You are now in California and the U.S. category.

I got up at 5:15 a.m. on Saturday morning with the idea of driving 100 miles to watch the sun rise over the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. I wanted to show my 84-year-old mom the beauty of one of California’s best-kept secrets. Maybe see some of the Delta’s magnificent sandhill cranes capable of flying up to 400 miles in a single day. But my real goal was to get a clearer perspective on the merit of building a single, 35-mile tunnel to provide a more reliable supply of water for generations of thirsty Californians.

The current three- to seven-day forecasts Americans have come to rely on for planning everything from weekend picnics to hurricane evacuations rely heavily on constant updates from satellites that orbit Earth’s poles measuring temperature, moisture and a host of other variables that define the planet’s ever-changing weather. Early Tuesday, NASA plans to launch the first of four state-of-the-art polar orbiters for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a $1.6 billion weather satellite that will monitor the entire planet as it rotates below, feeding computer models the data they need to make increasingly accurate predictions.

One of the nation’s most successful partnerships between farm and urban water agencies has lately run into serious turbulence, potentially threatening an important Colorado River water-sharing deal. Twelve years ago, the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe, California, signed an agreement with the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. It allowed the latter to pay Palo Verde farmers to fallow up to 35 percent of their acreage in times of water scarcity, and take delivery of the unused irrigation water, via canal, to serve its urban customers in the Los Angeles area, some 200 miles away.

California could one day be uninhabitable. Fire. Heat. Floods. Infestation. Disease. Suffering. Scientists have for years warned about the ravaging consequences of a warming planet. Decamping for the 23rd session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, California academics and political leaders were mulling how to better deploy the distressing projections to give unwary citizens a better understanding of what’s at stake and compel them to see the wisdom of embracing sustainability.