- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
The great Central Valley of California, which stretches from Bakersfield to Redding, has striking differences in rainfall - with the south much drier than the north, wrote George Skelton in his Los Angeles Times column Capitol Journal. The fact is important, he says, because crops growing in the hot dry south take more water than those in the northern reaches.
"You and I are going to drink more water in Bakersfield than in Colusa," said Daniel Sumner, director of the Agricultural Issues Center, a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources statewide program....
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
If a drought in California stretched on for 72 years, it wouldn't be a complete disaster, reported Bettina Boxall in the Los Angeles Times. According to computer modeling research by a group of UC and CSU scientists, the California economy would not collapse and agriculture would shrink, but not disappear.
"The results were surprising," said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. "California has a remarkable ability to weather extreme and prolonged droughts from an economic perspective."
Dan Sumner, director of...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Due to the California drought and what scientists believe will be a drier future, the state's farmers will likely move away from commodity crops to focus on high-value products like almonds, pistachios and wine grapes, according to Richard Howitt, agricultural economist at UC Davis. Howitt was used as a source in a lengthy story on Bloomberg.com about repercussions worldwide of the three-year dry spell in the Golden State.
Another source was Dan Sumner, director of the UC Agricultural Issues...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Signs of summer - high temperatures, school terms ending, well-stocked farmers markets - abound this time of year. Another sign of the times is abundant stories about Californians dealing with the historic 2014 drought.
Timm Herdt, a Ventura County Star columnist, wrote that farmers' close attention to the weather has given them keen awareness about climate change.
"Anybody who's paying attention knows the climate has already changed," said Daniel Sumner, director of the UC Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis....
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
A climate researcher used a colorful word picture at a conference Monday in Sacramento to convey the gravity of rising temperatures on earth, reported Elizabeth Case in the Davis Enterprise.
"The climate is an angry beast and we're poking it with a sharp stick" said Benjamin Santer, a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The conference, hosted by UC's Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, covered water use, adaptation to a changed climate and tangible predicted impacts on California's agricultural production, the...
