Across much of the United States, the flood risk is far greater than government estimates show, new calculations suggest, exposing millions of people to a hidden threat — and one that will only grow as climate change worsens.
Drought can mean restrictions for watering the lawn, crop losses for farmers and an increased risk of wildfires. But it can also hit you and your power company in the wallet.
After 67 years of living and breathing dairy farming in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Scott Magneson cannot, will not, stop.
Every morning before dawn, when the valley fog is still resting on his fields in thick clouds, he checks the barns. Then he starts on the to-do list, which outlasts the day. In another farm tradition, Magneson rarely leaves his land. He can’t remember the last time he and his wife Pat (who does the bookkeeping) took a vacation.
California spent 376 weeks in a drought, from December of 2011 until March of 2019. That’s the longest duration of drought we’ve ever seen here in the Golden State. Now a study by Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests wet and dry extremes in California are likely the result of severe storms called Atmospheric Rivers.
As a biologist and environmental advocate, even before the pandemic, I was scared by the headlines about our planet: A 75% decline in insect biomass with a 40% loss of insect species predicted; a United Nations warning of the imminent extinction of 1 million species worldwide; a 3 billion loss of birds in United States and Canada over the past half-century; the growth of dead zones on our coasts and the decline in the oxygen held by the world’s oceans. Climate change will only worsen these environmental problems.
California has been a global leader in heading off global warming, enacting laws to slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. To do so, local governments must draft formal Climate Action Plans that document how to meet their own mandates.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego will host a major research initiative funded by the federal government.
UC San Diego will host the Cooperative Institute for Marine, Earth and Atmospheric systems, and it will get up to $220 million in funding for research over a five-year period.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is making the investment locally after a competitive bidding process.
The Western drought has continued to expand and intensify, according to U.S. Drought Monitor data released Thursday.
Wet late-spring weather resulted in a slight decrease in the area deemed to be in extreme drought in Northern California.
Severe drought receded a little in parts of northeastern Utah and southwestern Washington. Unseasonably heavy precipitation, including high-elevation snow, fell in northeastern Utah, the Drought Monitor reported
A century after the state began overseeing surface water, the California legislature enacted a set of three laws regulating water below the surface. The passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014, granted the state official oversight authority of groundwater. However, its involvement existed long before SGMA and continues to influence current policies and regulation of the resource. A new paper published in Society and Natural Resources, examines how the state’s ongoing involvement helped shape current policies by looking at the 120-year history of California’s role in groundwater management and policy development.
Lake Tahoe’s famed clarity has long been used to gauge the health and changing conditions of Big Blue. Unlike in recent years when researchers were able to point to a dominant factor affecting lake clarity like drought or higher-than-average precipitation, 2019 saw a range of influences on Tahoe, including lake mixing for the first time in several years, sediment, algae, and climate warming.
