Palm Springs Art Museum to host Summer Party to celebrate exhibitions
Search continues for 2 suspects in Cathedral City Dollar Tree shooting
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VOL. 7,
NO. 124
Climate crisis is on track to push one-third of humanity out of its most livable environment By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. limate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life. By late this century, according to a study published last month in the journal Nature Sustainability, 3 to 6 billion people, or between a third and a half of humanity, could be trapped outside of that zone, facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates, unless emissions are sharply curtailed or mass migration is accommodated. The research, which adds novel detail about who will be most affected and where, suggests that
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Palm Springs home. | Photo by Cody Board on Unsplash
climate-driven migration could easily eclipse even the largest estimates as enormous segments of the earth’s population seek safe havens. It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part
by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming. “There are clear, profound ethical consequences in the numbers,”
Timothy Lenton, one of the study’s lead authors and the director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the U.K., said in an interview. “If we can’t level with that injustice and be honest about it, then we’ll never progress the international
action on this issue.” The notion of a climate niche is based on work the researchers first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which established that for the past 6,000 years humans have gravitated toward a
narrow range of temperatures and precipitation levels that supported agriculture and, later, economic growth. That study warned that warming would make those conditions elusive for growing segments of humankind and found that while just 1% of the earth’s surface is now intolerably hot, nearly 20% could by 2070. The new study reconsiders population growth and policy options and explores scenarios that dramatically increase earlier estimates, demonstrating that the world’s environment has already changed significantly. It focuses more heavily on temperature than precipitation, finding that most people have thrived in mean annual temperatures of 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Should the world continue on its present pathway — making gestures toward moderate reductions in emissions but not meaningfully reducing global carbon levels (a See Climate crisis Page 36
Supervisors set hearing to consider liens on delinquent bill payers
Temecula teachers rally over rejection of social studies curriculum
By City News Service
By HeyWire AI
he Board of Supervisors Tuesday scheduled a June 27 public hearing to consider whether to impose special assessments totaling $2.28 million on thousands of Riverside County residents'
property tax bills to collect unpaid trash collection debts. In a 4-0 vote — with Supervisor Karen Spiegel absent — the board signed off on Department of Environmental Health Director
Jeff Johnson's request for the hearing. According to Johnson, 5,664 residents in unincorporated communities owe the county's four waste See Tax bills Page 35
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emecula Valley Unified School District teachers held protest rallies Tuesday in response to a recent school board vote rejecting textbooks and curriculum for an elementary school social studies
program and during which the board president referred to slain gay-rights activist Harvey Milk as a "pedophile." During its May 16 meeting, the school board voted to reject a proposed curriculum and textbook
for its kindergarten through fifth-grade social studies program. A majority of board members concluded that it contained "morally objectionable material." Board See Temecula teachers Page 18