- Contributor: Ann King Filmer
- Author: Robin DeRieux
Ocean waters are warming, sea level is rising, seawater is becoming more acidic, and shoreline erosion is intensifying. The world’s oceans are reacting to increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere.
“The physical and chemical environment of the ocean is changing with the climate,” said John Largier of the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. “This affects ecosystems — like tidal marshes and coral reefs that protect us from storms and flooding.”
The ocean brings stability to the earth’s climate. It heats up and cools down more slowly than the land and the air. With climate...
- Author: Suanne Klahorst
The first thing I had to learn as writing staff at the John Muir Institute for the Environment, UC Davis, was the difference between "climate" and "weather." I compare it to reading a stock chart, there are jagged peaks and valleys daily, but it takes stock performance over years to reveal an unmistakable trend. The small ticks are similar to weather but the trend over decades is closer to climate. Nearly every stock chart has a huge valley at the year 2008, this is thought to be a once in a century event. That event is analogous to climate change, except climate trends are measured over millions of years, and climate is thought to be much slower to recover.
American opinions about global warming are as uncertain as the...
- Author: Katherine E. Kerlin
Decades of extreme weather crippled, and ultimately decimated, first the political culture and later the human population of the ancient Maya, according to a study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers that includes two University of California, Davis, scientists.
Now, for the first time, researchers have combined a precise climatic record of the Maya environment with a precise record of Maya political history to provide a better understanding of the role weather had in the civilization’s downfall.
Their findings are published in the Nov. 9, 2012, issue of the...
- Author: John Stumbos
- Author: Katherine E. Kerlin
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, climate change and global greenhouse emissions are a hot topic these days. Dozens of UC Davis scientists study many facets of the causes and consequences of global warming.
One of them is Frank Mitloehner, UC Cooperative Extension specialist and professor in the Department of Animal Science at UC Davis. Mitloehner has studied the role of the livestock industry in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Mitloehner was recently selected to chair a United Nations committee to measure and assess the environmental impacts of the livestock industry.
As chair of the new Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) committee,...
- Author: Suanne Klahorst
Global warming promises to be among the most immense challenges to human adaptation in history, as big as social media. But the climate topic has been overshadowed in recent years by the recession. Just as the Dow Jones can’t be described by the fluctuations of a single decade, climate science is not defined by periods less than centuries.
These thoughts were shared at a breakfast Oct. 16 at UC Davis hosted by Capital Public Radio. The speaker: Ben Santer, MacArthur Fellow (1998), National Academy Member (2012), and atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Santer said that when he hears about the tragedy of burdening youth with the national debt, he would like to hear more...