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.
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.
From the Environmental Defense Fund EDF Voices: People on the
Planet blog, in a post by Rebecca Shaw:
Nobody escapes climate change, especially not farmers. The
report released this week by a group of prominent and politically
diverse business leaders and public officials stood out, in part,
because of the alarming losses it forecasts for America’s
agricultural industry.
Climate change is likely to exact enormous costs on U.S. regional
economies in the form of lost property, reduced industrial output
and more deaths, according to a report backed by a trio of men
with vast business experience.
From the Los Angeles Times, in a commentary by Karin Klein:
The Arctic is ground zero for climate change research because the
effects of warming were seen first this far north, and continue
to be experienced here most dramatically.
Attendees of the U.S. Conference of Mayors will vote Monday on a
resolution that encourages cities to use natural solutions to
“protect freshwater supplies, defend the nation’s coastlines,
maintain a healthy tree cover and protect air quality,” sometimes
by partnering with nonprofit organizations.
San Francisco’s Ocean Beach may be one long stretch of sand, but
no fewer than six government bureaucracies are tasked with
keeping it and the neighboring Great Highway from washing away as
winter storms and rising seas batter them.
While Congress is still mired in climate-change denial, insurance
companies have no doubt about climate change. For them, the only
question is: Who pays for its effects?
“When California launched its landmark global warming law in the
final years of the George W. Bush administration, it was a risky
act of defiance from a state frustrated by federal inaction on
climate change.”
“For the past three decades, University of Miami geology
professor Harold Wanless has tracked the tides as they crept
higher, watched oysters head for drier ground and repeatedly
warned that the ocean is swelling in ways that could one day put
coastal cities like Miami under water.”
“For 1,100 miles, the California coast threads like a ribbon past
one of the most varied landscapes in the United States —
farmland, airports, beach fronts, high-tech startups, forest and
cargo ships with a 50-foot draft chugging past on the way to the
Port of Oakland. But the shoreline and the bay are changing
and could change even more if predictions of climbing sea levels
— 16 inches by midcentury — and flooding turn into reality.”
From The Modesto Bee, in a commentary by Neil Hudson:
“Climate change seems to be moving faster than our government can
respond. … However, at the local level, our county is
responding to the need to monitor and preserve our surface and
underground water resources so we have a sustainable supply for
the future.”
“Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday called California ‘the epicenter of
climate change,’ and he urged other states to work with him to
halt the rising temperatures that threaten the planet’s future.
“Brown’s comments came during a speech to a University of
California agricultural economics group.”
