AURORA, Colo. — As the weather warms, Lizeth Chacon is anticipating a new season of registering Latino voters — yet dreading experiences like one late last year, when she came upon a skate park full of older teenagers.

“I thought, ‘The perfect age! They’re turning 18,’ ” said Ms. Chacon, just 26 herself, born in Mexico and now the lead organizer at Rights for All People, a local immigrant organizing group. But among the roughly 50 people she approached in this increasingly diverse city east of Denver, “not a single person” was interested in her pitch, including those already old enough to vote: “They were like, ‘Why? Why would I bother to vote?’ ”

Across the country, immigrant-rights advocates report mounting disillusionment with both parties among Latinos, enough to threaten recent gains in voting participation that have reshaped politics to Democrats’ advantage nationally, and in states like Colorado with significant Latino populations. High hopes — kindled by President Obama’s elections and stoked in June by Senate passage of the most significant overhaul of immigration law in a generation, with a path to citizenship for about 11 million people here unlawfully — have been all but dashed.

Latinos mainly blame Republicans, who control the House and have buried the Senate bill, but they also have soured on Mr. Obama. The federal government has so aggressively enforced existing immigration laws that one national Hispanic leader recently nicknamed the president “deporter in chief” for allowing nearly two million people to be deported.

Lisa Duran, Ms. Chacon’s supervisor, said some Latinos felt “nowhere to turn.”
MATTHEW STAVER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A day after that widely reported gibe in Washington, at Denver’s Spanish-language radio station KBNO (“Que Bueno” to its audience), the host Fernando Sergio devoted his three-hour talk show to asking listeners whether they agreed with the criticism, or “has President Obama done the best he can against Republican opposition?”

“The majority were very angry at the president,” Mr. Sergio said in an interview at the station, where pictures of John and Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama hang on the walls. “People feel like he’s made some promises that he hasn’t fulfilled, that he can do more” — like expand his 2012 order that deferred deportations of young people brought to the country as children, a group known as Dreamers.

“If I were a Democratic consultant,” Mr. Sergio added, “I would have been concerned.”

Democrats indeed are worried. While the growing Latino electorate is a force in presidential elections, and one expected to give Democrats an edge for years unless Republicans shed an anti-immigrant image, Latinos are relative bit players in this midterm election year. Their turnout typically drops in midterm years; nationally and in Colorado, about half of registered Latinos voted in 2008 and 2012, but less than a third did in the 2010 midterm elections and many Democrats lost. This fall, with many Latinos caught between hostility toward Republicans and disappointment with Mr. Obama, participation could dip further.

“There’s a sense from some people that there’s nowhere to turn, and I’m afraid they’re just going to be frozen in frustration,” said Lisa Duran, executive director of Rights for All People, and Ms. Chacon’s supervisor. “It’s absolutely imperative that we not let that happen.”

A depressed vote threatens Democrats in a number of races, notably in Colorado, where Latinos were 14 percent of the state’s 2012 electorate and about 70 percent voted for Democrats. Their Senate majority at risk, Democrats are hustling to help Senator Mark Udall now that a formidable Republican, Representative Cory Gardner, has challenged him. They also hope to snatch the House district, including Aurora, from Representative Mike Coffman, a Republican. His Democratic rival is Andrew Romanoff, a former State House speaker.

While Mr. Coffman lately has moderated his stance on immigration, Mr. Gardner has not. He has opposed the deportation stay for young people and objects to the Senate’s path to citizenship as amnesty, and Democrats plan to emphasize that to Latino voters.

“This is a turnout election for Democrats, and we’re shifting focus and resources because we know that,” said Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “We can’t outcompete the billionaires on the airwaves. It’s going to have to be a ground game.” Mr. Bennet won in 2010 by mobilizing more Latinos, women and young voters than many in either party predicted.

Discouraged Democrats take some comfort that the closest Senate races are mostly in states without many Latinos. As for the House, a couple of dozen races could turn on Latino votes — including in California, Florida, Nevada and Texas — but Republicans are expected to retain their majority.

Still, Mr. Obama wants to reconcile with Latinos, a group that gave him 71 percent of its votes in 2012. He recently met with several Hispanic lawmakers and days later with 17 leaders of immigration groups, but the meetings only underscored each side’s frustration with the other.

In the meeting with the immigration groups, Mr. Obama did most of the talking for nearly two hours, participants said. He argued that by being united, they had they won public support for immigration changes, passed the Senate bill and put House Republicans on the defensive. By now attacking him, the president said — and he chided Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, for her “deporter in chief” taunt — the activists were relieving the pressure on Republicans, he said. Privately, Republicans agree.

The president told them that his secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, would review the deportation system. But Mr. Obama lowered expectations by reiterating that administration lawyers say he cannot take action beyond his 2012 order benefiting the so-called Dreamers. The advocates expressed skepticism.

The exchange reflected Mr. Obama’s bind: If he suspends more deportations, he could mend relations with Latinos and perhaps motivate more of them to vote. But he could lose what chance remains for new immigration law, his second-term domestic priority, since House Republicans have signaled they would cite such executive action as proof that he cannot be trusted to enforce any law.

Back in Colorado, Leticia Zavala follows the Washington maneuvering from the vast eastern plains, in the ranching center of Fort Morgan where she was born, in what is now Mr. Gardner’s House district. The county is one-third Latino, and her experiences there capture the community’s conflicted feelings.

Ms. Zavala, 26, recently was packing to drive to Mexico with her two young children for their first visit with her husband since he was deported in December, more than two years after he was snared in an immigration raid at a dairy plant, and six years after he began seeking legal status. While she knows perhaps 10 people who have been deported, until her husband’s ordeal, “I didn’t really know how it affected families,” she said, wiping tears.

Yet she has become more politically active, not less. Ms. Zavala takes heart from Latinos’ legislative victories in Colorado. She formed a small immigrants assistance group, enrolled in community college, and helps a local lawyer with citizenship classes. Everywhere, she carries a backpack with voter registration forms, envelopes and stamps.

Ms. Zavala estimated that she has helped register about 100 people, though it has not been easy. “Many people are angry and upset because Obama promised so much and it’s been how many years?” she said. “But the Republicans aren’t doing anything. We have something; there’s a bill. And for us to sit here in March 2014 with nothing — people are just really upset.”

NY Times, Mar. 31, 2014

Greenland’­s immense ice sheet is melting as a result of climate change.

KADIR VAN LOHUIZEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By JUSTIN GILLIS

YOKOHAMA, Japan — Climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans, scientists reported on Monday, and they warned that the problem was likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that periodically summarizes climate science, concluded that ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct.

The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants, which is killing some creatures or stunting their growth, the report found.

Organic matter frozen in Arctic soils since before civilization began is now melting, allowing it to decay into greenhouse gases that will cause further warming, the scientists said. And the worst is yet to come, the scientists said in the second of three reports that are expected to carry considerable weight next year as nations try to agree on a new global climate treaty.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, center, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, speaks during a press conference in Tokyo on Monday.

SHIZUO KAMBAYASHI / ASSOCIATED PRESS

In particular, the report emphasized that the world’s food supply is at considerable risk — a threat that could have serious consequences for the poorest nations.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the intergovernmental panel, said at a news conference here on Monday presenting the report.

The report was among the most sobering yet issued by the scientific panel. The group, along with Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its efforts to clarify the risks of climate change. The report is the final work of several hundred authors; details from the drafts of this and of the last report in the series, which will be released in Berlin in April, leaked in the last few months.

The report attempts to project how the effects will alter human society in coming decades. While the impact of global warming may actually be moderated by factors like economic or technological change, the report found, the disruptions are nonetheless likely to be profound. That will be especially so if emissions are allowed to continue at a runaway pace, the report said.

Tracks were flooded at Grand Central Station in Oct. 2012, after Hurricane Sandy hit New York.

HIROKO MASUIKE / THE NEW YORK TIMES

It cited the risk of death or injury on a wide scale, probable damage to public health, displacement of people and potential mass migrations.

“Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger,” the report declared.

The report also cited the possibility of violent conflict over land, water or other resources, to which climate change might contribute indirectly “by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks.” The scientists emphasized that climate change is not just a problem of the distant future, but is happening now.

Studies have found that parts of the Mediterranean region are drying out because of climate change, and some experts believe that droughts there have contributed to political destabilization in the Middle East and North Africa.

In much of the American West, mountain snowpack is declining, threatening water supplies for the region, the scientists said in the report. And the snow that does fall is melting earlier in the year, which means there is less melt water to ease the parched summers. In Alaska, the collapse of sea ice is allowing huge waves to strike the coast, causing erosion so rapid that it is already forcing entire communities to relocate.

“Now we are at the point where there is so much information, so much evidence, that we can no longer plead ignorance,” Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, said at the news conference.

The report was quickly welcomed in Washington, where President Obama is trying to use his executive power under the Clean Air Act and other laws to impose significant new limits on the country’s greenhouse emissions. He faces determined opposition in Congress.

“There are those who say we can’t afford to act,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. “But waiting is truly unaffordable. The costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

Amid all the risks the experts cited, they did find a bright spot. Since the intergovernmental panel issued its last big report in 2007, it has found growing evidence that governments and businesses around the world are making extensive plans to adapt to climate disruptions, even as some conservatives in the United States and a small number of scientists continue to deny that a problem exists.

“I think that dealing effectively with climate change is just going to be something that great nations do,” said Christopher B. Field, co-chairman of the working group that wrote the report and an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. Talk of adaptation to global warming was once avoided in some quarters, on the ground that it would distract from the need to cut emissions. But the past few years have seen a shift in thinking, including research from scientists and economists who argue that both strategies must be pursued at once.

A striking example of the change occurred recently in the state of New York, where the Public Service Commission ordered Consolidated Edison, the electric utility serving New York City and some suburbs, to spend about $1 billion upgrading its system to prevent future damage from flooding and other weather disruptions.

The plan is a reaction to the blackouts caused by Hurricane Sandy. Con Ed will raise flood walls, bury some vital equipment and conduct a study of whether emerging climate risks require even more changes. Other utilities in the state face similar requirements, and utility regulators across the United States are discussing whether to follow New York’s lead.

But with a global failure to limit greenhouse gases, the risk is rising that climatic changes in coming decades could overwhelm such efforts to adapt, the panel found. It cited a particular risk that in a hotter climate, farmers will not be able to keep up with the fast-rising demand for food.

“When supply falls below demand, somebody doesn’t have enough food,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist who helped write the new report. “When some people don’t have food, you get starvation. Yes, I’m worried.”

The poorest people in the world, who have had virtually nothing to do with causing global warming, will be high on the list of victims as climatic disruptions intensify, the report said. It cited a World Bank estimate that poor countries need as much as $100 billion a year to try to offset the effects of climate change; they are now getting, at best, a few billion dollars a year in such aid from rich countries.

The $100 billion figure, though included in the 2,500-page main report, was removed from a 48-page executive summary to be read by the world’s top political leaders. It was among the most significant changes made as the summary underwent final review during an editing session of several days in Yokohama.

The edit came after several rich countries, including the United States, raised questions about the language, according to several people who were in the room at the time but did not wish to be identified because the negotiations were private. The language is contentious because poor countries are expected to renew their demand for aid this September in New York at a summit meeting of world leaders, who will attempt to make headway on a new treaty to limit greenhouse gases.

Many rich countries argue that $100 billion a year is an unrealistic demand; it would essentially require them to double their budgets for foreign aid, at a time of economic distress at home. That argument has fed a rising sense of outrage among the leaders of poor countries, who feel their people are paying the price for decades of profligate Western consumption.

Two decades of international efforts to limit emissions have yielded little result, and it is not clear whether the negotiations in New York this fall will be any different. While greenhouse gas emissions have begun to decline slightly in many wealthy countries, including the United States, those gains are being swamped by emissions from rising economic powers like China and India.

For the world’s poorer countries, food is not the only issue, but it may be the most acute. Several times in recent years, climatic disruptions in major growing regions have helped to throw supply and demand out of balance, contributing to price increases that have reversed decades of gains against global hunger, at least temporarily.

The warning about the food supply in the new report is much sharper in tone than any previously issued by the panel. That reflects a growing body of research about how sensitive many crops are to heat waves and water stress. The report said that climate change was already dragging down the output of wheat and corn at a global scale, compared to what it would otherwise be.

David B. Lobell, a Stanford University scientist who has published much of the recent research and helped write the new report, said in an interview that as yet, too little work was being done to understand the risk, much less counter it with improved crop varieties and farming techniques. “It is a surprisingly small amount of effort for the stakes,” he said.

Timothy Gore, an analyst for Oxfam, the antipoverty group that sent observers to the proceedings in Yokohama, praised the new report as painting a clear picture of the consequences of a warming planet. But he warned that without greater efforts to limit global warming and to adapt to the changes that have become inevitable, “the goal we have in Oxfam of ensuring that every person has enough food to eat could be lost forever.”