74-year-old Belma Marok has already seen king tides destroy several homes here.

BELMA MAROK: The corner of the house was right over there, right outside that piece of concrete there.

MIKE TAIBBI: These big slabs were part of the foundation of the house?

BELMA MAROK: Yeah.

MIKE TAIBBI: The Marshall Islands, a nation of slender atolls and five more substantial islands, sit in the South Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Australia, no more than six or seven feet above sea level.

Climate scientists warn — if the current pace of global warming and sea level rise continues, then low-lying islands like the Marshalls could become incapable of sustaining their population within a generation or two.

CHIP FLETCHER: Sea level is rising in certain parts of the pacific faster than anywhere else in the world.

MIKE TAIBBI: Chip Fletcher studies climate science at the University of Hawaii. He says that well before the Marshall Islands might disappear — they could face a more immediate impact from climate change: fresh water shortages.

MIKE TAIBBI: What’s the biggest threat now to the Marshall Islands?

CHIP FLETCHER: Depends on your time scale. I think the longer time scale sea
level rise is probably the biggest threat. Simply because it has the potential to rise
above the average elevation of the Marshall Islands. Shorter timescale though, it’s the
fundamental need for fresh water.

MIKE TAIBBI: On Ebeye, fresh water is Belma Marok’s biggest worry in his home the spigots hooked up to the town water system are dry.

His son lugs buckets of water so their family can shower and flush their toilets. the family relies on rainwater catchment tanks for water — but those remain practically empty because of a relentless drought.

Getting fresh water has always been a preoccupation for the Marshall Islands. Most communities rely on rainwater collection — rooftop gutters connected to water tanks outside of virtually every home — and a few underground freshwater aquifers they can access through wells.

The fresh water is essential for cleaning, personal hygiene, doing laundry and of course, drinking.

But as life in the islands became more westernized, and the population grew to more than 50-thousand people, those limited freshwater sources became more stressed than ever.

And now, because of climate change the traditional water sources are at increased risk. the droughts are getting so long that collecting enough rainwater is becoming harder and harder.

The freshwater wells and underground aquifers are at risk of being fouled by salt water from frequent flooding some wells already spoiled because of high tides driven by rising sea level.

Those so-called “king” tides now sweep over the Marshalls more intensely and more frequently.

It’s an irony not lost on some climate change experts that while the Marshall Islands are among the sovereign nations that contribute the least to global warming, they’re also among the nations that face threats that are the most profound and immediate.

Hilda Heine, the President of the Republic of Marshall Islands is keenly aware of the paradox of living here it’s the old cliche water water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: We’ve been fighting this climate change for the last, what, maybe five to 10 years. And our islands are still livable. So we continue to have hopes. And so I think we’re able to make sure that people are safe during droughts. We’re able to provide water, food and so on. So that’s what we need to do. It’s the new norm, but that doesn’t mean giving up.

MIKE TAIBBI: President Heine says the government has made fresh water access a priority and points to improvements in the centralized water systems on the two most crowded islands — Majuro and Ebeye. But those systems supply only a fraction of the population and for limited hours each week.

On Majuro, home to 27,000 residents, severe weather events put enormous pressure on the main water source — seven reservoirs that store rainwater collected from the airport’s runway.

Halston deBrum is operations manager for Majuro’s government-run water company. he says the drought last year nearly depleted their supply.

HALSTON DEBRUM: This reservoir was half. That one, empty. Reservoir number one and two were pretty empty as well. The only water we did have was pretty much in the covered reservoir, the treated water.

MIKE TAIBBI: deBrum says a more severe weather event could leave them scrambling.

So if the big one hits next month, you guys aren’t ready for it?

HALSTON DEBRUM: No, if the big one hits next month, we won’t be ready for it. And then we’ll have to find other ways to provide water.

MIKE TAIBBI: But deBrum says he’s confident coming improvements will one day provide all residents 24/7 water access, even during droughts.

HALSTON DEBRUM: I think if we improve what we have here what we have. the infrastructure work that we have now. Improve the pipeline. Improve our catchment area on the runway. And then build more reservoirs. Bigger reservoirs so that we can store more.

MIKE TAIBBI: On Ebeye, the main freshwater source is a 14-year-old desalination that’s undergoing a nearly 5 million dollar upgrade. but right now it’s less than a panacea for the more than 10-thousand people living in this densely populated setting.

For one thing, the water is piped into households only 45-minutes a day, two days a week and it isn’t safe to drink without boiling it.

For most of their water needs, residents come to this public tap. But even though this water is tested on a regular basis, many residents are skeptical.

MIKE TAIBBI: Do you use it to drink, or just cook with it? What do you do with it?

JIM SHIMA: I do both cook and eat with it, and also bath and shower.

MIKE TAIBBI: But do you drink it straight?

JIM SHIMA: Eh, not really. I don’t drink the water here, I drink the water from Kwaj.

MIKE TAIBBI: “Kwaj” is the US military base on neighboring Kwajalein Island. Ferries throughout the day from Kwaj bring jugs of good, free and safe water from the base’s own state of the art desalination plant.

These five gallon jugs from the ferry weigh more than 40 pounds apiece and they are a load to carry. Health risks from contaminated water are a constant worry in the Marshall Islands. Waterborne illnesses are one of the top three conditions treated at Ebeye’s hospital. When we journeyed to one of the more remote Marshall Islands — Arno, home to just 15-hundred people — we saw a health worker educating children and adults about the risks of contaminated water and how to clean and test water to make sure it’s safe.

Still, after the lecture we met Tarjadik Arwan, who was drawing fresh water from one of the few wells still producing. she says children in the village have contracted pink eye, diarrhea, and typhoid fever from the wells.

A few miles away, a man named Konio Joe relies on this tank to provide water for his family’s home which he built it after a king tide last year swept away his old house a few yards closer to the shore. Climate scientist Chip Fletcher says there are ways to at least delay the impact of sea level rise and saltwater intrusion.

CHIP FLETCHER: What’s the rule of thumb? If you wage war with water, you will lose. Yield and elevate. Yield to the water, and elevate.

By that Fletcher means accepting the consequences of seawater rise and moving homes inland and to higher ground. That’s why Fletcher and his team are creating 3-dimensional models of the Marshalls, like this one of Hawaii’s Oahu island to show where flooding is most likely to occur as sea level rises, and what could be done to defend against it, like building more robust seawalls around the perimeter of the islands.

Fletcher says that’s an approach that should be considered by the Marshall Islands and by other low-lying Pacific ocean countries, like Tuvalu, the Cook Islands, and the Carteret Islands of Papua New Guinea, all of which are seeing an exodus driven partly by climate change.

CHIP FLETCHER: There are communities that are sort of poised on the edge of the cliff, I believe. All it takes is one event, a king tide event, and that might be the killer event to push you over the edge.”

MIKE TAIBBI: How close are you, do you think, to the kind of destructive weather event which will signal a profound change in the way that you should or the world should look at climate change?

PRESIDENT HEINE: Well, we’re practical, and I think we’re looking at the mitigation efforts, adaptation, how we can make the country resilient, people resilient to the effects of climate change. And we continue to do that. Because the option is not an option for us. We cannot think about evacuating our country, our island, because people are connected to their land. If we’re not on these islands, then we’re another people, another country.

The president does fret about the seawall she showed us that stands between her own home and the water that rises higher each year, a barrier that she says, erodes with every king tide.

In the meantime, the president’s across-the-street neighbor on majuro, Banga Roriki, keeps building and re-building his seawall hoping his home can survive.

The post Fighting for freshwater amid climate change appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Now let’s turn to the extreme heat wave baking the West and Southwest parts of the country.

Temperatures are well above the 100-degree mark. In California, it was 127 degrees yesterday in Death Valley, 122 in Palm Springs. In Phoenix, the temperature is expected to top out at 118 degrees today. In fact, it’s been so hot there, more than 40 flights were canceled or delayed because some planes can’t safely lift off in that heat.

A new analysis published in the journal “Nature Climate Change” this week also said climate change is leading to more heat waves in general. It found that 30 percent of the world’s population is exposed to potentially deadly heat for 20 days per year or more.

It’s the subject of our weekly segment on the Leading Edge of science with Miles O’Brien.

Let’s start with what’s happening in Phoenix.

Miles, you have flown for a long time. We have always heard of flights being delayed because it’s too cold. How can a flight not take off because it’s so hot?

MILES O’BRIEN: Yes, Hari, if it weren’t for the snow and ice, the winter would be the perfect time to fly, because a wing achieves flight, it derives lift based on the number of air molecules that surround it.

And, as the temperature heat up, those molecules command. We know that, when you warm things up, things expand generally. So there are fewer air molecules, so it takes greater amount of speed for that aircraft to fly. And if the runway isn’t long enough to support that — in other words, if the temperature is so high that there are so few molecules there to lift the wing that you don’t have enough runway to get going fast enough, you’re grounded.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, so this is still smaller planes that were affected. What’s the difference with the bigger planes?

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, the larger planes, the Boeing 737s, the big airliners, are designed to operate in a wider range of circumstances, for one thing. They are kind of a global product that has to operate in all kinds of intense conditions. And, frankly, it just costs more to certify them to these parameters.

In addition, a 737, for example, has a lot more potential payload, so you can take off some cargo and still fly the mission. These smaller planes are not designed with as much versatility, and because they’re smaller, they have less capability to reduce the payload and thus take off.

And really, ultimately, they have charts in there that a pilot has to look at, and there will be a maximum temperature, given the altitude of the field, et cetera. And if you exceed that, you legally cannot take off.

HARI SREENIVASAN: There are lots of runways that are too short to deal with this kind of heat. And we talked about in Phoenix, but, say, a place like La Guardia is just as confined or San Francisco is just constrained by a certain amount of space.

MILES O’BRIEN: Yes, so researchers looked at this.

The La Guardia runway is about 7,000 feet, runways there. And while that’s about 20 feet above sea level, and thus the air is denser there, by virtue of where it is and it doesn’t get quite as hot, nevertheless, at that length, you still — there are still some parameters and constraints that we have to be watching as the climate gets warmer.

This goes into the larger subject, Hari, of how our civilization is designed. When you’re thinking about a beach house on a barrier island or a runway at La Guardia or at Phoenix Sky Harbor, we have a finely-tuned civilization, and as the temperature goes up, even though it has only gone up a degree Celsius over a hundred years, it does create pockets of these heat waves.

We’re not exactly sure why, probably because the jet stream is weakening and causing high-pressure systems to park in these places. I spoke with a climate scientist who has looked into this extensively. He’s at Columbia University — Radley Horton is his name — as part of a series I did for the weather app MyRadar.

RADLEY HORTON, Columbia University: If we look at the last decade or two, we are seeing twice as many record-breaking extreme heat events, cities that are breaking their daily record highs for a given day, compared to the ratio compared to the number of cities having record-breaking cold temperatures.

If you make temperatures just a couple degrees warmer on the hottest days, that means much more demand for air conditioning, for example, which means much greater risk of the power going out, precisely at those temperatures, those times when people are so sensitive to just a little more warming from a public health perspective.

HARI SREENIVASAN: That goes a bit to that Goldilocks effect you are talking about, because even our infrastructure and our systems are built for us to be within a certain range.

MILES O’BRIEN: Exactly.

And that’s why we need to be really watching the effects of climate change. It’s easy to dismiss a one-degree Celsius increase and say, well, that’s not a big deal, but, in isolated locations, in specific locations, whether it’s Phoenix or whether it’s Miami Beach or whether it’s another city that has a sea level problem that it is dealing with, or whether it’s California dealing with wildfires, those particular pockets, those problems are exacerbated by that overall increase in the temperature of the climate, the overall temperature of the planet.

And it causes changes to our weather systems which we’re just beginning to understand. Researchers are just getting a handle on it.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So in the case of this news about Phoenix and the air — do airlines, who think about buying planes years and years out — these are hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of purchases — do they think differently about what kind of jets to buy or where to park all those jets, in a place with a long runway?

MILES O’BRIEN: Hari, I think this is something the aviation industry has not gotten out ahead of.

I suspect there are a lot of conversations going right now as we have seen this record heat wave. There was a similar record heat wave last year as well which caused similar problems. So the airlines are going to have to contend with this, the airliner makers, and airports as well.

The longest runway at Phoenix Sky Harbor is a little more than 11,000 feet. They might have to think about extending that runway. What about La Guardia, though? Is that even possible? Is it possible to even consider that?

All these things get factored into the consequences of climate change and how we as civilization can adapt to it.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, science correspondent Miles O’Brien, thanks so much.

MILES O’BRIEN: You’re welcome.

The post Why planes can’t fly when it’s too hot, and other ways our civilization can’t take the heat appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Reaction to the president’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement has been unusually fierce on both sides.

And, today, the White House stood firmly by his decision.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Thank you very much, everybody. This is slightly less controversial than yesterday, but yesterday was a big service to this country, I will tell you. Thank you very much, everybody.

JUDY WOODRUFF: That was all the president would say about his much-awaited announcement.

Earlier in the day, however, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, delivered an energetic defense.

SCOTT PRUITT, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency: We have nothing to be apologetic about as a country. We have reduced our CO2 footprint to levels of the early 1990s. And that’s been largely accomplished through innovation and technology, not government mandate.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Nevertheless, the announcement has touched off a chorus of protest both here in the U.S. and abroad.

From Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel:

CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL, Germany (through interpreter): The decision of the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement is very regrettable, and I’m expressing myself in a very reserved way when I say that. We in Germany, in Europe and in the world are now more determined than ever to pool all our strength to face one of the challenges of humankind.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In Paris, France’s newly elected President Emmanuel Macron offered this appeal reinforced by speaking in English.

PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON, France: To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the president of the United States, I want to say that they will find in France a second homeland. I call on them, come and work here with us.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both leaders said they wouldn’t renegotiate the deal, as President Trump said he was prepared to do.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, officials from China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, met with European counterparts and reaffirmed their commitment. Support also poured in from the U.S. corporate world. More than two dozen companies, including oil giant Shell, Apple, Facebook and Morgan Stanley, had signed a letter urging Mr. Trump to stay in the pact.

Separately, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and Tesla chief Elon Musk argued the move would cost the U.S. jobs. Disney’s chief, Bob Iger, joined Musk in resigning from presidential advisory committees in protest.

Peabody Energy,one of the country’s largest coal companies, did come out in support of the president’s decision.

And Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said continued dialogue was necessary at an event moderated by NBC News anchor Megyn Kelly.

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia (through interpreter): Rather than make noise over it, we need to create conditions for mutual work, because if countries that are big emitters, like the United States, will not take part at all, it will be impossible to negotiate and sign any kind of agreement.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Back at the White House, the EPA’s Pruitt said the president has made clear he’s willing to work with anyone on a better deal. But when pressed on whether Mr. Trump actually believes that humans play a role in climate change, Pruitt skirted the question.

SCOTT PRUITT: The discussions the president and I have had over the last several weeks have been focused on one key issue: Is Paris good or bad for this country? He determined it was bad for our country. It hurt us economically. It didn’t achieve good environmental outcomes. And he made the decision to reject the Paris deal.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, oil prices tumbled amid speculation the U.S. withdrawal would boost domestic oil production, adding to an already saturated global supply.

We will put some of the facts and claims behind climate change into context right after the news summary.

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