California billionaires donate $750 million for climate change research

LOS ANGELES — Billionaire California agriculture titans Stewart and Lynda Resnick have donated $750 million to Cal Tech for climate change research in what officials say is the second-largest gift to a U.S. academic institution.

The gift, announced Thursday, comes amid growing alarm over climate change and Trump administration policies that many say are making the problem worse.

Cal Tech said the donation would be used to study solar science, climate science, energy, biofuels, decomposable plastics, water and environmental resources, and ecology and biosphere engineering. The school plans to build a “sustainability research institute” named for the family. It is the largest donation the institution has received.

“The Resnick Sustainability Institute will now be able to mount efforts at scale, letting researchers across campus follow their imaginations and translate fundamental discovery into technologies that dramatically advance solutions to society’s most pressing problems,” Cal Tech said in a statement.

The gift comes after a week of protests across the globe to raise awareness about climate change as well as a United Nations climate summit in New York.

The 2015 Paris agreement aims to keep global warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels — and within 1.5 degrees if possible — in order to avert the most devastating effects of climate change.

But the national targets agreed to in Paris fall significantly short of that goal. Human activity already has warmed the planet by about 1 degree Celsius, and fulfilling only the Paris commitments is likely to result in a temperature increase of 3 degrees — far beyond what scientists consider tolerable to humanity.

Meanwhile, the effects of global warming are hitting harder...