captioning sponsored by et >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, august 25, pope francis arrives in ireland with strong words about the church coverps of child abuse, but no newction. cooperation on the border-- how mexico and the u.s. manage the rio grande's water supply in a time of climate ange. and the scientific search for the ocean's memories. next on "pbs newshour weekend." >> pbs newshour weekend is ma possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim iii. the cheryl and philip milstein dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelo the j.p.b. foundation.

rosalind p. walter. barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided sty mutual of america-- designing ized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirementdiompany. onal support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by ntributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thanyou. from the tisch wnet studios att lincoln in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thank you for joining us. pope francis visited ireland today, the first papal visit to untry in almost 40 years he marked his first visit by acknowledging that church authorities failed in responding to rampant child abuse worldwide. >> the failure of bishops, >> ( translated ): the failure of bisps, religious superiors, priests and others, to adequately address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the catholic

community. i myself share these sentiments. >> sreenivasan: the pope did not offer any new measures on sanctioning church leaders who cover up abuse. ireland's prime minister leo varadkar urged the pope to take action and use his "office and influence" to make sure clergy accused of sex abuse are brought to justice. ireland has been hit particularly hard by revelations of abuse after a series of government inquiries in recentye s. francis is in dublin for the world meeting of families, held once every three years, and more than 37,000 people have signed. up to atte joining us now via skype from dablin is freelance correspondent amerguson. e amanda we're used to the pope being greeted li rock star, people lining the streets of whatever streets he visit. that was not the case in dublin. why? >> well, it's not necessarily it wasn't the case. there just maybe wasn't the same crowds thpope would have drawn in 1979 when his predecessor visited. certainly there were large numbers of people ls ing the

stren dublin, but also there was a large number of protestsers as well, survivors of abuse, who wanted to make their point of abuse scandals. >> sreenivasan: how much hasst the receipt abuse scandal made the news in ireland? and put that in context of what and has been through wi its own abuse scandal decades ago. inly givenll, cert that the pope was visiting cub dublin today, and tomorrow as een intenseocus has b from international media. there are 1200 journalists from ll of theies with a eyes every move that the pope is making, and every sort of issue that's been raised around the catholic church, certainly what happened in nnsylvania and has been high on the agenda. and i think that, you know, given that this is the first visit ireland since all ofken the abuse scandals have emerged, and it's certainly been something that everybody is talking about. it's a long history of sexual

abuse, phyansical abuse, ther, and abuse of people linkthe catholic church, including forced adomses, all of those issues were l at today and juteinized by the media, address by leo vardakar, and perhapsso much by the pope, not to the satisfaction of survivors and victims anyway. >> sreenivasan: what about the rvivors and victims of ireland's own scandals? how do they feel about it? what are their protests today? >> yes well, you know, outside dublin castle, where the pope gave his address earlier, and members from the organization, survivor victims of institutional abuse held a demonstration whe they held up banners and they had a number of little pairs of baby shoes scattered across the floor to make a point, da a number of other sort of individual protesters were highlighting child abuse andth banners they were using. but, you know, alongside that there was, obviously, people, you know, there to support the

pope, people with vatican flags, people, you know, buup the sort of different pope francis amerchandise and giving h welcome. this was a painting on the roads, you know, welcoming the pope to ireland, both english and irish. certainly, he remarked whenever he was at the president's residence, that he had received a very warm welcome. but, obviously, there's been some sort of intense criticism iv well. >> srean: tell me a little bit about what's been happening in ireland in the recent past. we've seen these stories about how the political power of kind of the more liberal class or haascending. yoe taken on topics like abortion and divorce and even gay marriage. and here he is this morning, meeting with the leader of the country who is openly gay. >> y, so this is true. the ireland of 2018 is a very different place to the ireland of 1979. you know, chrch and state are very much still linked within

ireland, but the sort of influence on the political catholic churche used to have just isn't there to the same extent anymore. we've had two referendums recently where ireland voted for same-sex marriage. it also voord for tion law reform to give women reproductive rights, which are, obviously, against the teachings of the catholic church. and while, you know, many of t the-- and the most recent referendum around abortion, where many very devod catholics wove voted no on the referendum, there are people that go to exphass consider themselves catholic that would have voted, you know, for that i think it's veryh ireland's face forward into the world as a very progressive place, and that will only be set to continue, i think. >sreenivasan: all right, amanda ferguson joining us via skype from dublin today. thanks so much. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: another war of words between the united states

and china, this time over besident trump's decision to call off a meetiween secretary of state mike pompeo and north korean officials. citing a lk of progress in nuclear disarmament talks, president trump tweeted some responsibity to the chinese, saying, "i do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were." a chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said today that china is "seriously concerned" atover the president's accn. a federal district judge in washington struck down key provisio in three executive orders president trump signed this spring which woead have made ier to fire federal workers. under the president's ders under-performing employees would have less time to show improvement before bng fired. they also reduced the time federal employees in union positions could spend on union business during work hours. the administration had no comment on today's ruling. thousands of rohingya refugees protested in bangladesh day, marking the one year anniversary of violence in myanmar thatdr e them from their homes. hundreds of thousands of the

muslim rohingya now live in what is one the world's largest refugee camps. marchers prayed to return to their homes in myanmar andde nded justice for the dead.at a series of cks last year on police stations by rohingya militants led to a brutal e ackdown against the muslim minority group by anmar military. the democratic national committee voted today to sharply limit the influence of superdelegates at the 2020 presidential convention. going forward, the elect officials, party leaders and donors known as"pe elegates," will vote only in a contested nomination process, not during the first ballot. the role of superdelegates became controversial during the 2016 democratic primies. that year, many of the superdelegates backed hillary clinton early in the convention. supporters of senator bernie sanders considered the influence s the party establishment unfair advantage and a symbol of a rigged process. after toy's vote at the d.n.c.'s summer meeting in chicago, senator sanders called the decision "an important step forward."

more than 500 migrant children are still separated from their parents.e read moron our website, pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: as the climate warms, sea levels rise and pollution increases, scientists are racing to learn more about o the healthe world's oceans. in one california lab, there is now a long-term study derway to try to predict the future of the oceans by delving into their past.ee newshournd's ivette feliciano has our report. her story is part of our ongoing series "peril and promise: thech lenge of climate change. >> reporter: at northernte california's my bay aquarium, scientists are conducting an experiment in time travel. >> we put it in one of those little vials and send it off.r: >> reporhey're part of what's known as the ocean memory lab. >> so we can sort of go back in time from zero to the nd here. is that's so cool. >> reporter: itson: to paint a picture of what the ocean looked like 200 years ago.

>> imagine opening up a book at the last chapter and trying to understand what e story's about. we're kind of doing that right now with the ocean. >> reporter: science director kyle van houtan heads the project. >> we've studied the land. we live on land. and we've studied the land for centuries. we know quite a bit about the dynamics of how things work in forests and deserts and grasslands. we know a bit less abo the ocean. >> reporter: studies on the ocean's environmental health only go back a few deces, so scientists often can't say what marine life was like before pollutants-including plastics and chemicals-- were introduced to the water. >> we really wanna generate an informed baseline for what a healthy ocean is. to do that, we need more data than we have. d to-- we have to get creative. >> reporter: to that end, the year-old ocean memory lab draws on specimens collected by naturalists and explorers over the last two centuries. using modern techniques, lab

ientists can analyze tho specimens and compare them with samps collected today. >> the seabirds and the turtles and the whales, all these things that we study, they're essentially drones taking information about their ecosystem experiencen ut in the ocd recording it in their feathers, in their bones, in their blubber, various parts of theibody, and storing that away. so, by using this approach and using animals as drones to measure the environment, we canc ally go back in museum archives and records and repositories and go back muc further than if we starty. measuring to >> reporter: seabirds-- gulls, cormorants, and albatros- provide the ocean memory lab with a particularly valuable data set. >> seabirds are famous for nesting on lan of course, but flying thousands of kilometers out into the ocean, sometimes spending more than 95% of their life on the wing, in flight. and these air-- these animals search huge areas of the ocean for fish and squids, and then

will come back to eir colonies to breed. >> reporter: to get data on the octsn from sea birds, scient cut small fragments from their feathers and then grind them into fine powder. they then send the samples to a lab for protein analysis. >> they're recording all sorts of information aut their food in their feathers. and so we recently did an analysis looking at 130 years of seabird feathers and recreating thets from those feathers, from the ratio of amino acids and proteins in those feathers. >> reporter: with this technique, the ocean memory lab has been able to map out thein changeiet for several seabird species over time. >> what we learned was that, over the past 130 years, these birdhave gradually been shifting their place in the food web, andhey've been eating more squid and less fish, about twice much squid than they were eating in the late 1800s. from our analysis, that's due to climate change and due tthe fisheries activity, that humans have been taking a lot of fish

out of the ocean. >> reporter: but it's not just animal life that provides clues to t ocean's history. algae samples have been collected the hopkins marine station-- right next door to the aquarium-- for 125 years. >> this is from 1916. it's amazing that they'vbeen preserved, so-- but what we hope to do is to recreate what the ocean was like just here, down the coast, in 16 through the experience of that-- of that specimen. >> reporter: scientists can analyze the specimen and extract information on the state of the ocean from the time it was preserved. >> so, we can get thehe temperature ofcean, we can get pollutants in the ocean, we can get the nutrient levels. what we hope to do is-- is to kind of repeat some of these things today, but then,es pricy, go back in time to these specimens. >> reporter: other specimens ca provide b with centuries'

worth of data.ym >> this is thenic bone, >> reporter: this is the ear bone of a bowhead whale, which can live to be over 200 years old. out the ocean imroughout theon 's lifetime. >> yeah, so this animal could have been several hundred isars old and ample is from the ourly 1950s. this animal, uh, have been swimming around in the ocean before the declaration of independence was written.so that's quite amazing. otd all of the information here, it'sust a snapshot of the recent life of that animal, it's the entire life. it's kind of like a black box for an airplane, you know, it records all of the dat happened in that whale's lifetime. >> reporter: van houtan says that furthering our understanding of the ocean's history isn't just important for posterity, it's also vital to understanding how changes in the ocean's makeup affect people now. >> the ocean is the beating heart of the climate system. and we need to understand that, and we need to explain that and

to educate the world about that. we want them to understand the importance of the ocean, not just for fish and things that swim in the ocean, but the impo them.of the ocean for >> sreenivasan: the rio grande river is both a border, and an important source of water for the united states and mexico. millions of people depend on the river for drinking water and agriculture. as the population in the region grows, and climate change brings longer-lasting droughtre are some predictions of a s regional watrtage. in a nine-part series called "shallow waters" "quartz" and the "texas observer" investigated the potential water scarcity on both sides of the boer. recently i spoke with zoe schlanger, an environmental reporter at "quartz," about the challenges facing the rio grande. zoe schlanger, thanks r joining us. you take a long look over a series of stories about what's happening on the border. our boer with mexico is one

that is predominantly a river for most of it and the river doesn't actually care who's on which side, and a rives a natural body that will adjust with floodplains and so rth. so, what are some of the consequences of saying we want to put up a wall or at least firm that wall up? what happens ecologically on both sides of that wall? >> absolutely. i think most americans not in the region don't quite realize that where the wall will be placed is along a river that both sides depend on. six million people drink from it. both in the u.s. and mexico. and if you put a wall up against the river or evesometimes a mile away you have a fluctuating river body, exactly as you said, ckd we've already seen a few years n 2014, and the section of a border wall already put up-- nogales, sonora and nogales, arizona that border area, it caused a flood because walls act like dams. and so, when the rivers and there's massive rainfall during a monsoon season the

debris just piles up and water can't pass. and so, in that instance two people died in those floodwomers. so, it'shing that we have to think about. >> sreenivasan: these are huge floodplains on either side where psople are actually dependent on this to grow croto drink water as you said. so, is there cooperation between the two countries to kind of say, "okay, there's the politics of it, but there's also justhe fact that we need this water on both sides to survive?" >> absolutely. there's kind of a second set of politics happening along the border as it pertains specifically to water that most people don't know about, but the state department has an employee who negotiates directly with mexico and they meet and they talk all the time. i've met both the mexican commissioner and the u.s. commissioner and seen them eat lunch together. it's a very collegial relationship because it has to be. because we rely on mexico and the u.s. for drinking water in that area and in mexico they rely on us for a differenthe portion ofiver for drinking water. so they don't really have an option not to talk to each other and maintain a friendly environment despite changes in administration or anything else going on.

>> sreenivasan: let's talk in a longer time scale, what's happening to the river andat happening to the sort of water table that's underneath it? is there greater stress on itno than there was 30, 40 years ago? >> yeah, there really is. it happens to st one of the t growing regions in the u.s. and the u.s. side. and the population is going up even faster on the mexican side. you have a region that's set to uble in population by 2060 and a river that the federal government acknowledges will not be able to meet demand by that same year, by 2060. we're looking at way less snowfa, where the river is fed from snowfall in the colorado mountains and the monsoon rains are changing on the mexican side. so basically you have increased population, more people needing to drink water and way diminished water resources. >> sreenivasan: and you have a huge chunk of this that actuallh goes thr desert. >> there are parts of the river that completely dry out in the dry season and you have droughts that are increing. and scientists say this is due to climate change and due to more adity and less rainfall.

so, with droughts going up and population increasing it's a pretty tough spot. >> sreenivasan: but you have also a story on el paso which i didn't know about was actually relatively speaking a leader on trying to conserve the amount of water and they've been doing this for decades. >> yeah. el paso an incredible case study in what you have to do to really address the fact that you live in a desert at a time of increasing aridity, their-- ed archuleta, their water commissioner decided about 30 years ago to start drastically cutting water per person and sucating children. he would go into tools and tell them about how they really live in a desert. they have to act like desert animals. when there's less water, you ust less. and so now they're at this point akere they're doing something really groundbg for the u.s. and for the whole world, toally, where they're planning reat wastewater. they're acknowledging their river that they depend on and , that mexico depends on t going to be gone soon. and so now they're going to t treating wastewater an putting it through the pipes back to their population. avd because el paso people been taught for decades now that

they live in a dry place and thed to respect that, they're open t in a way that i think many other cities in the u.s. wouldn't fathom the idea of drinking their own waste water, this kind of closed loop water cycle. >> sreenivan: how did they figure out a way to think long term? because oftentimes, especially politicians can't see past the next two years election cycle or re-election cycle. >> ed archuleta had so much to do with this. he offered subsidies to people who would rip up their lawns. in the 1980s in el paso, lawns were the thing. everyone had really lavish gardens, things like that. and he cut that out. he said, "i'll pay you a dollar per cubic foot of lawn that you rip out and help you put in more desert plants or rocks," or things like that. and so now you go to el paso you don't see those lawns anymore. it's just been this kind of slow reeducating people on what they need to do to make that city survive. >> sreenivasan: and that's beme a model for other dry cities around the country and possibly around the world as well. this was series in conjunction with the "texas observer." as you went through this, whate

was ha" moment for you in the reporting? >> yes, so navee i at the "texas observer" had been talking to politicians and farmers and so many different people who had stakein this rive and i think as a reporter based in new york, it was incredible fome to realize how border politics on the ground are so different from what weear in the news when both sides know that they need each other for this resrce. they can't-- no one can live without water. no one can farm without water. there's so much more collaboration than you'd think of. so really right now it soundsli everyone's kind of holding and waiting to see what happens on the national level with the trump administration ailto what that- how that will affect things on the ground for them. t on the whole, there's much more collaboration than people think about. i think what really t home with that for me is the fact that in nogales, arizona the's a pipe that goes right through the border wall to nogales,

sonora in mexico to feed a hotel and some other businesses ter. so, that's been there since when, i mean, the water commissioner there said the border back then was like, barely a fence. maybe it wasn't even there at all when they started this alcollaboration, this info water sharing practice. and they still do it. there's still-- we went down and pew it and there's just a straight through the wall carrying water. >> sreenivasan: all ght. the series is called "shallow titers," you can find it online. it's a joint rep project between "quartz" and the "texas observer." thanks so much for joining us, zoe schlanger. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: tomorrow on "pbs newshour weekend," the u.s. open marks its 50thnniversary on monday, and we look at how men's tennis is expanding programs to atcruit more people of color. >> you can tell ne kid who has never picked up a racket before, but they're happy to have a racket in their hand and they're eager to learn. i think that's when yoly see that potential in that kid because they're like, "i can do

this. i can focus. i love it." >> sreenivasan: that's all for this edition of "pbs newshour weekend." i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching. have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media accessroup at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein sue and edgar wachenheim iii. the cheryl and philip milstein family. oy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.p.b. foundation. rosalind p. walter. 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 thank you.wers like you.sby be more. pbs.

♪ everythili for me has a t connection. ♪ roi used to get in lots ofle for daydreaming, and i found that daydreaming is an excellent way to see different parts of your brain working. i always thought there was some magicipe. to creating art, in fact it's not, it's the most simple thing. working outside is very importanto me. the canvas of gardens is