captioning sponsored by wnet on this edition for sunday, july 2: with the repeal of the affordable care act stalled, president trump continues his battle with the media. documenting climate change underwater-- how warming oceans are affecting coral reefs. and, antarctica is melting... what that could mean for sea level rise next on "pbs newshour weekend." >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. the anderson family fund. rosalind p. walter, in memory of abby m. o'neill. barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual

and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. lincoln center in new york,at hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thanks for joining us. the weekend after senate republicans delayed any votes on their bill to repeal and replace president obama's affordable care act, trump administration officials say they're optimistic a compromise is within reach. today, health and human services secretary tom price said after the july 4 recess, he believes senate majority leader mitch mcconnell will get legislation that could lower health insurance costs back on track. >> what we're trying to do is bring all of those prices down. everybody. premiums in this nation have doubled over the past four years, up an average of $3,000 dollars for the average family. that's a tax on everybody.

>> sreenivasan: one hurdle to securing enough senate votes is last week's analysis from the congressional budget office, which forecast the bill could cause 22 million americans to lose insurance over the next decade, particularly those covered by obamacare's expansion of medicaid for low-income americans. the c.b.o. also projected the senate bill could make insurance premiums go up for older americans nearing retirement. white house legislative director marc short today echoed a suggestion by president trump and some senators that they should consider repealing obamacare now and replacing it later. >> if the replacement part is too difficult for republicans to come together, then let's go back and handle the first step and repeal. so that's an option and then at that point if you've repealed it you can come back with a replacement effort that could be more bipartisan. >> sreenivasan: one of the republican senators publicly opposed to the bill in its current form, mike lee of utah, says it does too little to protect the middle class. >> this bill, the one we've been discussing in the senate, has bailouts for insurance companies. it has hundreds of billions of

dollars in tax relief for the affluent. it even has some provisions for the poor. who it leaves out are the forgotten man and the forgotten woman-- those earning a combined household income of $75,000 or so who have been left behind. >> sreenivasan: democratic west virginia senator joe manchin said today obamacare needs" repair" to fix the private insurance market, but not to be repealed. former republican presidential contender and ohio governor john kasich said the bill's $45- billion to fight the opioid epidemic is too low. president trump didn't comment on the fate of the republican healthcare plan today, but he found time to tweet a bizarre video showing him punching and body-slamming a man with a cnn logo superimposed on his face, the official "potus" account retweeted it. a version of the original video is from a "wrestlemania" event mister trump participated in ten years ago. a doctored-up version was first posted on the social media sit"" reddit" earlier this week.

in response, cnn said, "it is a last night, the president had reporters on his mind when he took time out from his holiday weekend at his new jersey golf club. at washington's kennedy center, he addressed a rally and concert for veterans sponsored by an evangelical christian church. >> the fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them. ( cheers ) because the people know the truth. the fake media tried to stop us from going to the white house, but i'm president, and they're not. >> sreenivasan: the head of the

environmental protection agency- - scott pruitt-- has launched a formal process to review and challenge mainstream climate science. the critique will reportedly be modeled on how the u.s. military identifies battlefield vulnerabilities. emily holden from "e and e" news's "climatewire" broke the story on friday and joins me now from washington to discuss it. what we know so far is essentially that administrator pruitt wants to recruit scientists to work on this red team, blue team to sort of look at any potential vulnerability or uncertainty in climb change report, the blue team would be the team producing and defending the reports > > sreenivasan: this kind of flies in the face of peer-reviewed scientific journals >> that's what you heard from the scientific community response to this, they're saying

this is how science is made, before we publish anything on climate change or any other matter we've had it reviewed by other scientists who have looked to see we've done everything correctly and come to the correct conclusions. > > sreenivasan: what about the fact that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that this is really not up for dispute? so if you wanted to do this red team blue team, would it be red team three and blue team 97? >> we don't know a lot about what the specifics would look like, it's small group of people who are at the center to do not agree with vast majority of climate scientists who say that climate changes happening that humans are a cause, a main cause, and that action needs to be taken as soon as possible to try to stall climate change how did you find out. >> s i was at an event where the president was speaking at the energy department headquarters and had a chat with bob murray whose be the c e o of murray energy one of the biggest companies he had a meeting with scott pruitt the same morning at

a lobby board meeting and that he had spoken to him about this issue and what he plans to do and also whether he plans to challenge a legal finding that is the basis for u.s. greenhouse gas regulations > > sreenivasan: put this in perspective. the other steps that scott pruitt taken when it comes to climate >> the budget proposal he has cut pretty much anything writted to climate funds his agencies does right now unclear whether congress will approve the numbers that he and the president are looking at. but essentially he's mixed anything that work on climate science within the epa, he's taken everything count from the website that he can. that is not a surprise. he's expressed that even that he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a main cause of climate change. > > sreenivasan: emily holding thanks for joining us.

>> sreenivasan: while there might be efforts to challenge climate science in washington, a new documentary called" chasing coral" reveals that there is no debating the changes occurring in the world's coral reefs. the film shows the destruction of the world's coral reefs in a way they've never been seen before. it shows the effects of rising sea temperatures caused by climate change." chasing coral" is now playing in select theaters across the country and will premiere on" netflix" july 14th. newshour weekend's saskia de melker spoke with the film's director about the challenge of showing the public the rarely seen, underwater effects of climate change. >> reporter: the documentary" chasing coral" tells the story of a three-year effort to capture the loss of the world's coral reefs through time-lapse, underwater photography. the film focuses on the process called coral bleaching. when ocean water becomes too warm, corals become stressed and expel the algae living in their tissue, causing the corals to turn completely white. coral bleaching is happening

more often as climate change raises the temperature of oceans, which have absorbed more than 90% of the heat created by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. one area the film focuses on is australia's great barrier reef, where the average ocean water temperature has warmed by about 1.2-degrees fahrenheit over the last century. jeff orlowski directed "chasing coral." >> coral reefs are the backbone for the entire ocean. they are the nursery for the ocean. about a quarter of all marine life in the ocean spends part of its lifecycle on a coral reef. and there are about a billion or so people that depend on coral reefs for fish for their food, for protein. >> reporter: a team of divers, photographers, and scientists logged 650 hours underwater in 30 countries to make "chasing coral." orlowski says the challenge was gathering multiple images a day -- in the same places for months -- to show changes to the reef in real time. >> from the beginning, we knew that if we could figure out a way to do time lapse of this

change happening in the ocean, that it would be the most powerful visual that we could create. there's something about creating evidence. when you look at a piece of ice calving or you look at a wildfire burning, because that's part of this normal cycle, it doesn't register in the same way as when you can document the change over time >> reporter: why did you specifically focus on the event of coral bleaching? >> the really valuable thing about documenting coral bleaching is that it is this straight, very direct visual indicator of how hot the oceans are getting. if the temperature of the water passes a certain threshold, the corals turn white. it's that simple. there's nothing natural about the cycle that's going on right now. in 2016, we lost 29% of the great barrier reef. so 29% of the great barrier reef died in a single year, because the water was hot.

>> reporter: the film shows how richard vevers, a former advertising executive turned ocean activist, was inspired to document coral bleaching, which can be reversed, but can also often lead corals to die >> i was truly shocked by what i saw. the reef was white as far as the eye could see. to be honest, i didn't have the knowledge to know how to process it. was this dead? was it alive? this is airport reef. so this is in december. and this is it now. >> reporter: is there something about coral bleaching though, that is a little bit counterintuitive, because it doesn't look like dying? >> there's a huge challenge around coral bleaching specifically, because when most people think about coral, they think about the beautiful, white sculpture sitting on their mantle. and it looks so pristine and clean and beautiful. it's not supposed to look like that when it's in the ocean. it has color, it has animal flesh living on it, it has

plants living inside of that. they look very, very different when they're healthy in the ocean than they do when they're sitting in somebody's home. >> reporter: how did you approach taking these underwater images? >> we had to align the cameras manually every day. you get the camera positioned in the right spot, panning in the right way. i actually had underwater lasers zip-tied to the camera system. literally the ground that you're putting the camera on is changing every day. so to get the camera in the same exact spot in this three- dimensional space was really, really challenging. we would let it roll for a couple minutes, then pick all the equipment up, go to another site and do it again. >> reporter: this isn't orlowski's first film documenting climate change. his 2012 film "chasing ice" chronicled the melting of the world's glaciers, and won an emmy award for outstanding nature programming. was it more difficult to chase ice and document what's happening in the glaciers or to chase the corals and document what's happening in the oceans?

>> working in the arctic is definitely colder, but not necessarily harder. there were different challenges. and in many ways, chasing coral was even more of a struggle for me personally. and more of a struggle to capture. glaciers right now are changing very consistently. the interesting thing that we realized with chasing coral was that the coral reefs- they can go from living to dead in two months. and if you're not there at the right time to capture that before and after, you just show up and it's a dead reef. so it was a challenge to be at the right place at the right time. >> reporter: this isn't a political film, but it's coming out in a time when climate change is highly politicized. what's that challenge in terms of making people aware of this but not getting sucked into that debate? >> i think it is massively unfortunate for human civilization that this issue has become politicized. and what i'm trying to work on and what our team is trying to work on is how do we de- politicize it. we need to get to a place where

everybody just acknowledges, okay, there are challenges, and we know there are solutions, and let's talk about what those solutions are. denying the problem just prolongs the problem. >> sreenivasan: scientists are predicting a 110-mile sheet of ice-- a chunk the size of the state of delaware-- will break off antarctica in the coming days or weeks. the cause is warming ocean waters, and the ice melt has implications for sea level rise well beyond the south pole region. the national geographic july issue cover story is called" antarctica is melting, and giant ice cracks are just the start joining me now from birmingham alabama to discuss this is robert kunzig, the senior environment editor for "national geographic."

dñ first of all chunk of ic the size of delaware seems almost impossible to, put our heads around, but that's actually a small piece when you think of the size of antartica >> it is and it's even just a small piece high of the lar son sea ice shelf, larson sea is a floating slab of ice size of vermont and new hampshire combined and what's happening is a rick that has been growing years now, this year really accelerated. as you said, it's about 15 miles wide, it -- and it's been growing from south to north. basically going to slice a big chunk of ice off the ice shelf and that chunk will be the size of delaware >> we have a picture of one of the crack, scientists have been looking and studying and trying to get at isn't of these cracks a long time. how deep does it go down and why

are they so concerned >> the crack, where larson sea meets the sea, it's about 600 feet thick. and most of that is under water. so there's an ice cliff of about 60 feet that towers above the waves. so the crack goes about, at least 600 feet. if this iceberg goes, the worry is that the whole ice shelf might collapse as other ice shelves on the antartica penninsula have already collapsed. ice shelves there and elsewhere are kind of are a sign of what's happening all over, that antartica is melting faster than scientists had expected. >> this isn't just about the fact that the ice is already in the water and it's just melting in a glass of water, we're actually adding ice cubes to that glass, which is what makes the sea level rise? >> well, yes. that's the perfect analogy. this ice, the larson sea ice shelf is floating like an ice cube and glass of water.

even if all of it collapses, that, itself, does not add to sea level. but the thing about ice shelves is that they function like corks, bottling up a much larger amount ice on the ground, on the land in this case behind them. and when -- that's the glaciers that are carrying ice from the interior of antartica towards the sea. the ice shelves are sort of the floating ends of the glaciers and so when that flow increases, more ice is falling into the sea and raising sea level in the article it talks about how scientists measure what's happening under water. what's happening underneath these sheets? how is there warmer water and what the the interaction of salt water do >> the big thing in recent years is that warmer ocean water, and when i say warm, warmer, i don't mean really warm. we're talking about four, five degrees above freezing.

that water is penetrating further up towards the coast of antartica under the ice shelf and it is undermining the ice shelves,s melting them and thinning them from below and weakening them. you have a large map that you have in the national geographic article that puts this in perspective and there's areas of kind of purple that are the areas that are kind of floating off. there's a couple of patches of red. what's really happening at an incredible rate. tell us about how fast it's happening and in say the pine glacier >> it's been an acceleration several times, all over antartica, the loss of ice from the floating ice shelves has increased by a factor of 12 in the past two decades. so where in the mid 90's they were losing six billion tons of ice, now 74. it's natural for these glaciers to float in the sea. but what's happening is the speed is increased.

robert kunzig thank you for joining us. >> thank you hari >> sreenivasan: there are, sadly, an estimated 39-thousand homeless military veterans in the united states, according to the federal department of housing and urban development. on this independence day weekend, we have a story about a nationwide effort to locate, identify, and bury the remains of homeless and often forgotten veterans. mitchell riley from arizona public media reports on this ongoing effort in the tucson area. >> reporter: on a bright saturday morning, organizers from the southern arizona missing in america project, along with military personnel, veterans groups, law enforcement officers, and private citizens, gather at the adair funeral home in northwest tucson.

pima county detective shaun pfund is the law enforcement liaison. >> this is about you. the missing in america project was a creation of a vet who believed that no veteran should go without honorable burial, and our intent is always to locate, identify, and recover veterans. >> reporter: over the past six years, 255 veterans have been laid to rest through this effort in southern arizona. statewide, the number is more than 430. nationwide, more than 3,100 vets have been identified and interred with military honors. >> it's a very emotional thing, because i acknowledge the person who has sacrificed so much for me. >> as we ride today, please have your angels spread their wings of protection and keep us all safe. >> reporter: the cremated remains of these 29 homeless or impoverished veterans are driven by motorcade 25 miles to be interred at a veterans'

cemetery in marana, arizona. the missing in america project finds remains by working with mortuaries, funeral homes, veterans groups, and state agencies. after determining the remains are of a veteran with an honorable discharge, the project cares for them in this way. >> i have come once again to honor and acknowledge the men and women who have honorably served our nation in a time of war and in a time of peace. >> reporter: some recovered veterans served as far back as world war ii. others as recently as iraq and afghanistan. pima county covers the cost of cremations. the adair funeral home donates the engraved urns.

( gunfire ) >> luckett, james h, u.s. army, vietnam. ( bell ) carter, john r., u.s. army, cold war. ( bell ) >> for they fell not upon the battlefields of this world but within our neighborhoods and city streets. unidentified, marginalized and forgotten, destined to fade away without a word, a tribute or recognition of their respective service to our nation. i say to everyone here within the sound of my voice and beyond, you are not forgotten. >> reporter: the next ceremony for the southern arizona missing in america project is scheduled for october. organizers have already confirmed the remains of 12 more veterans to be honored.

>> sreenivasan: and now, to viewers like you. your chance to comment on stories you've seen online and on our broadcast. two weeks ago, we brought you a story from alabama, where some residents are facing challenges finding and paying for health insurance. alabama is one of the five states in the country that only have one insurance provider remaining under the affordable care act. a working mom added it up: >> sreenivasan: nancy pointed out another concern.

>> sreenivasan: and there was this from rajni mehta. >> sreenivasan: finally, chris johnson offered this suggestion. >> sreenivasan: as always we welcome your comments. you can connect with us at pbs.org/newshour, on our facebook page, or on twitter @newshour. see how states are responding to requests for voter data from president trump's commission. visit pbs.org/newshour.

>> sreenivasan: tomorrow in tehran, france and iran sign iran's biggest energy deal since last year's lifting of sanctions over iran's nuclear program. french oil giant "total" is investing five-billion-dollars over 20 years to develop a natural gas field in the persian gulf in partnership with china's national petroleum corporation and iran. and finally, the united states has lifted its ban on laptops in passenger cabins on etihad airways flights from abu dhabi to the u.s., saying the airline has met tighter security requirements. the laptop ban remains in effect for eight other airlines operating in the middle east and africa. that's all for this edition of" pbs newshour weekend." thanks for watching. i'm hari sreenivasan. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. the anderson family fund. rosalind p. walter, in memory of abby m. o'neill. barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

announcer: coming up, a groundbreaking investigation is changing everything we thought we knew about tutankhamun. woman: 9 years old, and he is sitting on one of the greatest thrones in the ancient world. tut was a warrior. these are battles that he was involved in. announcer: the most advanced scientific tests uncover how the young pharaoh died. he fell down from the chariot. man: the heart was badly crushed. they couldn't even use that as part of his passage to the afterlife. announcer: a new analysis of his burial reveals what happened to tut after he died. woman: so there are just so many things wrong in terms of royal mummification. woman: the face was cut off and replaced with the face of tutankhamun. man: this is definitely an explanation for the charring on the mummy. announcer: and a surprising theory explains the survival of tut's tomb. woman: every royal tomb had been robbed. tut's still remained relatively untouched. announcer: "ultimate tut" on "secrets of the dead." woman: this is the enduring mystery of