After an extended weekend of wildfires, part of an early fire season that has already seen a record 2 million acres burned and Death Valley-like temperatures smothering the San Fernando Valley, Californians would be right to wonder whether we are living in a hellscape. We are not, it’s safe to say. But we are living in the future that climate scientists have been trying to warn us about for years now.
In the next five years, the world has nearly a 1-in-4 chance of experiencing a year that’s hot enough to put the global temperature at 2.7 degrees (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial times, according to a new science update released Wednesday by the U.N., World Meteorological Organization and other global science groups.
A bill passed by the state Legislature and headed to the governor’s desk for his signature will strengthen and expand a marine fish hatchery program in Carlsbad, the only one of its kind on the West Coast.
The new legislation by Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner Horvath will update the program and allow it to breed more of the native California species that have been depleted by commercial and recreational fishing over the years.
On August 14, 2018, Joshua Novacheck, a 30-year-old research engineer for the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was presenting the most important study of his nascent career. He couldn’t have known it yet, but things were about to go very wrong.
New wildfires ravaged bone-dry California during a scorching Labor Day weekend that saw a dramatic airlift of more than 200 people trapped by flames and ended with the state’s largest utility turning off power to 172,000 customers to try to prevent its power lines and other equipment from sparking more fires.
Last month as a heat wave slammed California, state regulators sent an email to a group of energy executives pleading for help. “Please consider this an urgent inquiry on behalf of the state,” the message said.
Monday at midnight marked the deadline for California lawmakers to pass bills out of the Legislature. But in a session replete with the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice and wildfires, numerous bills were left to die on the cutting room floor.
Among them was the majority of the environmental agenda in what some legislators, environmentalists and public health advocates labeled a disappointment.
From Yemen to India, and parts of Central America to the African Sahel, about a quarter of the world’s people face extreme water shortages that are fueling conflict, social unrest and migration, water experts said on Wednesday.
With the world’s population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall, including severe droughts, competition for scarcer water is growing, they said, with serious consequences.
San Diego water managers are working with local researchers to understand how atmospheric rivers bring water to the region.
The moisture-laden storm systems bring rain to Southern California, but too much rain can be damaging.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers are working to better understand atmospheric rivers, or ARs, so they can predict when and where the weather systems will hit.
State officials threw a lifeline to four fossil fueled power plants along the Southern California coast, deciding the facilities are still needed to provide reliable electricity even as they contribute to the climate crisis.
Tuesday’s vote by the State Water Resources Control Board to let the gas plants keep operating past the end of this year followed brief rolling blackouts over two evenings last month, as a heat wave caused air conditioning demand to soar, and California found itself short on electricity supplies.
