As the world’s biggest climate meeting continues in Poland this week, the growing threats from climate change―and the lack of large-scale action to match the risks―have been much in the news. Global, national, and statewide assessments all point to severe consequences if greenhouse gas emissions are not greatly reduced. Evidence is growing that climate change is a “threat multiplier,” increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters worldwide and here in California.
Evelyn Valdez-Ward is a doctoral student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine where her research focuses on the effects of climate change and drought on plants and soils.
Your research is on water transport in plants and how that might be shifting with climate change. Can you tell us a little more about what you are studying?
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.
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?
“A recent study conducted by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Biogeosciences found that a combination of climate and human activities (diversion and reservoirs) controls the movement of carbon in two large western river basins, the Colorado and the Missouri Rivers.”
“The Obama administration’s announcement Monday of sweeping new rules aimed at curbing global warming emissions from power plants could boost profits at Silicon Valley companies that make solar panels, energy efficiency software and other clean technology.”
