California was caught flat-footed by the climate-driven challenges it has faced last week: extreme temperatures, unseasonable lightning strikes, diminishing water supplies and red flag fire conditions. As a result, CalFire was short on firefighters to battle the blazes and the electric utilities had too little power to serve all of their customers at the same time.
Urgent action on water security is essential to better prepare societies for future global health crises, say experts at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and Northwestern University in the U.S.
Millions of people rely on real estate websites when they’re hoping to buy or rent a home. Major sites such as Zillow, Redfin, Trulia and Realtor.com feature kitchens, bathrooms, mortgage estimates and even school ratings. But those sites don’t show buyers whether the house is likely to flood while they’re living there. Now, Realtor.com has become the first site to disclose information about a home’s flood risk and how climate change could increase that risk in the coming decades, potentially signaling a major shift in consumers’ access to information about climate threats.
The Colorado River millennial mega-drought continues, despite robust snowpack last winter. Above-average temperatures in spring resulted in a paltry 57% runoff, nowhere near enough water to refill the reservoirs that remain half-empty. Based on these conditions, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently determined that 2021 will be a “tier zero” year under the Lower Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plan, with reduced water deliveries for Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.
When blackouts rolled across California on August 14 and 15, briefly cutting off power to several hundred thousand households and their air conditioners, fridges, and medical devices during a pandemic and a record-breaking heat wave, some critics blamed the state’s heavy reliance on solar and wind energy. As the state pursues its ambitious renewable energy goals, they asked, will electric power become unreliable?
An international team of researchers has found that dam building in the 20th century offset some of the factors that would have led to a higher rise in sea levels. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their study of the factors that have led to a rise in global sea levels and what they learned.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently released his Water Resilience Plan, a platform of 142 proposals gathered from state agencies to manage and improve California’s water future.
The big ticket items are two infrastructure projects: the Delta conveyance tunnel and Sites Reservoir, alongside the Sacramento River.
Public health officials are urging boaters, swimmers and recreational water users to be on the lookout for hazardous blue-green algae blooms as warm temperatures persist.
San Joaquin County Environmental Health Department officials said in a news release Monday that staff have posted advisory signs at local marinas warning people to stay out of the water where toxic algae is present.
On a cool February morning, around 60 people gathered in the Sierra Nevada foothills to take part in a ceremony that, for many decades, was banned.
Men and women from Native American tribes in Northern California stood in a circle, alongside university students and locals from around the town of Mariposa. Several wore bright yellow shirts made of flame-resistant fabric. For the next two days, the group would be carefully lighting fires in the surrounding hills.
A bill that would have provided the necessary funds to fix the sagging Friant-Kern Canal was killed by the state legislature on Thursday.
State Sen. Melissa Hurtado introduced SB 559 to the legislature in February 2019, but the Assembly Appropriations Committee stuck it in the suspense file since August of last year, delaying its consideration to the 2020 legislative session.
