Earlier in May, scientists released a report warning that as many as three fourths of California’s 31 types of native salmon and trout might go extinct within 100 years. The ominous forecast made headlines nationwide as reporters and editors highlighted the main takeaways – that climate change and a variety of human activities, including agriculture … Read more
SOS II: Fish in Hot Water Knowledge is power CalTrout and UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences have released State of the Salmonids II: Fish in Hot Water, an in-depth report that details the status of California’s 32 native salmon, steelhead, and trout. The science-based report is clear – if we don’t act, we risk … Read more
California Gov. Jerry Brown made international news when he vowed to fight President Donald Trump’s attempts to cut America’s climate change research and rescind the nation’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. Brown’s commitment to fighting climate change seems real, and under his leadership, his state has engaged in numerous greenhouse-gas reduction plans. But there are … Read more
Two straight months of heavy rainfall have effectively ended five straight years of drought in California. But with parts of the state reporting more than 100 inches of precipitation since last fall, the rain activity has also caused floods, road closures, infrastructure damage and evacuations in many areas. As a result of the unpredictable nature … Read more
It didn’t really matter that Kyle Donohue hadn’t built an array of solar power panels before: Lincoln County wasn’t getting the same amount of electricity from the Hoover Dam as it used to. The lake behind the dam had dropped amid a historic drought, pushing up power costs for Lincoln County. At the same time, … Read more
**UPDATE** The March for Science date has been set for April 22. Check out this international map of march locations. Get involved with a local march, for example Humboldt county’s march here. Last weekend, a massive milieu of women in pink hats descended on Washington, D.C. for the Women’s March. The next big protest being … Read more
Late in 2015, we published a series of stories about a large-scale harmful algal bloom year off the West Coast that resulted in numerous marine animal deaths and closures of recreational and commercial fisheries in California, Oregon, and Washington. At the time, scientists hypothesized that the severe, widespread toxic bloom was connected to unusually persistent … Read more
New technique predicts frequency of heavy precipitation with global warming. On Dec. 11, 2014, a freight train of a storm steamed through much of California, deluging the San Francisco Bay Area with three inches of rain in just one hour. The storm was fueled by what meteorologists refer to as the “Pineapple Express” — an … Read more
If you go back thousands of years, you see that droughts can go on for years if not decades, and there were some dry periods that lasted over a century, like during the Medieval period and the middle Holocene. The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe … Read more