The Boston Research Advisory Group report found that deadly hot marine heat waves — once extremely rare — could become commonplace. Scientists warn that those and other impacts are only going to get worse if the climate continues to warm with dire and possibly irreversible impacts on the ocean.

If the planet does not stop emitting planet-warming greenhouse gasses, marine heat waves could occur off the coast of Massachusetts once every decade if the planet reaches 2 degrees Celsius of warming and perhaps every other year with 3 degrees of warming. The vast majority of excess heat generated by anthropogenic warming is absorbed by the planet’s oceans.

“The possible impacts described in this report are not pleasant,” said Paul Kirshen, a professor of climate adaptation at the University of Massachusetts Boston and an author of the report. “We need to get to net zero emissions and below as soon as possible.”

Unlike on land, where humans can build a seawall to protect from coastal flooding, for example, there is very little that can be done to help ecosystems adapt to warmer water and higher acidity, experts said. The trends noted in the report will be “very difficult” to respond to, Kirshen said.

The report was created to answer questions posed by leaders of coastal Massachusetts towns and cities about what communities could expect over the next few decades as the climate continues to warm. Many of those towns have local economies that are at least in part dependent on commercial fishing, an industry that is likely to be dramatically changed by a warmer and more acidic Massachusetts Bay.

Native fish populations will likely continue their decline off of Massachusetts’ coast, while species from further south will move in, scientists found. The bay will continue to get acidic and inhospitable for the many fish, plants, and shellfish that live there now.

Oceans absorb about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide that’s released into the atmosphere. When absorbed, carbon dioxide makes sea water more acidic through chemical reactions, putting the entire food web in the marine ecosystem at risk, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

One example: Higher acidity causes shells to deteriorate, which kills shellfish. That will be an early marker of a shift in fishing ecology in Massachusetts Bay, the Boston-area researchers warned.

“Shell fisheries should be monitored … for warning signs,” the report said. As acidity increases, there are fewer carbonate ions in the water, an essential ingredient to build shells.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic Cod’s numbers have already declined and the American lobster population is moving north. Scientists further expect populations of winter flounder, silver hake, and Atlantic herring to decline as well.

As others move out, species more suited to warmer temperatures are expected to move in, such as summer flounder, black sea bass, blue crab, and butterfish among them.

Jason Krumholz, an oceanographer and associate professor at the University of Connecticut, said that when he started graduate school in 2005, only very rarely did he catch blue crabs in nets. Now, more than half the crabs he catches are blue crabs, he said.

“I’m not that old yet, and this is a change that I’ve seen just in my career,” said Krumholz, one of the authors of the report. “It’s pretty fast.”

The fishing industry could likely adapt to this change by convincing buyers to push different offerings on the menu, Krumholz said. “We may have a lot more flags outside of restaurants with blue crabs on them instead of lobsters in 20 years.”

Scientists have also observed that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is slowing down. It’s one of the planet’s most prominent and powerful ocean currents and helps to moderate the climate at sea and on land near the shore.

That’s a wild card for ocean temperatures, said Bruce Anderson, an oceanographer and professor at Boston University and one of the lead authors of the report. The phenomenon could weaken and broaden the Gulf Stream, which brings warm tropical waters to the region.

“It’s really unclear what the Gulf Stream is going to do and how that change is going to affect things like the fisheries or even our climate here in Massachusetts,” Anderson said.

If the Gulf Stream slowdown continues, the water offshore of Massachusetts could see “substantial” warming as subtropical waters diffuse northward into the region, scientists found, further compounding the problems.

Another area of uncertainty: How President-elect Donald Trump’s administration could impact the trajectory of offshore ecosystems.

Environmental advocates are worried that the incoming Trump administration will try to slash budgets for federal environmental agencies, which could both slow the energy transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and affect efforts to clean up marine pollution.

Many federal grants finance beach cleanups, water quality testing, and other programs to manage the marine environment, said Jeff Watters, vice president of external affairs of the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit organization.

“I think they’re more at risk now than they were under the first [Trump] administration,” Watters said, because Congress was able to block some of those defunding efforts last time. “Pollution could absolutely go up; that’s a real possibility.”

Those fears come as marshes and coastal ecosystems are already threatened by plastic and pharmaceutical pollution, and runoff pollution is expected to increase due to stronger storms and an increase in coastal populations, according to the new report.

The pollution in Massachusetts Bay is affected by the behavior of people: What they buy, where they fish, how they recreate, and where they live, said Anderson of Boston University.

Yet, perhaps in that relationship lies a glimmer of hope: Towns, cities, and individuals can prevent further pollutants from entering the ecosystem. “This is a very sensitive environment to everyday decisions,” Anderson said.

Erin Douglas can be reached at erin.douglas@globe.com. Follow her @erinmdouglas23.

Broken bones, muscle tears, concussions, even a gunshot wound — those are just some of the injuries sustained by Massachusetts State Police recruits during their training in recent years.

After a recruit died following a training exercise in September, the NBC10 Investigators began asking how many other recruits have been injured during training.

There have been 185 injuries reported across recruiting classes since 2018, according to police records obtained by NBC10 Boston. Among the injuries are broken fingers and broken ribs, torn ACLs, dislocated limbs, back injuries, eye injuries and two cases of rhabdomyolysis, a potentially life-threatening condition caused by overexertion of the muscles

Dozens of these injuries have resulted in 180 recruits being awarded workman’s compensation, and from those recruiting classes, 49 recruits resigned from the academy following their injuries.

Asked about the data, a police spokesman said in a statement the agency is committed to all employees’ health and safety, and that an on-site medical team monitors trainees throughout their time at the police academy to ensure they can physically perform their duties “with excellence.”

Enrique Delgado-Garcia died after a defensive tactics training exercise. His mother Sandra Garcia told NBC10 Boston at the time that the training is too brutal. An outside investigator was tapped to look into Delgado-Garcia’s death.

The NBC10 Investigators were invited inside the academy walls to get a firsthand look at what it takes to become a Massachusetts state trooper and the extremely demanding training involved after we began asking questions about the high attrition rate of this class.

The Massachusetts Air National Guard tech support member responsible for “one of the most significant leaks of classified documents and information in United States history” will spend a decade and a half behind bars.

U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani sentenced Jack Teixeira to 180 months, which is 15 years, in federal prison at a sentencing hearing in federal court in Boston’s Seaport on Tuesday afternoon. She also ordered, among other conditions, that he enter a mental health treatment program and barred him from taking any jobs where he would have access to sensitive government materials. She did not impose a fine because he did not have the resources to pay a fine.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry for all the harm I’ve wrought and I’ve caused,” Teixeira, wearing an orange Plymouth County Correctional Facility jumpsuit, said before Talwani delivered her sentence.

“I can’t really sum up how contrite I am that my behavior has caused such a maelstrom,” the 22-year-old continued, “affecting my family and everyone overseas. I understand that all of the responsibility and consequences come on my shoulders alone and I accept whatever that will bring. I’m at your mercy, your honor.”

Teixeira, of Dighton, was arrested in April 2023 and pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act.

Teixeira, who served as a Cyber Defense Operations Journeyman at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod, leaked more than 40 highly classified military documents, including many regarding Russia’s war in Ukraine, to a cadre of fellow video game players on the social media platform Discord.

He was looking at a maximum of more than 16 years for his crimes, if Talwani had followed the plea agreement, which she wasn’t bound by in calculating sentencing. Teixeira entered the plea agreement in late February and finalized with his guilty pleas days later on March 4.

Boston FBI Special Agent in Charge Jodi Cohen called Teixeira “a textbook example of an insider threat.”

“His actions compromised military plans, sources and methods, and allowed our most significant adversaries access to some of our most closely guarded intelligence,” she continued in a press conference following sentencing.

Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy at the same press conference said that the “heavy price” of the sentence “sends a powerful message to every individual who holds a top secret clearance.”

“I expect that starting tomorrow, Jack Teixeira’s name will be mentioned when people are trained about the gravity of a top secret clearance and the consequences if you leak information,” Levy said.

Sentencing arguments

The federal prosecutor, Jared Dolan, in arguing for a sentence of 200 months, called Teixeira’s crimes “exceptionally serious” and compared his actions to those of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. He said that the sentence should be large enough to be a huge deterrent to anyone else who is considering such disclosures.

“Our military is built on a backbone of people his age and younger,” Dolan said. “And we trust that the training for those individuals put them in a place to succeed and that’s what they do every single day.”

“The defendants job was to not tell anyone else, what he promised to not tell anyone else,” he continued. “Youthful brains make impulsive decisions, but this was not an impulsive decision and if it was then it was an impulsive decision that he made every day for more than a year.”

Talwani spoke at length about her thought process on sentencing a crime for which there was “very little case law.”

“It seems to me that this is not one harm, this is multiple harms,” Talwani said when arguing that she disagreed with the plea agreement’s argument that the crimes could be grouped. She compared it to rape or robbery, to where even if the victim remained the same each new offense was a different crime.

“Yes the victim is the same here, the victim is the United States,” she continued. “But I don’t know how you can say it’s the same if he did it for one month instead of 13 months. … Each time you are creating a new risk, each time is new information, new disclosure.”

In sentencing memos filed last month, the defense recommended a sentence of 11 years whereas the prosecution recommended a sentence of 16 years and eight months, citing not only the need for Teixeira’s adequate punishment but to deter anyone else from even considering similar actions.

Defense attorney Michael Bachrach argued that Teixeira had no intention whatsoever to harm the United States, and that “motive matters.”

Unlike Manning and Snowden, who each chose to disclose secrets with purpose, Bachrach argued that Teixeira’s “truly bad decision making” was built on both his youth and his autism and wanting to find a community.

“What he cared about was having a community to speak to because he didn’t have that community at Otis Air Base,” Bachrach said, adding that his recommended sentence of 11 years is “significant” and is more time than half of the defendant’s life at the time of the crimes.

Talwani took some exception with Bachrach’s argument but did agree that she was leaning toward a downward departure based on Teixeira’s age.

Originally Published: November 12, 2024 at 4:12 PM EST