Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says.

The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released Tuesday with details that bring climate change’s impacts down to a local level. Unveiling the report at the White House, President Joe Biden blasted Republican legislators and his predecessor for disputing global warming.

“Anyone who willfully denies the impact of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future. Impacts are only going to get worse, more frequent, more ferocious and more costly,” Biden said, noting that disasters cost the country $178 billion last year. “None of this is inevitable.”

Overall, Tuesday’s assessment paints a picture of a country warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole, one that regularly gets smacked with costly weather disasters and faces even bigger problems in the future.

Since 1970, the Lower 48 states have warmed by 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) and Alaska has heated up by 4.2 degrees (2.3 degrees Celsius), compared to the global average of 1.7 degrees (0.9 degrees Celsius), the report said. But what people really feel is not the averages, but when weather is extreme.

With heat waves, drought, wildfire and heavy downpours, “we are seeing an acceleration of the impacts of climate change in the United States,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth.

And that’s not healthy.

Climate change is ”harming physical, mental, spiritual, and community health and well-being through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, increasing cases of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water quality and security,” the report said.

Compared to earlier national assessments, this year’s uses far stronger language and “unequivocally” blames the burning of coal, oil and gas for climate change.

The 37-chapter assessment includes an interactive atlas that zooms down to the county level. It finds that climate change is affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority and Native American communities often disproportionately at risk.

In Alaska, which is warming two to three times faster than the global average, reduced snowpack, shrinking glaciers, thawing permafrost, acidifying oceans and disappearing sea ice have affected everything from the state’s growing season, to hunting and fishing, with projections raising questions about whether some Indigenous communities should be relocated.

The Southwest is experiencing more drought and extreme heat – including 31 consecutive days this summer when Phoenix’s daily high temperatures reached or exceeded 110 degrees – reducing water supplies and increasing wildfire risk.

Northeastern cities are seeing more extreme heat, flooding and poor air quality, as well as risks to infrastructure, while drought and floods exacerbated by climate change threaten farming and ecosystems in rural areas.

In the Midwest, both extreme drought and flooding threaten crops and animal production, which can affect the global food supply.

In the northern Great Plains, weather extremes like drought and flooding, as well as declining water resources, threaten an economy dependent largely on crops, cattle, energy production and recreation. Meanwhile, water shortages in parts of the southern Great Plains are projected to worsen, while high temperatures are expected to break records in all three states by midcentury.

In the Southeast, minority and Native American communities — who may live in areas with higher exposures to extreme heat, pollution and flooding — have fewer resources to prepare for or to escape the effects of climate change.

In the Northwest, hotter days and nights that don’t cool down much have resulted in drier streams and less snowpack, leading to increased risk of drought and wildfires. The climate disturbance has also brought damaging extreme rain.

Hawaii and other Pacific islands, as well as the U.S. Caribbean, are increasingly vulnerable to the extremes of drought and heavy rain as well as sea level rise and natural disaster as temperatures warm.

The United States will warm in the future about 40% more than the world as a total, the assessment said. The AP calculated, using others’ global projections, that that means America would get about 3.8 degrees (2.1 degrees Celsius) hotter by the end of the century.

Hotter average temperatures means weather that is even more extreme.

“The news is not good, but it is also not surprising,” said University of Colorado’s Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist who was not part of this report. “What we are seeing is a manifestation of changes that were anticipated over the last few decades.”

The 2,200-page report comes after five straight months when the globe set monthly and daily heat records. It comes as the U.S. has set a record with 25 different weather disasters this year that caused at least $1 billion in damage.

“Climate change is finally moving from an abstract future issue to a present, concrete, relevant issue. It’s happening right now,” said report lead author Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy and a professor at Texas Tech University. Five years ago, when the last assessment was issued, fewer people were experiencing climate change firsthand.

Surveys this year by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show that.

In September, about 9 in 10 Americans (87%) said they’d experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past five years — drought, extreme heat, severe storms, wildfires or flooding. That was up from 79% who said that in April.

Hayhoe said there’s also a new emphasis in the assessment on marginalized communities.

“It is less a matter … of what hits where, but more what hits whom and how well those people can manage the impacts,” said University of Colorado’s Abdalati, whose saw much of his neighborhood destroyed in the 2021 Marshall wildfire.

Biden administration officials emphasize that all is not lost and the report details actions to reduce emissions and adapt to what’s coming.

By cleaning up industry, how electricity is made and how transport is powered, climate change can be dramatically reduced. Hausfather said when emissions stops, warming stops, “so we can stop this acceleration if we as a society get our act together.”

But some scientists said parts of the assessment are too optimistic.

“The report’s rosy graphics and outlook obscure the dangers approaching,” Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson said. “We are not prepared for what’s coming.”

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Borenstein reported from Kensington, Maryland, and Webber from Fenton, Michigan.

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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment and follow Seth Borenstein and Tammy Webber on Twitter at http://twitter.com/borenbears and https://twitter.com/twebber02

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

The $416 million bill that emerged contains a hodgepodge of tax breaks, refunds, reimbursements, grants and loans for the agriculture, timber and shellfishing industries in a mostly rural, sparsely populated 17-county stretch of North Florida.

“This makes a huge difference in fiscally constrained counties that can’t tax their way or fund their way out of things that come in the normal course of a year,” said bill sponsor Rep. Jason Shoaf, R-Port St. Joe.

But Democrats and environmentalists raised concerns about part of the bill that extends a ban on county and city governments from adopting moratoriums or restrictions on development for two years.

“This is a great bill,” said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, but she added the ban ties the hands of city and county officials trying to prevent building in areas vulnerable to flooding and wind damage from hurricanes.

Shoaf and Senate sponsor Corey Simon, R-Quincy, said the ban allows people to rebuild and get back to normal life faster without government interference.

Orange County officials supported the legislation because it reversed the original ban on restrictive development and zoning rules approved by the Legislature in regular session last spring. It pre-empted a much larger number of counties and cities located within 100 miles of landfall of hurricanes Ian and Hurricane Nicole in 2022 from proposing changes to their comprehensive plan or land development regulations before Oct. 1, 2024.

The new ban is limited to 10 southwest Florida counties affected only by Ian: Charlotte, Collier, Desoto, Glades, Hardee, Hendry, Highlands, Lee, Manatee, and Sarasota counties.

The law could put residents of those counties in danger, environmentalists said.

“This one section helps developers in Southwest Florida,” said David Cullen of the Sierra Club.  “Given recent events and rapid increase in hurricanes, I would be inclined to let counties and municipalities adopt stricter development rules. People died.”

Paul Owens of 1000 Friends of Florida said his organization also supports robust local planning. While he recognized the need for relief, he opposed the extension of the ban as “short-sighted.”

The state will suffer more frequent hurricanes with higher intensities, and local governments need to be able to pass measures to prevent development in the most vulnerable areas, he said.

Hurricane Idalia made landfall near Keaton Beach on Aug. 30 as a Category 3 hurricane with 125-mph winds and a 7- to 12-foot storm surge along 33 miles of coastline.

It caused an estimated $9.6 billion in insured losses as it tore through several counties before crossing into Georgia.

Agricultural losses in Florida from Hurricane Idalia will likely be between $78.8 million and $370.9 million, according to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Initial estimates put clamming industry losses at $34 million but business owners said it’s fast approaching $50 million.

The Legislature had already approved $1.4 billion in this year’s budget for hurricane preparation and recovery efforts. The Legislature added $416 million to those efforts in the special session.

The biggest piece of the new money – $181 million – targets measures to harden homes against future hurricanes is designed to clear a waiting list of 17,000 applicants for the My Safe Florida Home program. Applicants can get up to $10,000 for door, window and roofing upgrades.

As of October, the state had already approved $209 million for nearly 21,000 homeowners, with only about 12.9% of that disbursed, according to a Senate staff analysis of the bill.

The agricultural assistance approved comes out to $162.5 million for farms, timber growers and shellfishing operations.

About $75 million will create the Agriculture and Aquaculture Producers Natural Disaster Recovery Loan Program to provide long-term interest-free loans of up to $500,000 to repair or replace essential physical property and remove debris.

Another $37.5 million in grants of up to $250,000 will pay for up to 75% of the cost of site preparation and tree replanting. The bill also allocates $30 million to meet FEMA’s local match requirements for public assistance. And it provides $25 million in housing recovery loans to eligible counties.

Fifth-generation farmer Rob Land of Lafayette County said it would cost him a minimum of $200,000 to get back what he lost in the hurricane, including a $125,000 feed barn.

“It destroyed our cotton crops,” Land said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Timothy Solano, a board member of the Cedar Key Aquaculture Association, said the two weeks his clamming operation was out of commission cost his company $2 million, which will make it tough to fill his orders to suppliers.

The industry is on track to lose $50 million, he said, and federal funds won’t be available until March.

“This legislation is a good effort to provide the relief that we need,” Solano said.

The human species has topped 8 billion, with longer lifespans offsetting fewer births, but world population growth continues a long-term trend of slowing down, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.

The bureau estimates the global population exceeded the threshold Sept. 26, a precise date the agency said to take with a grain of salt.

The United Nations estimated the number was passed 10 months earlier, having declared November 22, 2022, the “Day of 8 Billion,” the Census Bureau pointed out in a statement.

The discrepancy is due to countries counting people differently — or not at all. Many lack systems to record births and deaths. Some of the most populous countries, such as India and Nigeria, haven’t conducted censuses in over a decade, according to the bureau.

While world population growth remains brisk, growing from 6 billion to 8 billion since the turn of the millennium, the rate has slowed since doubling between 1960 and 2000.

People living to older ages account for much of the recent increase. The global median age, now 32, has been rising in a trend expected to continue toward 39 in 2060.

Countries such as Canada have been aging with declining older-age mortality, while countries such as Nigeria have seen dramatic declines in deaths of children under 5.

Fertility rates, or the rate of births per woman of childbearing age, are meanwhile declining, falling below replacement level in much of the world and contributing to a more than 50-year trend, on average, of slimmer increases in population growth.

The minimum number of such births necessary to replace both the father and mother for neutral world population is 2.1, demographers say. Almost three-quarters of people now live in countries with fertility rates around or below that level.

Countries with fertility rates around replacement level include India, Tunisia and Argentina.

About 15% of people live in places with fertility rates below replacement level. Countries with low fertility rates include Brazil, Mexico, the U.S. and Sweden, while those with very low fertility rates include China, South Korea and Spain.

Israel, Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea rank among countries with higher-than-replacement fertility rates of up to 5. Such countries have almost one-quarter of the world’s population.

Only about 4% of the world’s population lives in countries with fertility rates above 5. All are in Africa.

Global fertility rates are projected to decline at least through 2060, with no country projected to have a rate higher than 4 by then, according to the bureau.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A project to build a first-of-a-kind small modular nuclear reactor power plant was terminated Wednesday, another blow to the Biden administration’s clean energy agenda following cancellations last week of two major offshore wind projects.

Oregon-based NuScale Power has the only small modular nuclear reactor design certified for use in the United States. For its first project, the company was working with a group of Utah utilities to demonstrate a six-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory, generating enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes.

The project was to come online starting in 2029 and was supposed to replace electricity from coal plants that are closing. When combined with wind and solar, the advanced nuclear technology was intended to help municipalities and public power utilities in several western states eliminate planet-warming greenhouse gas emission from the power sector.

Instead, NuScale and the Utah utilities announced Wednesday they’re terminating the project after a decade of working on it. The cancellation comes as two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey were canceled amid supply chain problems, high interest rates and a failure to obtain the desired tax credits.

The announcement by Danish energy giant Orsted was the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry and a blow to President Joe Biden’s goal to have 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes.

A spokeswoman for the Energy Department called the cancellation “unfortunate news,” but said first-of-a-kind deployments are often difficult. Officials believe the work accomplished to date on the project will be valuable for future nuclear energy projects.

“We absolutely need advanced nuclear energy technology to meet (the Biden administration’s) ambitious clean energy goals,” spokeswoman Charisma Troiano said.

“While not every project is guaranteed to succeed, DOE remains committed to doing everything we can to deploy these technologies to combat the climate crisis and increase access to clean energy.″

Timothy Fox, vice president at ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm, called NuScale’s announcement “a substantial setback” for small nuclear power, but said there is still “a lot of interest out there” in developing the technology at other sites. It was not yet clear whether other projects under development face similar obstacles, he said.

“This was the frontrunner, and the frontrunner has now faltered,” Fox said..

The Energy Department under three presidents has provided more than $600 million since 2014 to support the design, licensing and siting of a small modular reactor power plant near Idaho Falls, Idaho at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory.

In 2020, the Trump administration approved up to $1.4 billion for the project, known as the Carbon Free Power Project. The agreement serves as a funding vehicle and is subject to future appropriations by Congress.

The cancellation of the Idaho project reminded some critics of the earlier failure of Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt soon after receiving a federal loan from the Obama administration more than a decade ago, costing taxpayers more than $500 million.

NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems said it was unlikely the project will have enough subscriptions from local power providers to continue. The power system serves 50 members, mostly municipalities and public power utilities in Utah and other Western states.

Most prospective subscribers were unwilling to take on the risks associated with developing a first-of-a-kind nuclear project, the Utah group said.

Costs have increased more than 50% in the last two years to $89 per megawatt hour, the company said. Small reactors are seen as an alternative to more costly, traditional nuclear power that includes large reactors and cost billions of dollars and takes decades to complete.

NuScale President and Chief Executive Officer John Hopkins said the company will continue working with domestic and international customers to bring its technology to the market. The design that was certified by federal regulators is for a 50-megawatt, advanced light-water small modular nuclear reactor. The company is currently seeking certification for an upgraded 77-megawatt design.

NuScale said it can use power plant design plans and the regulatory progress from the cancelled project for other customers and is working to transfer materials with long lead times to other projects.

The Utah power system said it will focus on non-nuclear resources in the near term, and will need additional renewables, primarily solar and wind, as well as new natural gas.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association, called the cancellation “very disappointing,” but said it was understandable because of the difficulties inherent in developing new technologies. NuScale has a design that will deploy and bring clean and reliable energy in the future as the demand for clean energy grows globally, the institute said in a statement.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that opposes nuclear power, said the Energy Department under three successive administrations has wasted more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer money.

“It’s about time the plug was pulled on this small modular reactor disaster,” Cook said in a statement. “What a colossal waste of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, which could have been spent on existing, safe and renewable sources of energy like solar and wind.”

While no other small modular reactor or advanced design has been submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for certification, the agency said Thursday that other companies are close to applying and there’s a great deal of activity within the industry.

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McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday upheld the Biden administration’s approval of the massive Willow oil-drilling project on Alaska’s remote North Slope, a decision that environmental groups swiftly vowed to fight.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason rejected requests by a grassroots Iñupiat group and environmentalists to vacate the project approval, and she dismissed their claims against Willow, which is in the federally designated National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The administration’s approval of Willow in March drew the ire of environmentalists who accused the president of backpedaling on his pledge to combat climate change.

The company behind the project, ConocoPhillips Alaska, has the right to develop its leases in the reserve “subject to reasonable restrictions and mitigation measures imposed by the federal government,” Gleason wrote. She added that the alternatives analyzed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as part of its review were consistent with the policy objectives for the petroleum reserve and the stated purpose and need of the Willow project.

The groups that sued over the project raised concerns about planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from Willow and argued that federal agencies failed to consider how increased emissions from the project could affect ice-reliant species such as the polar bear, Arctic ringed seals and bearded seals, which already are experiencing disruptions due to climate change.

Gleason said an agency environmental review “appropriately analyzed the indirect and cumulative” greenhouse gas emissions impacts of the project.

Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice, which represents several environmental groups in one of the cases, called the ruling disappointing and said an appeal was planned.

Bridget Psarianos, an attorney with Trustees for Alaska, which represents Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic and environmental groups in the other lawsuit, called Gleason’s decision “bad news not just for our clients but for anyone who cares about the climate and future generations.”

“There is too much at stake to gloss over the harm this project will do,” Psarianos said. “We will remain standfast in working with our clients to protect the Arctic from this devastating project today and in the weeks, months, and years ahead.”

The project has widespread political support in Alaska. But climate activists said allowing it to go forward marked a major breach of President Joe Biden’s campaign promise to stop new oil drilling on federal lands. The administration’s action alienated and outraged some supporters, particularly young activists who launched a TikTok campaign to oppose the project ahead of its approval.

ConocoPhillips Alaska had proposed five drilling sites, but the Bureau of Land Management approved three, which it said would include up to 199 total wells. The project could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day at its peak. Using that oil would produce the equivalent of at least 263 million tons (239 million metric tons) of greenhouse gas emissions over Willow’s projected 30-year life.

The administration has defended its climate record, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland earlier this year called Willow “a very long and complicated and difficult decision to make,’’ noting that ConocoPhillips Alaska has long held leases in the region and that regulators tried to balance drilling rights with a project that was narrower in scope.

Interior declined to comment on Gleason’s decision Thursday.

Connor Dunn, vice president of the Willow project for ConocoPhillips Alaska, said in court documents that it was “highly unlikely” that Willow would proceed if the administration’s approval were to be vacated.

Many of the company’s leases in the area date to 1999 and are at risk of expiring by Sept. 1, 2029, if oil hasn’t been produced by then, Dunn said. There is no guarantee the company, which through July had invested about $925 million in Willow, would get an extension on its leases, he said.

In April, Gleason rejected efforts to halt cold-weather construction work by ConocoPhillips Alaska while litigation was pending, including mining gravel and using it for a road toward the project. That work ended in May.

Following Gleason’s decision Thursday, the company said it intends to proceed with plans for construction work this winter.

Erec Isaacson, president of ConocoPhillips Alaska, said Willow “underwent nearly five years of rigorous regulatory review and environmental analysis, including extensive public involvement from the communities closest to the project site. We now want to make this project a reality and help Alaskan communities realize the extensive benefits of responsible energy development.”

The project has been mired in litigation for years.

A prior authorization of Willow, issued in 2020 during the Trump administration, called for allowing ConocoPhillips to establish up to three drill sites, with the potential for two more proposed by the company to be considered later.

But Gleason set that aside in 2021 after finding that the federal review underpinning the decision was flawed and did not include mitigation measures for polar bears. The ruling led to a new environmental analysis and the Biden administration’s greenlight in March for what Justice Department attorneys had said was a scaled-back version that resolved concerns raised by Gleason.

Many Alaska Native leaders on the North Slope and groups with ties to the region have argued that Willow is economically vital for their communities. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the state’s bipartisan congressional delegation and labor unions have touted Willow as a job creator in a state where major existing oil fields are aging and production is a fraction of what it once was.

“Today’s ruling gives us hope for our collective future on the North Slope and in Alaska,” said Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, a group whose members include leaders from across much of the North Slope region. “Going forward, we hope that key decision makers in the Biden administration and in Congress listen to the voices of those who know these lands better than anyone else: the North Slope Iñupiat.”

Some Alaska Native leaders in the community nearest the project, Nuiqsut, have expressed concerns about impacts to their subsistence lifestyles and have said their concerns were ignored.

It was an outlandishly fat invasive Burmese python.

Twenty-one-year-old Carter Gavlock, who was in the other truck, hopped out, sprinted to the snake and immediately grabbed it by the tail.

“That was a big mistake because the snake damn near took him into the canal,” Elfenbein said. “There was nothing he could do to stop it.”

Gavlock had caught yearling snakes before, but this was “a dinosaur,” he said. “I was like, hey, somebody jump on this thing with me. It’s dragging me across the road.”

Elfenbein’s son, Cole, raced over and grabbed the tail as well, and a tug of war ensued. As they pulled it to the middle of the dirt road, it turned on them. “That’s when things got kinda hairy,” Elfenbein said.

Elfenbein learned to hunt pythons from professional contractor Anne Gorden-Vega, and went for the head. He held on as best he could, right behind the jaws.

“Right when Mike went for the head, she turned, almost got Mike, and pulled Mike towards me and almost got a hold of me,” said Gavlock.

At this point, there were five men on the snake.

“It was powerful to the point where Mike and I were both on the front end of the snake, kneeling down, and it picked him and I both up off the ground. She basically arched and picked us both up and pushed us over to the side,” Gavlock said.

Both Elfenbein and Gavlock said it took a good 45 minutes to subdue the snake.

By the time it was over, “everybody … smelled horribly,” Elfenbein said. “I was sore the next morning from manhandling that thing. It took all five people all of their energy to subdue that snake.”

As they caught their breath, Gavlock said it almost didn’t feel real. “We’d just met two random people that were willing to jump on a dinosaur-of-a-snake. Once we had her under control we were just cracking beers and hanging out.  It was like we won a football game.”

Elfenbein called professional python hunter Amy Siewe, aka the “Python Huntress,” to help dispatch the snake.

Siewe has been a professional python hunter since 2019, first with the state, and now with her own guiding service. She’s caught hundreds of snakes. When she rounded her truck and set eyes upon the snake, she was shocked. “I’m telling you it is the fattest snake I’ve ever seen in my life. It was insane,” she said.

Siewe humanely euthanized the massive female with a captive bolt gun, which is the approved method of euthanasia by the American Veterinary Association.

“We got her calmed down … before we dispatched her,” Siewe said.

“Amy is an incredible python hunter — she has a lot of care for the well-being of the snakes,” Elfenbein said. “I could tell she was happy to get rid of her, but I could see that she was sad to have to kill her.”

Siewe took the snake to the Conservancy of Southwest Florida for an official weight and measurement: 17 feet 2 inches, 198 pounds with a 23-inch girth – thicker than the average man’s thigh.

To put that in perspective, Siewe’s largest snake was an inch longer, at 17 feet 3 inches (she caught it solo) and 110 pounds. This snake was nearly twice as heavy.

“Between the deer and the pigs, they’re eating pretty well out there in Big Cypress,” she said.

Sure enough, this snake had deer hooves in her stomach when she was processed. That’s a concern for biologists, who worry that a drop in the deer population will make life even more challenging for endangered Florida panthers.

There also were egg follicles inside her, a sign of the upcoming breeding season in winter. Removing large females from the ecosystem is currently the most effective way to fight the python invasion, which in some areas has reduced the population of medium-sized mammals by more than 90%

The biggest ever

The heaviest python ever recorded in Florida was an 18-foot, 215-pound leviathan captured in Picayune Strand, just west of Big Cypress National Preserve, in 2021.

Biologists Ian Bartoszek and Ian Easterling of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida tracked a male “scout snake” named Dionysus into the wilderness during breeding season as he sniffed out potential mates. He led them to the massive female full of eggs.

The longest python ever captured in Florida measured 19 feet, weighed 125 pounds, and was caught by amateur hunter Jake Waleri this past July, also in Big Cypress National Preserve.

As for the python’s future, they’re thriving. Elfenbein said he’s worried about a proposal that would convert Big Cypress National Perverse into an official “wilderness” area and limit access for amateur hunters like himself.

Meanwhile, the snake’s invasion front has moved north out of the Everglades all the way to the suburbs of Fort Myers and the shores of Lake Okeechobee.

And last week, alligator hunters caught a 12-foot python in Brevard County, some 70 miles north (as the crow flies) of where biologists say pythons are reproducing in the wild. There’s no way to know if that snake was a released pet or a wild snake, but the fact that it was caught so far north is concerning.

But these python hunters said they’ll come back for more. “I grew up on Steve Irwin, watching him every morning as a kid,” said Gavlock, who plans on hitting the dark cypress swamps again this weekend. “To be honest, though, I don’t think we’ll ever top that snake.”

When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle five years ago, it left boats, cars and trucks piled up to the windows of Bonny Paulson’s home in the tiny coastal community of Mexico Beach, Florida, even though the house rests on pillars 14 feet above the ground. But Paulson’s home, with a rounded shape that looks something like a ship, shrugged off Category 5 winds that might otherwise have collapsed it.

“I wasn’t nervous at all,” Paulson said, recalling the warning to evacuate. Her house lost only a few shingles, with photos taken after the storm showing it standing whole amid the wreckage of almost all the surrounding homes.

Some developers are building homes like Paulson’s with an eye toward making them more resilient to the extreme weather that’s increasing with climate change, and friendlier to the environment at the same time. Solar panels, for example, installed so snugly that high winds can’t get underneath them, mean clean power that can survive a storm. Preserved wetlands and native vegetation that trap carbon in the ground and reduce flooding vulnerability, too. Recycled or advanced construction materials that reduce energy use as well as the need to make new material.

A person’s home is one of the biggest ways they can reduce their individual carbon footprint. Buildings release about 38% of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions each year. Some of the carbon pollution comes from powering things like lights and air conditioners and some of it from making the construction materials, like concrete and steel.

Deltec, the company that built Paulson’s home, says that only one of the nearly 1,400 homes it’s built over the last three decades has suffered structural damage from hurricane-force winds. But the company puts as much emphasis on building green, with higher-quality insulation that reduces the need for air conditioning, heat pumps for more efficient heating and cooling, energy-efficient appliances, and of course solar.

“The real magic here is that we’re doing both,” chief executive Steve Linton. “I think a lot of times resilience is sort of the afterthought when you talk about sustainable construction, where it’s just kind of this is a feature on a list … we believe that resilience is really a fundamental part of sustainability.”

Other companies are developing entire neighborhoods that are both resistant to hurricanes and contribute less than average to climate change.

Pearl Homes’ Hunters Point community in Cortez, Florida, consists of 160 houses that are all LEED-certified platinum, the highest level of one of the most-used green building rating systems.

To reduce vulnerability to flooding, home sites are raised 16 feet (4.8 meters) above code. Roads are raised, too, and designed to direct accumulating rainfall away and onto ground where it may be absorbed. Steel roofs with seams allow solar panels to be attached so closely it’s difficult for high winds to get under them, and the homes have batteries that kick in when power is knocked out.

Pearl Homes CEO Marshall Gobuty said his team approached the University of Central Florida with a plan to build a community that doesn’t contribute to climate change. “I wanted them to be not just sustainable, but resilient, I wanted them to be so unlike everything else that goes on in Florida,” Gobuty said. “I see homes that are newly built, half a mile away, that are underwater … we are in a crisis with how the weather is changing.”

That resonates with Paulson, in Mexico Beach, who said she didn’t want to “live day to day worried about tracking something in the Atlantic.” Besides greater peace of mind, she says, she’s now enjoying energy costs of about $32 per month, far below the roughly $250 she said she paid in a previous home.

“I don’t really feel that the population is taking into effect the environmental catastrophes, and adjusting for it,” she said. “We’re building the same old stuff that got blown away.”

Babcock Ranch is another sustainable, hurricane-resilient community in South Florida. It calls itself the first solar-powered town in the U.S., generating 150 megawatts of electricity with 680,000 panels on 870 acres (350 hectares). The community was also one of the first in the country to have large batteries on site to store extra solar power to use at night or when the power is out.

Syd Kitson founded Babcock Ranch in 2006. The homes are better able to withstand hurricane winds because the roofs are strapped to a system that connects down to the foundation. Power lines are buried underground so they can’t blow over. The doors swing outward in some homes so when pressure builds up from the wind, they don’t blast open, and vents help balance the pressure in garages.

In 2022, Hurricane Ian churned over Babcock Ranch as a Category 4 storm. It left little to no damage, Kitson said.

“We set out to prove that a new town and the environment can work hand-in-hand, and I think we’ve proven that,” said Kitson. “Unless you build in a very resilient way, you’re just going to constantly be repairing or demolishing the home.”

The development sold some 73,000 acres (29,500 hectares) of its site to the state for wetland preservation, and on the land where it built, a team studied how water naturally flows through the local environment and incorporated it into its water management system.

“That water is going to go where it wants to go, if you’re going to try and challenge Mother Nature, you’re going to lose every single time,” said Kitson. The wetlands, retention ponds, and native vegetation are better able to manage water during extreme rainfall, reducing the risk of flooded homes.

In the Florida Keys, Natalia Padalino and her husband, Alan Klingler, plan to finish building a Deltec home by December. The couple was concerned about the future impacts global warming and hurricanes would have on the Florida Keys and researched homes that were both sustainable and designed to withstand these storms.

“We believe we’re building something that’s going to be a phenomenal investment and reduce our risk of any major catastrophic situation,” Klingler said.

“People have been really open and receptive. They tell us if a hurricane comes, they’re going to be staying in our place,” Padalino said.

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The location of the Padalinos’ home has been corrected to the Florida Keys, not the Panhandle. This story also corrects the name of the Pearl Homes development Hunters Point, its location and site elevation, based on updated information from the company.

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Associated Press video journalist Laura Bargfeld, in Mexico Beach, and photographer Gerald Herbert, in New Orleans, contributed.

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

For nearly four months, Lewis has overseen a lab in the Florida Keys housing more than 5,000 refugee corals rescued from scorching offshore waters.

Her staff at the Keys Marine Laboratory on Long Key have faced swirls of heartbreak and hope since mid-July — when a mass coral evacuation began.

Heartbreak came in those first few weeks when scores of elkhorn and staghorn corals arrived at the lab, bleached or dead, as an unprecedented marine heat wave swept through offshore coral nurseries. Temperatures pushing the mid-90s arrived sooner than anticipated and caught the restoration community off-guard.

And then came the hope, however fleeting, that the first-of-its-kind evacuation and rescue operation was helping keep many corals alive. Corals regained their color and strength and in recent days have passed veterinarian health inspections.

Now, Lewis is finally coming up for air as the immediate coral crisis abates.

On Monday, a restoration team took roughly 360 corals from the lab and drove them north to Tavernier, where divers boated the animals back to their offshore nurseries. The 13-hour operation was the first journey in what could be a weekslong effort to put every rescued coral back at sea.

“So many of these corals came in gasping their last breath,” said Lewis, the lab’s director. “Every single coral that we can put back out there is a success.”

As of mid-September, Florida’s coral reefs — the only coral reef system in the continental United States — faced the equivalent of nearly 24 weeks of harmful ocean temperatures, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch.

With water that hot, for that long, vast swaths of offshore corals in the Keys died after bleaching earlier in the summer. Corals lose their color and bleach, a signal of prolonged stress, when they expel the tiny algae species living in their tissues.

It could be months before scientists know the true extent of the damage and loss to Florida’s reef, according to Jacquie De La Cour, the operations manager at Coral Reef Watch. It’s still unclear how already vulnerable corals will now respond to disease, potentially exacerbating the mortality crisis.

But for now, coral restorers are celebrating the small victory of returning the first batch of healing corals back to their offshore Tavernier nursery. Ocean temperatures in recent weeks have dipped to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 12 degrees cooler than the summer peak.

Stormy seas finally calmed this week and gave divers a short window to kick off the initial return mission, according to Phanor Montoya-Maya, the reef restoration program manager for the Coral Restoration Foundation. He said all rescued corals should hopefully be out of the Keys Marine Laboratory and back to their offshore homes by December.

“These are challenging times,” Montoya-Maya said in an interview Tuesday. But morale was high Monday as the first corals were planted back on the seafloor. “We can take this as an opportunity to continue learning from the crisis, and sharing with others not just how bad things can get, but also what the good things are that we can do.”

New ideas born from coral crisis

Unprecedented heat caused coral restorers to come up with unprecedented solutions.

One idea that stemmed from the crisis was to relocate corals to deeper, cooler ocean waters instead of bringing them to land-based labs.

Ken Nedimyer, the founder and technical director of the nonprofit Reef Renewal USA, Inc., helped spearhead the experimental effort to bring corals to colder, 70-feet-deep waters. In late July, there was a roughly 2-degree water temperature difference from the hotter water in the shallows.

About 40 divers from all over the world traveled to the Keys to help with the relocation, Nedimyer said.

“Getting them there and then getting them out of the sun seemed to make all the difference in the world,” he said. Every two weeks, divers would score the corals’ health from 0 to 5, with zero being healthy and five being bleached bone-white. Within a few weeks, the corals brought to deeper waters had improved to a 1.

“They looked really good, and they’ve stayed healthy,” Nedimyer said in an interview. Teams hope to start bringing the corals back to shallower water as soon as rough seas calm in the deeper waters, he said.

Warm summer water temperatures lasting into fall meant restoration efforts had to wait until cooler waters finally returned to South Florida, said Liv Williamson, an assistant scientist of marine biology and ecology at the University of Miami.

“It was cold the other day,” Williamson said. “Two months ago you were baking in the water.”

During recent dives in the Florida Keys, Williamson said, she was happy to find corals she had watched bleach this summer were recovering and regaining their color.

It’s not just the Keys Marine Laboratory returning rescued corals back to sea. Over the last few weeks, the University of Miami has returned hundreds of staghorn and elkhorn corals from about 150 genetically unique individuals.

“We want to make sure we have lots and lots of genotypes because that’s where the genetic diversity comes from,” Williamson said. “And genetic diversity equals resilience.”

Williamson said one silver lining of this summer’s bleaching crisis is an increased awareness of the need for a healthy reef in Florida.

“I feel confident that there’s a lot of attention on it and, therefore, there’ll be funding and people to do as much as we can do,” she said. “It’s a question of whether what we’re capable of doing is enough.”

Williamson said climate change shares much of the blame for the extreme temperatures, which were made worse by this year’s El Niño.

Her research focuses on finding more resilient corals and helping pass on their heat-tolerant genes to outplanted corals, in an effort to keep up with warming oceans.

Williamson and her team are monitoring the new corals spawned earlier this summer to see if their heat tolerance matches those in the parent corals.

“That’s ongoing for the next bunch of months — really into next year,” she said.

‘We’re crossing our fingers’

The coral community was surprised by how early the heat actually arrived this past summer. Despite widespread collaboration, branching corals like the elkhorn and staghorn species saw high mortality rates, Lewis said.

With an El Niño weather pattern likely to linger through next year and the effects of climate change exacerbating extreme heat, coral scientists are bracing for the worst again next summer. The Keys Marine Laboratory will be better prepared if a similar marine heat wave strikes next year or in the more distant future. For Lewis, it’s a matter of when, not if.

“We’re crossing our fingers, but the bottom line is this: We’re better prepared for the next time,” Lewis said.

The lab, casually dubbed by scientists as a “coral halfway house,” is home to 60 saltwater tanks that range in size from 40 gallons to 1,000 gallons. The lab is just south of Islamorada and right in the middle of the Florida Keys island chain, making it a central landing spot for several coral rescue groups.

Before the coral crisis began, the lab had fewer than 40 water pumps to keep saltwater flowing over corals to mimic ocean currents. But the sheer amount of rescued coral pouring into the facility this past summer forced the lab to triple the number of pumps to 120.

The tally of new equipment helps underscore that emergency growth: The lab now has 20 new tables for housing saltwater tanks and new adjustable shades to veil corals from harsh sunlight, and discussions already are underway to expand the facility further — all to prepare for the inevitability of a future marine heat wave, Lewis said.

“Everything happened so fast,” Lewis said. “But we’ve learned an awful lot about keeping these very highly stressed corals in captivity.”

©2023 Tampa Bay Times. Visit tampabay.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

At 7:30 a.m., Rich Loney was on the beach drinking coffee, enjoying the views, when his neighbor spotted what looked like an alligator.

“We thought it was seaweed, and the closer we got, we could tell it was moving,” Loney said. “I grew up in Ohio, so I didn’t know what it was — alligator, crocodile?”

As they approached it, the Hillsboro Beach Police arrived over the dune and told them to stay back. It was indeed an alligator, about 6 feet long.

Wildlife officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission eventually arrived to wrangle the alligator. WSVN reported that the FWC was able to subdue the animal around 1:15 p.m.

Officers had to wade into breaking waves, waiting for the alligator to come close enough to lasso with a catch pole. Once the gator felt the catch rope around its neck, it spun frantically to escape.

A police officer helped control the animal as a second FWC officer hopped on its back and taped its jaws shut. They then lifted it into the back of a truck.

According to NBC 6, the gator was taken west to the Everglades and released.

A canal stemming from the Everglades Wildlife Management Area to the west leads to the Boca Raton Inlet, not far up the beach.

American alligators normally live in freshwater environments, but occasionally ventured into brackish or even salt water environments for short periods.

Their endangered cousins, the American crocodile, are a saltwater species that more often hit the beaches of South Florida. A sizable specimen shut down the beach at Pompano Beach in September.

“Be aware,” Zoo Miami’s Ron Magill told NBC 6. “If you see a gator in the ocean, understand it took a wrong turn somewhere, and it doesn’t mean to be out in the ocean.”

Magill advises not to panic in such a situation.

“Don’t think this alligator is going to come after you for food,” Magill says. “He’s probably trying to figure out how to get back to fresh water.”

In a little more than five years – sometime in early 2029 – the world will likely be unable to stay below the internationally agreed temperature limit for global warming if it continues to burn fossil fuels at its current rate, a new study says.

The study moves three years closer the date when the world will eventually hit a critical climate threshold, which is an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1800s.

Beyond that temperature increase, the risks of catastrophes increase, as the world will likely lose most of its coral reefs, a key ice sheet could kick into irreversible melt, and water shortages, heat waves and death from extreme weather dramatically increase, according to an earlier United Nations scientific report.

Hitting that threshold will happen sooner than initially calculated because the world has made progress in cleaning up a different type of air pollution — tiny smoky particles called aerosols. Aerosols slightly cool the planet and mask the effects of burning coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s lead author said. Put another way, while cleaning up aerosol pollution is a good thing, that success means slightly faster rises in temperatures.

The study in Monday’s journal Nature Climate Change calculates what’s referred to as the remaining “carbon budget,” which is how much fossil fuels the world can burn and still have a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. That is the threshold set by the 2015 Paris agreement.

The last 10 years are already on average 1.14 degrees Celsius (2.05 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the 19th century. Last year was 1.26 degrees Celsius (2.27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer and this year is likely to blow past that, according to scientists.

The new study set the carbon budget at 250 billion metric tons. The world is burning a little more than 40 billion metric tons a year (and still rising), leaving six years left. But that six years started in January 2023, the study said, so that’s now only five years and a couple months away.

“It’s not that the fight against climate change will be lost after six years, but I think probably if we’re not already on a strong downward trajectory, it’ll be too late to fight for that 1.5 degree limit,” said study lead author Robin Lamboll, an Imperial College of London climate scientist.

A 2021 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report gave a budget of 500 billion metric tons pointed to a mid 2032 date for locking in 1.5 degrees, Lamboll said. An update by many IPCC authors this June came up with a carbon budget the same as Lamboll’s team, but Lamboll’s analysis is more detailed, said IPCC report co-chair and climate scientist Valerie Masson-Delmotte.

The biggest change from the 2021 report to this year’s studies is that new research show bigger reductions in aerosol emissions — which come from wildfires, sea salt spray, volcanoes and burning fossil fuels — that lead to sooty air that cools the planet a tad, covering up the bigger greenhouse gas effect. As the world cleans up its carbon-emitting emissions it is simultaneously reducing the cooling aerosols too and the study takes that more into account, as do changes to computer simulations, Lamboll said.

Even though the carbon budget looks to run out early in the year 2029, that doesn’t mean the world will instantly hit 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times. The actual temperature change could happen a bit earlier or as much as a decade or two later, but it will happen once the budget runs out, Lamboll said.

People should not misinterpret running out of the budget for 1.5 degrees as the only time left to stop global warming, the authors said. Their study said the carbon budget with a 50% chance to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is 1220 billion metric tons, which is about 30 years.

“We don’t want this to be interpreted as six years to save the planet,” study co-author Christopher Smith, a University of Leeds climate scientist, said. “If we are able to limit warming to 1.6 degrees or 1.65 degrees or 1.7 degrees, that’s a lot better than 2 degrees. We still need to fight for every tenth of a degree.”

Climate scientist Bill Hare of Climate Action Tracker that monitors national efforts to reduce carbon emissions, said “breaching the 1.5 degree limit does not push the world over a cliff at that point, but it is very much an inflection point in increasing risk of catastrophic changes.”

As they head into climate negotiations in Dubai next month, world leaders still say “the 1.5-degree limit is achievable.” Lamboll said limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is technically possible, but politically is challenging and unlikely.

“We have got to the stage where the 1.5C carbon budget is so small that it’s almost losing meaning,” said climate scientist Glen Peters of the Norwegian CICERO climate institute, who wasn’t part of the research. “If your face is about to slam in the wall at 100 miles per hour, it is sort of irrelevant if your nose is currently 1 millimeter or 2 millimeters from the wall. … We are still heading in the wrong direction at 100 mph.”

People “shouldn’t worry — they should act,” said climate scientist Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, who wasn’t part of Lamboll’s team. Acting as fast as possible “can halve the rate of warming this decade.”

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment.

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Follow Seth Borenstein on X, formerly known as Twitter at @borenbears

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