Climate Change

More than 98 inches of snow has fallen in Boston this season, while workers have spent about 170,000 hours plowing the streets and distributed more than 76,000 tons of salt on roadways. At the same time, much of the American West, Rocky Mountains, and Northern and Central Plains have experienced warmer-than-average temperatures. California, in the grip of an epic drought, had its fourth-driest January ever recorded with just 15 percent of average precipitation. So what is going on with this extreme weather, and what does it have to do with global climate change?

Laura Wisland, a senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists who formerly worked for the California Public Utilities Commission to implement its renewable portfolio standard, said the study affirms the value of siting solar in developed areas where land has already been disturbed. Building solar in those places can lower the costs and time associated with new clean energy development, she said, adding that the study can help cities and counties assess their solar energy potential.

When 2014 Fellow Karen Andradea arrived at UC Berkeley in 2009, she was surprised to discover how challenging it was for outside organizations to partner with students and faculty on research projects. So she set out to create the UC Berkeley Science Shop, a publicly accessible entity that connects small nonprofits, local government agencies, small businesses, and other civic organizations with undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

The realization that individual action has little to no impact on major environmental problems — to say nothing of the existential threat of climate change — can prompt despair, 1995 Fellow Paul Steinberg, a professor of political science and environmental policy at Harvey Mudd College, says. But it doesn’t have to. We could try, instead, consulting social scientists, who have spent a lot of time thinking about just this problem: How can a single individual can act in a way that effects large-scale change?

Kartikeya Singh presented during the plenary session "Rising Stars: The Arctic, Climate Change and the Role of Renewable Energy" of the 2014 Arctic Circle Assembly, held in Reykjavik, Iceland from October 29 to November 2, 2014. The Assembly convened delegations from 40 nations as well as senior industry and NGO leaders to discuss national security and energy as well as environmental issues facing the region.

At first glance, California and Syria appear to have little in common other than Mediterranean climates. But two new studies – focusing on severe droughts in these places half a planet apart – highlight a yawning gap in the abilities of developed and many developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change. Each study, appearing in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documents ways in which global warming is boosting the likelihood of additional droughts as severe and prolonged as those the two have experienced.

New research published in January reveals that vast stretches of the ocean interior abruptly lost oxygen during the transition out of the last ice age that occurred 17,000–10,000 years ago. This event was the most recent example of large-scale global warming, and was caused primarily by changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun. Past climate events provide informative case studies for understanding what is currently happening to the modern climate system, says 2013 Fellow Sarah Moffitt.

Clean energy innovation and decarbonization efforts will be overwhelmingly concentrated in rapidly industrializing countries, where demand for energy is high and deployment opportunities are broad, says a new report from a group of 12 energy scholars.

The European Union led the world in wheat production and exports in 2014-15. Yet Europe is also the region where productivity has slowed the most. Yields of major crops have not increased as much as would be expected over the past 20 years, based on past productivity increases and innovations in agriculture. Finding the causes of that stagnation is key to understanding the trajectory of the global food supply.