By SUMAN NAISHADHAM (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Month after month, global temperatures are setting new records. Meanwhile, scientists and climate policymakers warn of the growing likelihood that the planet will soon exceed the warming target set at the landmark Paris 2015 climate talks.

Making sense of the run of climate extremes may be challenging for some. Here’s a look at what scientists are saying.

WHAT CLIMATE RECORDS HAVE BEEN BROKEN RECENTLY?

The European Union’s climate-watching agency Copernicus declared last month that it was the hottest May on record, marking the 12th straight monthly record high. Separately, the World Meteorological Organization estimated that there’s almost a one-in-two chance that average global temperatures from 2024 to 2028 will surpass the hoped-for warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times that was agreed in the Paris talks.

And one more: Earth warmed at a slightly faster rate in 2023 than 2022, a group of 57 scientists determined in a report in the journal Earth System Science Data.

ARE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS SURPRISED?

Not really. Many climate scientists say warming trends are following what they have studied and predicted based on the buildup of carbon dioxide from rising fossil fuel use.

In 2023, the levels of those heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached historic highs, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Carbon dioxide, in particular, which is the most abundant and important of the greenhouse gases produced by human activity, rose in 2023 by the third-highest amount in 65 years of recordkeeping, NOAA said.

WHAT DO THE SHATTERED RECORDS MEAN FOR HUMANS?

More suffering. Human-induced climate change has brought wild weather swings, increasingly unpredictable storms and heat waves that stay over a particular area for longer periods of time.

An Asian heat wave this spring forced schools to close in the Philippines, killed people in Thailand and set records there and in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives and Myanmar. Weeks of heat waves across parts of India last month also closed schools and killed people.

Life won’t end if temperatures exceed the 1.5-degree limit, but things will get worse, scientists say. Previous U.N. studies show massive changes to Earth’s ecosystem are more likely to begin between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius of warming, including eventual loss of the planet’s coral reefs, Arctic sea ice, some species of plants and animals — along with even worse extreme weather events that kill people and damage infrastructure.

“The Paris threshold is not a magic number. Reaching that level of warming over a multiyear average will not cause a noticeable uptick in the impacts we’re already witnessing,” said Jennifer Francis, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Climate scientists are steadfast that fossil fuel use must be phased out to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — is the main contributor to global warming caused by human activity.

“Until greenhouse gas concentrations level off, we will keep breaking temperature records, along with increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events,” said Francis.

Renewable energy has been growing fast, but needs to grow faster still. Efficiencies are being studied, developed and rolled out all across the economy — in the ways we heat houses and buildings, for example, cook our food and make cement — but scientists say the need to adapt is urgent.

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By KATE BRUMBACK (Associated Press)

ATLANTA (AP) — An appeals court has halted the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump and others while it reviews the lower court judge’s ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to remain on the case.

The Georgia Court of Appeals’ order on Wednesday prevents Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee from moving forward with pretrial motions as he had planned while the appeal is pending. While it was already unlikely that the case would go to trial before the November general election, when Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee for president, this makes that even more certain.

The appeals court on Monday docketed the appeals filed by Trump and eight others and said that “if oral argument is requested and granted” it is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 4. The court will then have until mid-March to rule, and the losing side will be able to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.

A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment on the appeals court ruling.

A Fulton County grand jury in August indicted Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a sprawling scheme to illegally try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Four defendants have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors, but Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. It is one of four criminal cases against Trump.

Trump and eight other defendants had tried to get Willis and her office removed from the case, arguing that a romantic relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest. McAfee in March found that no conflict of interest existed that should force Willis off the case, but he granted a request from Trump and the other defendants to seek an appeal of his ruling from the state Court of Appeals.

McAfee wrote that “an odor of mendacity remains.” He said “reasonable questions” over whether Willis and Wade had testified truthfully about the timing of their relationship “further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it.” He said Willis could remain on the case only if Wade left, and the special prosecutor submitted his resignation hours later.

The allegations that Willis had improperly benefited from her romance with Wade resulted in a tumultuous couple of months in the case as intimate details of Willis and Wade’s personal lives were aired in court in mid-February.

It’s hard to quit Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.

The duo first paired for the 1995 Michael Bay-directed action-comedy “Bad Boys” and are a joy from the opening sequence of the franchise’s more-entertaining-than-not fourth entry, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” which speeds into theaters this week.

As veteran Miami police detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, respectively, Smith and Lawrence pick right up with their characters’ signature bickering, Marcus insisting to the fast-driving Mike that he’s going to be sick if he doesn’t get some ginger ale. Mike agrees to stop the car, giving Marcus 90 seconds to run into a store to buy the ginger ale — and ONLY the ginger ale — with the snack-loving Marcus, upon grabbing the soda, housing a pack of Skittles and ordering a day-old hotdog at the counter. He may have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for the stickup man who slows him down and with whom the cops quickly deal. (By this point, Mike is highly displeased with both the criminal and his longtime partner.)

Perhaps you are trying to quit Smith in light of “the slap heard around the world,” Smith’s infamous introduction of his hand to presenter Chris Rock’s face during the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony. It’s been pretty easy until now, as Smith was last in theaters later in 2022, briefly, with the so-so slavery action-drama “Emancipation.”

How, if at all, would this movie — like its 2020 processor, “Bad Boys for Life, directed by Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi, aka Adil & Bilall — handle the slap? Well, late in the affair, an enlightened Marcus literally slaps some sense into Mike at a climactic moment. That’s not going to make the whole thing go away, of course, but it’s probably as well as the production could do.

In this tale, after suffering a heart attack at Mike’s wedding, Marcus is chock full of said enlightenment, however questionable some of it may be.

While unconscious, he experiences a vision in which the pair’s late boss, Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano), informs him it’s not his time. Marcus awakens with a wide smile on his face, pulls out the tubes stuck to him and promptly exits the room where Mike sleeps slouched in a chair. Soon, on the hospital roof, where he gives Miami a show in his hospital gown, Marcus tells Mike that he, Mike, soon will face a great test but that he is up to it.

“Just know: You’re good,” Marcus says.

(This all might sound more prophetic to Mike were Marcus not soon talking about his discovery that they are, in fact, soulmates, that this is only one of many existences they’ve shared. In one for which Marcus apologizes, Mike was a disobedient donkey and Marcus his cruel owner, he insists. “Hey, how long you think your brain was without oxygen?” Mike responds.)

Mike will be tested, of course, after he and Marcus set about clearing the aforementioned Howard’s name after the deceased is framed for being in bed with the drug trade.

The flick’s formidable villain is James McGrath (Eric Dane of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Euphoria”), but it’s clear someone within the department is involved, as well. That makes it hard for our heroes to trust even their current boss (and Mike’s ex), Rita Secada (Paola Nuñez), if not their young former colleagues in the Advanced Miami Metro Operations (AMMO) team — Kelly (Vanessa Hudgens) and Dorn (Alexander Ludwig).

Another returning character is Mike’s estranged son, Armando Aretas (Jacob Scipio), who’s been imprisoned for his actions while working for a drug cartel. He is the one person who can identify McGrath, so he is set to be transferred to Miami.

Will Smith appears in a scene from “Bad Boys: Ride or Die.” (Frank Masi/Sony/TNS)

To this point, less than halfway through the affair and despite the high stakes, “Ride or Die” is an easy-breezy joy ride fueled by its humor. However, Adil & Bilall shift gears, leaning more heavily on the action half of the action-comedy formula. And while a sequence set aboard the prisoner-transport helicopter in which Mike and Marcus are accompanying Amando to Miami mostly has the goods, Adil & Bilall and their moviemaking collaborators generally lean way too heavily on tilted cameras and quick cuts in an attempt to ratchet up the excitement whenever bullets are flying and things are exploding. They use drone shots. They use first-person video game-like shots.

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Most of it is more distracting than it is effective.

Worse, the screenplay from Chris Bremner, also a co-writer on “Bad Boys for Life,” and Will Beall (“Aquaman”) leans too heavily on the never-compelling father-son dynamic between Smith and Armando. (Interestingly, a heart attack Beall suffered inspired the Marcus storyline, but that monumental life event is mostly played for laughs.)

It doesn’t matter all that much, but it must be noted the talents of Rhea Seehorn — typically terrific on “Better Call Saul” — are wasted on a one-dimentional character, Howard’s daughter, a U.S. Marshall agent longing to kill Amando for his role in her father’s death.

Ultimately at least a slight improvement over the underwhelming “Bad Boys for Life,” “Ride or Die” largely plays to its sophomoric strengths, right down to the site of those all-but-obligatory slaps: an abandoned alligator-themed amusement park where a big ol’ gator named Duke is rumored to still roam.

Its greatest strength is Smith and Lawrence together. Quit them if you can, but our guess is this isn’t the last time the “Bad Boys” come for you.

‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’

Where: Theaters.

When: June 7.

Rated: R for strong violence, language throughout and some sexual references.

Runtime: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.5.