The words blasted to cellphones around Salem, Oregon were ominous: “Civil emergency. prepare for action.” Within half an hour, a second official alert clarified the subject wasn’t impending violence, but toxins from an algae bloom, detected in the city’s water supply.
California’s fabled beaches are shrinking, with waves and tides eventually expected to slosh over thousands of coastal homes and businesses. That’s the entirely plausible prediction from scientists studying climate change and rising ocean levels linked to hotter temperatures.
UC San Diego scholar who influenced Pope Francis on climate change and a Salk Institute biologist who helps develop cancer drugs will each share the $1.3 million that comes with winning a Tang Prize, one of the newest and priciest awards in science. Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the university’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography was chosen for his decades of insights about how humans influence the world’s climate, sometimes in severe and deadly ways.
Amid accelerating sea level rise from climate change, Marin County has the highest number of households in California vulnerable to coastal flooding, according to a report released Monday. In the worst case scenario, there are a possible 4,377 Marin homes at risk of being inundated with chronic flooding by 2045, the Union of Concerned Scientists reported.
David Inouye is an accidental climate scientist. More than 40 years ago, the University of Maryland biologist started studying when wildflowers, birds, bees and butterflies first appeared each spring on this mountain.
Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, got the Coyote Valley Dam project — in one 13-word sentence — on a list of feasibility studies for some 30 Corps projects from Alabama to Alaska to be expedited by the Secretary of the Army. Tucked into the 122-page Water Resources Development Act of 2018, the list was approved two weeks ago on a lopsided 408-2 vote in the House and was forwarded to the Senate.
We were warned. On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.”
That oceanfront property in Stinson Beach you’ve dreamed about may not be so perfect after all. A report published Monday finds that nearly 4,400 homes in Marin County might not make it beyond a 30-year mortgage because of encroaching seawater.
New York City’s attempt to hold five of the world’s biggest oil companies responsible for damage from global warming didn’t seem to impress a judge during oral arguments Wednesday to determine if a lawsuit can proceed. … The January lawsuit came after similar litigation was filed by the cities of San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Cruz in California.
El Niño was long considered a reliable tool for predicting future precipitation in the southwestern United States, but its forecasting power has diminished in recent cycles, possibly due to global climate change. In a study published today in Nature Communications, scientists and engineers at the University of California, Irvine demonstrate a new method for projecting wet or dry weather in the winter ahead.
Anthem follows the model of the low-density, family-friendly suburbs that have sprouted around Phoenix since the 1950s to accommodate the region’s surging population. But further rapid expansion could prove challenging at a time when water supplies are dwindling, as warming temperatures increasingly affect the western United States, scientists warn.
The frantic phone calls to the Community Water Center began in the summer of 2014. In the 7,000-strong unincorporated community of East Porterville, nestled against California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, homeowners’ wells were failing amid a historic drought.
Satellite data and images are provocative, even disturbing. They confront us with a global view that can be at once breathtaking, like a piece of art, and yet, in this era of rapidly changing climate, they paint a picture of the demise of the environment.
Researchers at Climate Central have put together a handy tool which lets you see just how bad summers will get by 2100, if global warming predictions are accurate and nothing is done to stop the upward trend.
But now comes the harder part for many Californians: In 2015, AB 32 will begin to cover companies that produce transportation fuels, including gasoline. That means oil companies will begin paying for the greenhouse gases their products emit, a cost the oil companies say they will pass on to consumers.
From the San Bernardino County Sun, in a commentary by Thomas Elias:
California ranchers are now among the first interest groups to realize that like it or not, global warming can no longer be denied with any semblance of accuracy. For very gradually, ranchers are seeing the grasslands they depend upon to feed their cattle begin to shrink and convert naturally to shrub land.
Acting Commissioner Lowell Pimley provides the second in a series of podcasts. In this question and answer session he discusses climate change and drought.
From the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW):
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is hosting its third speaker series with a presentation on the effects of climate change on salmon and steelhead trout in the American River. The event will be held at the Nimbus Hatchery Visitor Center in Rancho Cordova on July 17 at 7 p.m.
California’s evolving cap-and-trade market may soon have a new player: rice farmers. …
The program, called the Rice Cultivation Projects Compliance Offset Protocol, is slated to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2015, and run for a 10-year period.
NASA’s new spacecraft to sniff carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere reached orbit on Wednesday after launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
