- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
Are Blackouts Here to Stay? A Look into the Future
(E&E News) Anne C. Mulkern, Nov. 15
…Throughout the United States, between roughly 2000 and 2010, about 75% of homes that burned in wildfires were located in the WUI, said Van Butsic, a land use specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. The rest was mostly in rural areas, with about 2% in cities.
People go back after they lose homes, Butsic said. He surveyed the 28 largest fires in California from about 1975 to 2005, and through aerial photos tracked what was rebuilt. About 90% of destroyed homes were rebuilt within a decade, he found. New homes also filled in large tracts of undeveloped land in formerly burned...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Keeping global warming below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) can be achieved only by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors, including land and food, said the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a report released Aug. 8, 2019.
The panel of scientists said agriculture, deforestration and other land use - such as harvesting peat and managing grasslands and wetlands - generate about one-third of human greenhouse gas emissions and 44% of methane emissions. The panel suggests that farmland be reduced and forestland increased to keep the earth from getting more than 1.5 degrees C hotter than in...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
One of the forces driving agricultural experiments in California's fertile San Joaquin Valley is climate change, reported Mark Schapiro on Grist.org. Although some sources still don't feel completely comfortable with the concept.
"Whether it's carbon built up in the atmosphere or just friggin' bad luck, the conditions are straining us," said John Duarte, president of Duarte Nursery.
The state's fruit and nut orchards are taking the most heat as conditions change. A fruit or nut tree planted today may be ill-suited to climatic conditions by the time it begins bearing fruit in 5 or 10 years. Between 1950 and 2009,...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
KQED reporter Mark Schapiro discovered a "center of insurrection" at the UC West Side Research and Extension Center in Five Points, where UC Cooperative Extension cropping systems specialist Jeff Mitchell has been building soil on a research plot for 20 years.
Schapiro's story was part of a series titled "Reckoning in the Central Valley," a collaboration between Bay Nature magazine and KQED Science examining how climate change is exposing...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
In the California agriculture industry, the climate change discussion is less about whether disruption is coming than it is about how farmers will adapt, reported John Cox in the Bakersfield Californian.
Cox spoke to a Delano farmer who doesn't like debating climate change, but he has thought a lot about how to deal with it.
"As a grower, you just take it as it comes," he said.
Farmers may not agree with new regulations intended to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions seen as accelerating climate change, but they share an interest in preparing for the changes ahead, the article said.
"Everybody I know in...