Salk’s Harnessing Plants Initiative will receive $30 million from the Bezos Earth Fund to advance efforts to increase the ability of crop plants, such as corn and soybeans, to capture and store atmospheric carbon via their roots in the soil. This work will explore carbon-sequestration mechanisms in six of the world’s most prevalent crop species with the goal of increasing the plants’ carbon-storage capacity.
Though scientists know that clouds are critical to the climate system, their exact role is still uncertain. New studies are starting to fill in the knowledge gap.
A project announced Monday by Sempra Energy and the Salk Institute seeks to advance plant-based carbon capture and sequestration research to help address the looming climate crisis. San Diego-based Sempra donated $2 million to the Salk Institute to help fund the five-year project.
California’s war with Washington over the environment will soon come to an end.
The legal wrangling that sparked 57 environmental lawsuits against the Trump administration — for loosening policies on everything from automobile pollution to pesticide use and salmon conservation — should turn to consensus and cooperation.
The San Joaquin Valley has received a specially addressed message from the Union of Concerned Scientists about what it thinks people across the region should be doing about looming water shortages, worsening air quality and generally more volatile weather in the years ahead.
In the past decade, California has experienced its most severe drought in over a millennium, devastating floods, the hottest summer on record and eight of the 10 largest wildfires ever recorded in the state.
Within the past month, Death Valley set a new record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth, and wildfires burned an area larger than the state of Connecticut. Three of the largest wildfires in California history are still smoldering, the smoke from which is now visible as far away as New York City.
Climate-driven disasters are increasingly putting Californians at risk and our most vulnerable populations, comprised largely of people of color, are suffering disproportionate impacts. These populations often have the least access to parks, greenspace and health care resources, and are at increased risk from rising temperatures, poor air quality driven by wildfires and other climate change impacts.
If you’re in the habit of reading the president’s tweets, you may have noticed a theme the last few weeks: California is a fiery wasteland. He said as much Tuesday, writing that the Golden State is “going to hell.” Trump made the same points in another tweet last week, promising “no more blackouts” or “ridiculous forrest fires” (his typo, not mine) if he’s reelected and clarifying that water rationing is “coming soon.”
Meteorologist Emily Heller says the weather lately reminds her of what Northern California saw in 2018 just before the Camp Fire set the town of Paradise ablaze. For weeks, there was no rain, excessive heat, and dry winds.
New mapping of salt concentrations in the world’s oceans confirms what physics and climate models have long suggested: Global warming is intensifying Earth’s water cycle, speeding up the rate at which water evaporates in one area and falls as rain or snow somewhere else.
Two weeks ago, the Pine Gulch Fire became the largest wildfire in Colorado history when it grew to an area nearly the size of Chicago. The 139,000-acre blaze, ignited July 31, was fueled by another record: The area where the fire occurred experienced its hottest August in at least 126 years.
