Coincidentally, two news releases were distributed yesterday with information from UC Ag and Natural Resources about climate change.

One news release announces the current issue of California Agriculture journal, which is devoted to news and research on climate change and how it will alter California’s environment and landscape, agriculture and food quality. The cover of the magazine says climate change is "unequivocal," a word pulled from the 2007 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level," the IPCC report says.

Articles in the journal -

• Summarize the predicted changes to California’s climate, weather, growing conditions, pollution, sea level and other factors
• Explain why initial increases in crop production due to “CO2 fertilization” decline rapidly, a finding with important implications for hunger and nutrition worldwide
• Predict that the numbers and kinds of invasive insect pests will increase because of rising temperatures
• Demonstrate how alternative agricultural practices such as cover cropping can have a significant impact on the amounts of greenhouse gases emitted from fields

The second climate change news release was generated by the UC Berkeley news service. It says climate change will bring about major shifts in worldwide fire patterns, and that those changes are coming fast, according to an analysis led by researchers at UC Berkeley and Texas Tech University.

"This is the first attempt to quantitatively model why we see fire where we see it across the entire planet," the news release quotes study author Max Moritz, assistant cooperative extension specialist in wildland fire at UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources and co-director of the UC Center for Fire Research & Outreach. "What is startling in these findings is the relatively rapid rate at which we're likely to see very broad-scale changes in fire activity for large parts of the planet."