CCWAS IGERT PI Graham Fogg will be one of several speakers at the Second International Summit of Sustainability in Chile, on Thursday, 27 September 2012. Graham and his hosts, including José Luis Arumí and other CCWAS collaborators from the University of Concepción and CEAZA, will speak about the importance of groundwater in water resource management under climate change.

For more information, see the original press release.

Scientists generally exercise caution about becoming enmeshed in policy discussions. However, it would behoove scientists from all disciplines to become educated about the implications of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which will take effect in January 2013 unless Congress passes legislation to counteract it.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 -- through a process called sequestration -- stipulates across-the-board cuts in all federal agencies. NSF, NIH, EPA, the Department of Education, NOAA all fall under its axe. 

Meredith Niles, a UC Davis graduate student in Ecology and trainee in the Responding to Rapid Environmental Change IGERT, has written clearly and eloquently about this in her blog. It's good reading for all scientists -- and for anyone concerned about scientific research, higher education, transportation systems, and other public goods supported by federal dollars.

According to Rich Rominger, California should implement policy practices that protect agricultural landscapes and their concordant environmental, economic, and cultural benefits. Rominger, a Yolo County farmer, former secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and coauthor Renata Brillinger published an op-ed in today's Sacramento Bee that touched on some of the challenges faced by California agriculture.

Climate now should be added to that list.

Rominger highlighted recent work by UC Davis scientist Louise Jackson and a host of others on greenhouse gas emissions and how agriculture can help mitigate climate change impacts. 

He ended with a call for action by policymakers and others. Worth a read. 

NASA this week reported that over a four-day period in July, almost all of the ice sheet that covers Greenland experienced some amount of surface melting. 

Normally, about half of the Greenland ice sheet melts and refreezes over the summer. However, scientists from NASA and their university collaborators analyzed data from three independent satellites and found that on 12 July, 97% of the ice cover had melted at or near the surface, compared with 40% on 8 July. This extreme melt event coincided with an unusually strong ridge of warm air over Greenland in mid July. A series of high pressure ridges has dominated Greenland's weather since mid-May, with each ridge stronger than the preceding ones. While Greenland's residents may have enjoyed the resulting temperate weather, its likely effect on the ice sheet took scientists by surprise.

Even central Greenland, two miles above sea level and near the highest point of the ice sheet, warmed to within a degree of freezing. Melting in the ice sheet at this region had not occurred since 1889, according to ice cores analyzed by Kaitlin Keegan, a trainee in Dartmouth College's IGERT in polar environmental change.

According to NASA scientist Tom Wagner, "The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story. Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system."