Tag: climate change

Farmers must develop new approaches if they are to keep producing crops as water supplies dwindle. Katherine Bourzac, Nature On a still, warm evening in mid-June, leaves are reflected in the cool water that fills the irrigation channels of a pecan orchard in Clovis, California. This placid scene seems to have barely changed in the past 40 years. Underground, however, the water table tells a different story. Satellite data show that in California’s Central Valley, the most productive...

Seth Borenstein, Yahoo! News Top scientists from a variety of fields say they are about as certain that global warming is a real, man-made threat as they are that cigarettes kill. They are as sure about climate change as they are about the age of the universe. They say they are more certain about climate change than they are that vitamins make you healthy or that dioxin in Superfund sites is dangerous. They’ll even put a number on how certain they are about climate change. But...

Smithsonian Magazine In the past two decades, we’ve seen dramatic images of ice shelves and the floating tongues of glaciers crumble into the ocean. The summer of 2012 saw a huge chunk of ice–two times the size of Manhattan–snap off of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Two years earlier, a piece of ice twice as big as that one split from the glacier’s front. In early 2002, ice covering an area the greater than the size of Rhode Island sloughed into the ocean from a lobe of the Antarctic Peninsula’s...

Janet Wilson, UCIrvine News UC Irvine’s redwoods sit like forlorn Christmas trees near the campus power plant and the Crawford Hall parking lot. They’re miniatures of Northern California’s ancient giants, a dwarf grove with drooping branches. But they’re still standing. The trees began life with fanfare three decades ago. They are test-tube babies – samples of the world’s first artificially cloned Sequoia sempervirens created by now-deceased UCI biologist Ernest Ball. Manufactured from...