The ferocity of recent wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range has been alarming as drought, infestation and the effects of climate change conspire to threaten the survival of some of the West Coast’s most wild forestland. Sixty six million trees are already dead and it could be 100 million by the end of this year. And it’s not just the trees that will suffer. FSRN’s Vic Bedoian takes a closer look why.
As state-mandated water restrictions were projected to be lifted on Aug. 1, local water districts have begun to take steps establishing new, self-certified conservation marks, but the state has yet to confirm the districts’ goals.
Cal Water Marysville, which previously had a 24 percent reduction mandated by the state, set its new water conservation target at 10 percent. “It’s a target that is meant to reinforce conservation,” said Lee Seidel, district manager for Cal Water Marysville.
A group of commercial fishermen won a potentially significant court ruling in the seemingly endless battle over California’s water supply and the volumes of water pumped south through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
A federal appeals court last week ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which delivers water from the Delta via the federal Central Valley Project, violated federal environmental law by renewing a series of two-year delivery contracts for south-of-Delta agricultural customers. The court said the bureau should have given “full and meaningful consideration” to the idea of reducing the amount of water available for delivery in the contracts.
The deadly wildfire raging north of Big Sur continued to grow in size on Sunday and has now burned 40,000 acres and destroyed nearly 70 structures.
About 5,300 firefighters are battling the Soberanes fire, which is now just 18% contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Since it began July 22, the fire has also claimed the life of a bulldozer operator. Pushed by strong southerly winds, the blaze has shifted away from coastal homes and is moving southeast into the heart of the Los Padres National Forest, said Maria Lara, spokeswoman for Cal Fire.
Lake Tahoe is overheated, underfilled and both its future and renowned crystal blue waters are murkier than normal.
The crown jewel of the Sierras and largest alpine lake in North America had a rough year in 2015, according to the new “State of the Lake” report from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, which finds the lake’s temperature is rising at its fastest rate ever.
It’s been said that Lake Tahoe is a complex body that man may never understand. That is true; however, UC Davis and Geoff Schladow, the director of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center housed at Sierra Nevada College, are doing their best to prove that statement wrong—well, maybe, just a little bit wrong.
It seems that when experts think they’ve finally arrived at data that absolutely cannot be questioned, that same data is put into conflict with the patterns of human action and natural forces.
A little more than a year ago, California’s Gov. Jerry Brown ordered mandatory water reductions of 25 percent throughout the state. And in some areas, citizens were ordered to reduce consumption by 35 percent. This was all in response to more than four years of severe drought.
However, in June 2016, those mandatory reductions were lifted, mainly because the state was blessed with considerable rainfall the previous winter. As a result, local water agencies were given the authority to determine on their own whether mandatory water reductions were still necessary and, if so, what the amounts should be.
Several weeks ago, my daughters “graduated” from the third grade. The final day of the school year was an unusually warm June day, and after pizza and games, their teacher said goodbye for the summer after extracting a solemn promise – to read “at least 10 books” during their time away.
Ten chapter books in 10 weeks, I reminded them on our drive home – a healthy dose, remembering the pile at my bedside. Easy, they promised, no problem.
In the southern reaches of Egypt, the city of Aswan is one of the hottest and sunniest in the world. Temperatures reach 41C in the summer and less than a millimetre of rain falls each year. Some years it doesn’t rain at all.
Aswan may be one of the world’s least rainy places, but it’s not even close to being the most water-stressed city. It nestles on the east bank of the Nile, close to the Aswan High Dam and the vast Lake Nasser, one of the largest manmade lakes in the world. With a capacity of 132 cubic km, the dam serves the irrigations needs not just of Aswan, but Egypt and neighbouring Sudan as well.
It’s being called a marine heat wave. The combination of the strongest El Niño in recent history and the warm water anomaly known as the Blob generated the greatest amount of warm ocean water that has ever been recorded, possibly affecting marine life up and down the West Coast. New research has now linked the two phenomena, with each believed to be alternately affecting the other through the atmosphere and the ocean. El Niño is the warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean and it can affect wind, temperature and precipitation patterns around the globe.
