The warming climate is putting environmental pressure on California forests that have towered over the Golden State for thousands of years. They are not the only forests being stressed by climate change, the region’s iconic underwater forests are also facing challenges. Those forests are populated by giant kelp, and there is one located just off the La Jolla shore.
Southern California Gas Co. is taking its battle with state officials over climate change policy to court, arguing in a new lawsuit that the California Energy Commission has failed to promote natural gas as required by state law.
Californians across the state are concerned about climate change and support plans to reduce harmful emissions and focus on renewable sources of energy. But there are stark differences when it comes to which residents of the Golden State see pollution as a serious threat to their family’s health.
How much warming will greenhouse gas emissions cause in the coming years? It’s one of the most fundamental questions about climate change — and also one of the trickiest to answer.
Now, a major study claims to have narrowed down the range of possible estimates.
It presents both good and bad news. The worst-case climate scenarios may be somewhat less likely than previous studies suggested. But the best-case climate scenarios — those assuming the least amount of warming — are almost certainly not going to happen.
It’s “the most important climate science paper that’s come out in several years,” according to climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University, who was not involved with the study.
California’s wild weather swings, from pounding rain to drought and from fires to floods, are widely expected to worsen as the climate warms. A new study shows just how severe things might get, and it’s not pretty.
Welcome back to Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. If this is your first edition, we’re glad to have you.
Precipitation extremes will likely intensify under climate change. However, much uncertainty surrounds intensification of high-magnitude events that are often inadequately resolved by global climate models. In this analysis, we develop a framework involving targeted dynamical downscaling of historical and future extreme precipitation events produced by a large ensemble of a global climate model.
Charismatic is hardly the best word to describe the humpback chub, a fish with a frowny eel face jammed onto a sportfish body in a way that suggests evolution has a sense of humor. Nor did tastiness build a fan base for this “trash fish” across its natural habitat throughout the Colorado River Basin. But, in 1973, the humpback chub became famous by winning federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.
U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris (D-CA) on Tuesday announced the introduction of the Water for Tomorrow Act, legislation that ensures the nation’s water supply is safe and sustainable. The threat of climate change, which has a disproportionate impact on low-income communities and communities of color, will continue to intensify water scarcity and extreme weather conditions, particularly in California and the West. The Water for Tomorrow Act combines the water sustainability measures from Sen. Harris’ Water Justice Act with key measures from the FUTURE Drought Resiliency Act, led in the House of Representatives by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA).
The Sacramento region is preparing for the long term impacts of the climate crisis when it comes to water supply. Central to the plan is a groundwater storage program with two to three times the space of Folsom Lake.
As the climate warms it’ll likely become harder to fill up reservoirs, because the snowpack could be small for multiple years. Think of the nearly empty reservoirs across California during the most recent drought.
