In a world of worsening heatwaves, flooding, drought, glacial melting, megafires and other calamities of a changing climate, Gary Gragg is an optimist.
As California warms, Gragg — a nurseryman, micro-scale farmer and tropical fruit enthusiast — looks forward to the day that he can grow and sell mangoes in Northern California.
Months of exceptionally cold and rainy weather have made it easy to forget that just eight months ago in California we endured the most extreme September heatwave on record. High temperatures drove record-breaking demand for electricity, and the state managed to avoid blackouts by tapping into a wave of new solar energy and battery energy storage resources and facilities that helped send clean, renewable power to shoulder the load.
Snow, torrential rains, massive floods. Extreme weather has battered the U.S. this year, and shoppers likely will feel the lingering effects at the grocery store heading into summer.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Monday to safeguard his state’s water supplies from the effects of extreme weather.
The order will help expand California’s capacity to capture storm runoff during wet years by accelerating groundwater recharge projects, according to the governor’s office.
The United Nations chief on Wednesday launched a five-point plan to jump-start broader use of renewable energies, hoping to revive world attention on climate change as the U.N.’s weather agency said greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat, sea-level rise, and ocean acidification reached record highs last year.
“We must end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the renewable energy transition before we incinerate our only home,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Time is running out.”
The recent dry weather in Northern California might be sticking around for a while.
The Climate Prediction Center forecasts a 77% chance La Niña conditions will continue through the month of May.
The term La Niña refers to a correlation between ocean water temperatures and winter weather patterns.
Oftentimes, the weather event brings wetter than normal conditions to the Pacific Northwest and drier weather to Southern California.
While dry events in California are not getting drier, extreme wet weather events have steadily increased in magnitude since the middle of the last century, new research shows.
These increased extreme wet events can result in more dangerous flooding and also fuel wildfires.
“Most research after 2015 has been very focused on this climate variability and how it’s going to get worse in the future,” says Diana Zamora-Reyes, a graduate student in the department of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper in the International Journal of Climatology.
You probably noticed a lot of weird weather in 2021.
From record-breaking deluges and tropical storms to drought-stricken landscapes that erupted in wildfire, the nation seemed to lurch from one weather-related disaster to the next.
You’re forgiven if you dismiss these events as unrelated, albeit unfortunate, phenomena. But they actually share a common bond – they’re all part of a new climate reality where supersized rainfalls and lengthening droughts have become the norm.
Droughtsville, California, is in trouble.
Its water supply is endangered as multiple crises intensify: worsening droughts, competition for scarce supplies, sea level rise, groundwater contamination, earthquakes, wildfires and extreme weather. All of these factors, and more, threaten Droughtville’s ability to provide clean water to its residents.
The city is fictional, but the threats are not.
Extreme weather events in 2021 shattered records around the globe. Hundreds died in storms and heatwaves. Farmers struggled with drought, and in some cases with locust plagues. Wildfires set new records for carbon emissions, while swallowing forests, towns and homes.
Many of these events were exacerbated by climate change. Scientists say there are more to come – and worse – as the Earth’s atmosphere continues to warm through the next decade and beyond.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
