By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The natural El Niño cycle, which warps weather worldwide, is both adding to and shaped by a warming world, meteorologists said.

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A new study calculated that an unusual recent twist in the warming and cooling cycle that includes El Niño and its counterpart La Niña can help explain the scientific mystery of why Earth’s already rising temperature spiked to a new level over the past three years.

Separately, scientists have had to update how they label El Niño and La Niña because of rapid weather changes cause by global warming. Increasingly hot waters globally have caused the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this month to alter how it calculates when the weather pattern has flipped into a new cycle. It’s likely to mean that more events will be considered La Niña and fewer qualify as an El Niño for warming tropical waters.

Earth’s average monthly temperature took a noticeable jump up from the long-term upward trend connected to human-caused climate change in early 2023, and that increase continued through 2025. Scientists have many theories about what’s happening, including an acceleration of greenhouse gas warming, a reduction in particle pollution from ships, an underwater volcano eruption and increased solar output.

In a new study in Nature Geoscience this month, Japanese researchers look at how the difference in energy coming to and leaving the planet — called Earth’s energy imbalance — increased in 2022. An increased imbalance, or more trapped heat, then leads to warmer temperatures, scientists said. The researchers calculate that about three-quarters of the change in Earth’s energy imbalance can be attributed to the combination of long-term human-caused climate change and a shift from a three-year cooling La Niña cycle to a warm El Niño one.

El Niño vs. La Niña

El Niño is a cyclical and natural warming of patches of the equatorial Pacific that then alters the world’s weather patterns, while La Niña is marked by cooler than average waters.

Both shift precipitation and temperature patterns, but in different ways. El Niños tend to increase global temperatures and La Niñas depress the long-term rise.

La Niñas tend to cause more damage in the United States because of increased hurricane activity and drought, studies have shown.

FILE – Villagers fetch water from a makeshift borehole in Mudzi, Zimbabwe, Tuesday, July 2, 2024. as the United Nations’ food agency says months of drought in southern Africa, triggered by the El Nino weather phenomenon, has had a devastating impact on more than 27 million people and caused the region’s worst hunger crisis in decades. (AP Photo/Aaron Ufumeli, File)

Why weather cycles switch from warm to cool

From 2020 to 2023, Earth had an unusual “triple dip” La Niña without an El Niño in between. In a La Niña , warm water sticks to a deeper depth, resulting in a cooler surface. And that reduces how much energy goes out into space, said study co-author Yu Kosaka, a climate scientist at the University of Tokyo.

She compared it to what happens when people have fevers.

“If our body’s temperature is high then it tends to emit its energy out, and the Earth has the same situation happening. And as the temperatures increase, it acts to emit more energy outward. And for three-year La Niña , it’s opposite,” Kosaka said.

So more energy — which becomes heat — is trapped on Earth, she said. La Niñas more typically correspond to a one- or two-year buildup of extra energy imbalance, but this time it was longer so the difference was more noticeable and included hotter temperatures, Kosaka said.

“When there is a transition from La Niña to El Niño , it’s like the lid is popped off,” releasing the heat, explained former NOAA meteorologist Tom Di Liberto, who’s now with Climate Central.

About 23% of the energy imbalance driving the recent higher temperatures comes from this unusually long La Niña pattern, with slightly more than half coming from gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas, the study authors said. The rest can be other factors.

Scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, which wasn’t involved in the study, said the research makes sense and explains an increase in energy imbalance that some scientists were attributing to accelerated warming.

Changing how El Niños and La Niñas are labeled

For 75 years when meteorologists calculated El Niños and La Niñas , it was based on the difference in temperature in three tropical Pacific regions compared to normal. An El Nino was 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal and La Nina was cooler than normal by the same amount.

FILE – A man carries usable belongings salvaged from his flood-hit home across a flooded area in Shikarpur district of Sindh province, of Pakistan, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan, File)

The trouble in a warming world is what’s considered normal keeps shifting.

Until now, NOAA used the 30-year average as normal. It updated the 30-year average every decade, which is how often it updates most climate and weather measurements. Then the water warmed so much for El Niños and La Niñas that NOAA updated its definition of normal every five years, but that wasn’t enough either, said Nat Johnson, a meteorologist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.

So NOAA came up with an El Niño index that’s relative, starting this month. This new index compares temperatures to the rest of Earth’s tropics. Recently that difference between the old and new methods has been as much as half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), and “that’s enough to have an impact,” Johnson said.

That’s because what really matters with El Niños and La Niñas is the way the waters interact with the atmosphere. And recently the interactions didn’t match the old labeling, but they do match the new method, Johnson said.

This will likely mean a bit more La Niñas and fewer El Niños than in the old system, Johnson said.

Here comes another El Niño

NOAA’s forecast is for an El Niño to develop later this year in the late summer or fall. If it comes early enough, it could dampen Atlantic hurricane activity. But it would also mean warmer global temperatures in 2027.

“When El Niño develops, we’re likely to set a new global temperature record,” Woodwell’s Francis said in an email. “’Normal’ was left in the dust decades ago. And with this much heat in the system, everyone should buckle up for the extreme weather it will fuel.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

You may be able to tap your head and rub your stomach at once, but can you play the harpsichord and conduct an orchestra at the same time? The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s artistic partner Richard Egarr shows off his multitasking skills as part of his latest engagement at the Ordway Concert Hall.

For the show, Egarr conducts the orchestra’s performances of music by George Frideric Handel and Ludwig van Beethoven. For Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 4, he both conducts and plays the harpsichord. The concert offers an audacious take on music by beloved composers.

Egarr conducts Handel’s “Water Music,” without referring to any music, seemingly knowing the music by heart. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as he once played “Water Music” for the late Queen Elizabeth II for her 60th Jubilee.

That jubilee performance took place on the River Thames, a callback to the music’s original performance, when King George I commissioned Handel to write a series of pieces for an outdoor excursion on the river. “I was on barge number 2,” Egarr recalled, noting it rained for much of the event in 2012.

While the SPCO’s performance took place in the shelter of the concert hall, elements of the music help set the scene for an outdoor setting. You can just imagine the horns calling out across the Thames in splendid, celebratory bursts, while the strings echo as if in conversation. An added timpani part, played by Steve Kimball, contributed an element of gravitas and drama.

For Bach’s Orchestral Suite, Egarr’s harpsichord playing — impressive in its own right — almost seems like an afterthought. Often playing with one hand and conducting with the other, Egarr’s attention is keenly focused on the musicians surrounding him and the music they create together. Even in the more complicated passages, it’s as if his body levitates. He slowly rises from sitting to standing as though summoned by the music itself.

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After intermission, Egarr returns to the stage without the harpsichord to conduct Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4.

Typically at classical music concerts, audiences don’t clap between movements; if they do, it’s considered a faux pas to applaud before the very end of a piece. Egarr cheekily disregards this convention, encouraging the audience to clap at the end of each movement, as if in defiance of tradition.

Beginning with shadowy layers in B-flat (which Egarr calls “the blackest key”), the music feels cinematic and brooding before picking up into a more lively gallop. The dramatic and aching second movement, according to Egarr, may have been a love letter to one of Beethoven’s romantic interests. But the real thrill comes at the end of the piece, when the orchestra sprints through a virtuosic whirl of emotion and melody at breakneck speed.

At times, the last movement goes so fast that the moments of pause or elongation feel like revelations. That’s the brilliance of Beethoven — and of Egarr’s interpretation of the composer. Extreme gestures come into particular focus when their contrasts reveal them.

If you go

Who: The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

What: Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony with Richard Egarr

When: 7 p.m. Sat. Ordway,  2 p.m. Sunday at Ted Mann Concert Hall.

Where: Saturday: The Ordway, 345 Washington St., St, Paul. Sunday: Ted Mann Concert Hall, 2128 Fourth Street S., Minneapolis.

Accessibility: Ordway: Elevators access all floors of Concert Hall, accessibility seating for all mobility devices (request when buying tickets); service animals welcome (inform ticket representative); listening units and large print available upon request. One single occupancy, accessible restroom in the Music Theater lobby. Ordway.org/visit/accessibility. Ted Mann Concert Hall: Access via south side power door entrance. Elevator and adapted restrooms available.

Capsule: Richard Egarr teams up with the SPCO for an audacious performance.

 

By MICHAEL PHILLIS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Friday it backs a 10-year deadline for most cities and towns to replace their harmful lead pipes, giving notice that it will support a tough rule approved under the Biden administration to reduce lead in drinking water.

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The Environmental Protection Agency told a federal appeals court in Washington that it would defend the strongest overhaul of lead-in-water standards in three decades against a court challenge by a utility industry association.

The Trump administration has typically favored rapid deregulation, including reducing or killing rules on air and water pollution. On Friday, for example, it repealed tight limits on mercury and other toxic emissions from coal plants. But the agency has taken a different approach to drinking water.

“After intensive stakeholder involvement, EPA concluded that the only way to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act’s mandate to prevent anticipated adverse health effects ‘to the extent feasible’ is to require replacement of lead service lines,” the agency’s court filing said.

Doing so by a 10-year deadline is feasible, the agency added, supporting a rule that was based in part of the finding that old rules that relied on chemical treatment and monitoring to reduce lead “failed to prevent system-wide lead contamination and widespread adverse health effects.”

The EPA said in August it planned to defend the Biden administration’s aggressive rule, but added that it would also “develop new tools and information to support practical implementation flexibilities and regulatory clarity.” Some environmental activists worried that that meant the EPA was looking to create loopholes.

Lead, a heavy metal once common in products like pipes and paints, is a neurotoxin that can stunt children’s development, lower IQ scores and increase blood pressure in adults. Lead pipes can corrode and contaminate drinking water. The previous Trump administration’s rule had looser standards and did not mandate the replacement of all pipes.

Standards aimed at protecting kids

The Biden administration finalized its lead-in-water overhaul in 2024. It mandated that utilities act to combat lead in water at lower concentrations, with just 10 parts per billion as a trigger, down from 15. If higher levels were found, water systems had to inform their consumers, take immediate action to reduce lead and work to replace lead pipes that are commonly the main source of lead in drinking water.

The Biden administration at the time estimated the stricter standards would protect up to 900,000 infants from having low birth weight and avoid up to 1,500 premature deaths a year from heart disease.

“People power and years of lead-contaminated communities fighting to clean up tap water have made it a third rail to oppose rules to protect our health from the scourge of toxic lead. Maybe only a hidebound water utility trade group is willing to attack this basic public health measure,” said Erik Olson, senior director at the Natural Resource Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit.

The American Water Works Association, a utility industry association, had challenged the rule in court, arguing the EPA lacks authority to regulate the portion of the pipe that’s on private property and therefore cannot require water systems to replace them.

The agency countered on Friday that utilities can be required to replace the entire lead pipe because they have sufficient control over them.

The AWWA also said the 10-year deadline wasn’t feasible, noting it’s hard to find enough labor to do the work and water utilities face other significant infrastructure challenges simultaneously. Water utilities were given three years to prepare before the 10-year timeframe starts and some cities with a lot of lead were given longer.

The agency said they looked closely at data from dozens of water utilities and concluded that the vast majority could replace their lead pipes in 10 years or less.

Replacing decades-old standards

The original lead and copper rule for drinking water was enacted by the EPA more than 30 years ago. The rules have significantly reduced lead in water but have been criticized for letting cities move too slowly when levels rose too high.

Lead pipes are most commonly found in older, industrial parts of the country, including major cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee. The rule also revises the way lead amounts are measured, which could significantly expand the number of communities found violating the rules.

The EPA under President Donald Trump has celebrated deregulation. Officials have sought to slash climate change programs and promote fossil fuel development. On drinking water issues, however, their initial actions have been more nuanced.

In March, for example, the EPA announced plans to partially roll back rules to reduce so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water — the other major Biden-era tap water protection. That change sought to keep tough limits for some common PFAS, but also proposed scrapping and reconsidering standards for other types and extending deadlines.

PFAS and lead pipes are both costly threats to safe water. There are some federal funds to help communities.

The Biden administration estimated about 9 million lead pipes provide water to homes and businesses in the United States. The Trump administration updated the analysis and now projects there are roughly 4 million lead pipes. Changes in methodology, including assuming that communities that did not submit data did not have lead pipes, resulted in the significant shift. The new estimate does correct odd results from some states — activists said that the agency’s initial assumptions for Florida, for example, seemed far too high.

The EPA did not immediately return a request for comment. The AWWA pointed to their previous court filing when asked for comment.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.

By MICHAEL BIESECKER and JESSE BEDAYN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Newly released records show a U.S. citizen was shot and killed in Texas by a federal immigration agent last year during a late-night traffic encounter that was not publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security.

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The death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, would mark the earliest of at least six deadly shootings by federal officers since the start of a nationwide immigration crackdown in President Donald Trump’s second term. On Friday, DHS said the shooting on South Padre Island last March occurred after the driver intentionally struck an agent.

The shooting involved a Homeland Security Investigations team that was conducting an immigration enforcement operation in conjunction with local police, according to documents obtained by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Washington.

The records are part of a tranche of heavily redacted internal documents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the nonprofit obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Though Martinez’s death on March 15, 2025, was reported by local media outlets at the time, federal and state authorities did not disclose that the shooting involved the team from HSI. In a statement Friday, DHS said the driver who was killed “intentionally ran over a Homeland Security Investigation special agent,” resulting in another agent firing “defensive shots to protect himself, his fellow agents, and the general public.”

The department did not respond to questions about why it had made no media release or other public notification of the officer-involved shooting over the last 11 months.

Martinez’s mother, Rachel Reyes, said her son was just days past his 23rd birthday when he and his best friend drove from San Antonio down to the beach for the weekend to celebrate. South Padre Island, located on the Gulf Coast just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, is a renowned spring break destination that attracts tens of thousands of college-aged partiers each March.

Martinez worked at an Amazon warehouse, liked to play video games and hang out with friends. His mother said he had never had any prior run-ins with law enforcement.

“He was a typical young guy,” Reyes told The Associated Press. “He never really got a chance to go out and experience things. It was his first time getting to go out of town. He was a nice guy, humble guy. And he wasn’t a violent person at all.”

Records show federal agents were assisting police

According to an internal two-page ICE incident report included in the newly disclosed documents, shortly after midnight, HSI officers were assisting South Padre Island police by redirecting traffic through a busy intersection after a vehicle accident with several injuries.

A blue, four-door Ford with a driver and passenger approached the officers, who ordered the driver to stop. The report does not say why. Initially, the driver didn’t respond to commands but did eventually come to a stop, according to the report.

Agents then surrounded the vehicle, telling those inside to get out, but the driver “accelerated forward” and struck an HSI special agent “who wound up on the hood of the vehicle,” the report said. An HSI supervisory special agent standing by the side of the car then fired his weapon multiple times through the open driver’s side window, and the vehicle stopped.

Paramedics already on the scene of the accident quickly provided medical aid and the driver was taken by ambulance to a regional hospital in Brownsville, where he was pronounced dead, according to the report. The passenger, also a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody.

The HSI officer who the report says was struck by the vehicle was treated for an unspecified knee injury at a nearby hospital and released.

The names of the two HSI agents involved in the shooting and the names of the two men in the car were all redacted from the ICE report, but Reyes confirmed the dead driver was her son. She said he was shot three times.

State investigation into shooting is still ‘active’

The report says the Texas Rangers responded to the shooting scene and took the lead as the primary agency investigating the shooting.

Reyes said she first learned her son had been shot by a federal agent, rather than a local police officer, about a week after he was killed. She was contacted by an investigator from the Rangers who she said told her there were videos of the shooting that contradicted the account provided by federal agents. DHS did not immediately respond to an email Friday about the claim that there is video showing a different account.

She said she was told by the investigator that the state report into the shooting was completed in October and that the case would be presented to a grand jury for potential criminal charges.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which includes the Rangers, said in a statement Friday that the investigation into the shooting is still “active” and declined to offer more information.

Messages left with the office of Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz, an elected Democrat whose jurisdiction includes South Padre Island, received no response Friday. South Padre Island Police Chief Claudine O’Carroll also did not respond to requests for comment.

Attorneys for the family said Friday they have spent the past year pursuing accountability and transparency.

“It is critical that there is a full and fair investigation into why HSI was present at the scene of a traffic collision and why a federal officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen as he was trying to comply with instructions from the local law enforcement officers directing traffic,” attorneys Charles M. Stam and Alex Stamm said in a statement.

Agents involved were part of a border task force

According to the ICE report, the HSI agents involved in the shooting were part of a maritime border enforcement security task force typically focused on combating transnational criminal organizations at seaports. Over the last year, however, officers from across multiple federal agencies have been reassigned to prioritize immigration enforcement.

In January, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis, was killed in the driver’s seat of her SUV by ICE officer Jonathan Ross. Trump administration officials initially attempted to paint Good as a “domestic terrorist” who tried to ram officers with her vehicle before multiple videos emerged of the incident that cast doubt on the government’s narrative.

As in the Good case, experts in police training and tactics questioned why a federal officer apparently positioned himself in front of Martinez’s vehicle.

“You don’t stand in front of the car, you don’t put yourself in harm’s way,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a police use-of-force expert at the University of South Carolina. He added that there’s never a scenario where it’s justified, “because you don’t know whether this person is going to flee, and if he flees, you could be dead.”

Alpert said investigators will likely review any available body camera video or other footage to examine how swiftly Martinez moved the car forward, if he merely took his foot off the break or pressed down hard on the accelerator.

Martinez’s mother said she didn’t believe he would ever intentionally assault a law enforcement officer.

“They didn’t give him a chance,” Reyes said. “It’s so excessive. They could have done anything else besides that. It’s like they shoot first and ask questions later.”

Bedayn reported from Denver.