Climate Change

There is widespread acceptance among the scientific community that human activities are the primary cause of present day climate change. But, how a changing climate impacts ecosystems is still a source of confusion to the public. Some of this confusion is associated with a lack of clear communication among journalists and scientists, particularly when it comes to addressing variability and uncertainty in ecological datasets.

For California to meet its climate goals, we need to rethink the role that water plays as a significant electricity consumer and producer.

By controlling both short-lived climate pollutants and long-lived greenhouse gases we can increase the chances of limiting our global temperature rise to below 2° C, while also supporting sustainable development around the world” says Nexleaf Analytics President, Nithya Ramanathan. Read more

Summary of EPA document: The Analysis of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Data from the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry 1.0 summarizes chemical and water use data from more than 38,000 oil and gas production wells hydraulically fractured between January 1, 2011, and February 28, 2013, and looks at how chemical and water use vary in different locations across the country. Read more

What started as an offhand remark by Lara Hansen (1995) to a funder, about how to use some leftover money from a grant, has become the largest national conference on adaptation to climate change. Actually, it is the only national conference on the topic, which is surprising given adaptation’s importance to humans in coming decades and centuries.

We have a number of Fellows leading in Sonoma County, working to understand the impacts of climate change at a micro level and develop solutions to improve local resiliency to climate change impacts that could be rolled out nationally.

Climate change adaptation “isn’t something government is going to be able to solve alone,” says Amber Pairis. “We need to engage people in this conversation in a meaningful way. The rubber really meets the road on the ground in your community,” she adds. “And that is where change will happen”.

Doug Johnson sees the increasingly severe drought in California as a chance to educate people about the importance of invasive plant management at the landscape level in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The Sierras are an important source of water for all of California, with snowpack formed in winter melting over the spring and summer months and running down to the dry parts of the state. Invasives, some of which are known to be water hungry compared to competing vegetation, can reduce the capacity of Sierra meadows to perform this valuable function. For the state’s residents and agricultural industry, this could make a bad problem worse.

Brad Keitt (1997) has already been working to prevent extinctions caused by non-native species introduced to islands for decades. His non-profit, Island Conservation, prevents extinctions of native species by removing invasive species from islands. But the challenge of climate change has Keitt rethinking how his organization plans its projects and communicates about them.