Category: Climate

Freshly tilled dirt in the front yard of Robert Wunderlich’s home in Beverly Hills, Calif., Monday. Mr. Wunderlich is replacing his grass front lawn with drought-tolerant landscaping. Photo: Stuart Palley for The Wall Street Journal BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.—This enclave of movie-star glamour—famous for its tree-lined boulevards and manicured yards—is starting to turn heads for another look: dying grass and ripped-out lawns. Beverly Hills has been identified by state officials as among California’s biggest urban water guzzlers and, under rules expected to be approved this week, ordered to cut its consumption by 36% or face fines up to $10,000 per violation. Anticipating the crackdown, the city in mid-April stopped watering its grassy medians. On April 21, the City Council adopted tough new restrictions that include a limit on lawn watering to two days a week, and a ban on draining and refilling swimming pools under penalty of maximum $1,000 fines. […]

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ENLARGE California Gov. Jerry Brown, shown in a file photo, announced a plan for major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on Wednesday. Photo: Monica Davey/European Pressphoto Agency SAN FRANCISCO—Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday ordered new standards for greenhouse gas emission reductions over the next 15 years in California, building on the state’s already stringent requirements. Mr. Brown ordered a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. The targets align the nation’s largest state with the standards set by the European Union, Mr. Brown said in a news release. “With this order, California sets a very high bar for itself and other states and nations, but it’s one that must be reached—for this generation and generations to come,” Mr. Brown said. Currently, the state is set to meet a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, Mr. Brown said. That goal […]

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Pope Francis blesses the faitfhul during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on April 15. Photographer: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images Pope Francis summoned scientists, government officials and religious leaders to a villa in the manicured Vatican Gardens on Tuesday as he stepped into the heated climate-change debate. “Climate change is a defining issue of our time,” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told attendees at the Vatican conference. “It is a moral issue, it is an issue of social justice, human rights and fundamental ethics.” The conference, which is being held under the auspices of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, precedes a papal encyclical scheduled for publication in June. The encyclical, a letter to the world’s bishops but with broader resonance because of the pope’s moral and political authority, will aim to influence a UN summit in Paris at the end of the year, at which nations may pledge to […]

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Blame global warming for about 75 percent of the world’s unusually hot days and 18 percent of its extreme snow or rain, according to a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change. Heat waves and heavy storms are occurring at least four times more often than they did before carbon pollution started driving up thermometers. Global average temperatures are now about 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.4 Fahrenheit) higher than before industrialization. Additional heat and precipitation are expensive. Severe weather costs the U.S. economy as much as $33 billion a year, according to a U.S. Energy Department report released April 21. And those figures will increase as the planet continues to warm, as climate change may not be smooth or gradual, according to the new paper. At 2 degrees Celsius — United Nations climate negotiators’ avowed upper limit — extremely hot days may be twice as likely as at 1.5 […]

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The last hurricane to make landfall in Florida was Wilma in October 2005. Source: NOAA via Getty Images Florida hasn’t been hit by a hurricane since 2005, the longest stretch in more than a century. Its state-run property insurer isn’t taking any chances. Even though forecasters predict this year will produce the fewest named Atlantic storms since 1997, Citizens Property Insurance Corp., which provides coverage when other insurers won’t take the risk, is selling as much as $1 billion of municipal debt to raise cash just in case. It would be the insurer’s first bond sale in three years. With hurricane season set to start June 1, Citizens is taking advantage of interest rates close to generational lows to bolster its claim-paying ability. Investors in the insurer’s tax-exempt bonds welcome the steps toward a sturdier balance sheet: One storm is all it takes to rack up billions of dollars […]

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INSIDE HOOVER DAM — The floor rumbled under Mark Cook. His legs vibrated as he stood in a tunnel tucked into the thick base of Hoover Dam, 430 feet below the tourists looking out over Lake Mead. Beneath him, water roared through steel pipes 13 feet tall. Nearby, heavy turbines hummed with mechanical intensity. “We’re moving some good water today,” Cook, the dam manager, said proudly. Moving water means making electricity. But the drought is making that harder to do. The lack of water has put a serious crimp in the hydroelectric line at Hoover Dam and other power plants across the West, limiting an inexpensive and pollution-free energy source that once was considered endless. Power capacity at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona-Nevada border, has dropped nearly 25 percent since 2000. In California, home to 287 hydroelectric plants and where almost half the state today is classified as being in […]

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Tags: Africa | climate change | Migrant | sahel | shipwreck Italian coastguard and Armed Forces of Malta personnel in protective clothing carry the body of a dead immigrant off the ship Bruno Gregoretti in Senglea, in Valletta’s Grand Harbour, April 20, 2015. REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi The migrant crisis in the Mediterranean is symptomatic of deep dislocation in the Sahel region and sub-Saharan Africa — dislocation exacerbated by climate change. Climate change is affecting such basic environmental conditions as rainfall patterns and temperatures and is contributing to more frequent natural disasters like floods and droughts. Over the long term, these changing conditions can undermine the rural livelihoods of farming, herding and fishing. The resulting rural dislocation is a factor in people’s decisions to migrate. Migratory decisions are complex, of course, and nobody would argue that climate change is the only factor driving them. But climate change cannot be ignored. […]

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An Environmental Protection Agency rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the existing power fleet could bring almost 100 GW of new natural gas-fired generation to the US fleet by 2030, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said in an assessment released Tuesday. The assessment at the same time found significant retirements of coal-fired generation by 2030 as well as an erosion of the economics supporting remaining coal power as the resource shifts from acting as baseload to becoming a peaking asset. NERC is an industry-backed organization tasked by Congress and FERC to ensure bulk power system reliability In light of these and other changes to the system, the assessment noted concerns that the necessary infrastructure may not be in place by the rule’s deadlines, creating the need for a mechanism to ensure reliability should unforeseen issues or timing challenges arise. Article continues below… At the same time, NERC […]

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Emergency Shut Down Of West Coast Fisheries: “Populations Have Crashed 91 Percent” thumbnail Earlier this week Michael Snyder warned that the bottom of our food chain is going through a catastrophic collapse with sea creatures dying in absolutely massive numbers . The cause of the problem is a mystery to scientists who claim that they can’t pinpoint how or why it’s happening. What’s worse, the collapse of sea life in the Pacific Ocean isn’t something that will affect us several decades into the future. The implications are being seen right now, as evidenced by an emergency closure of fisheries along the West coast this week. On Wednesday federal regulators announced the early closure of sardine fisheries in California, Oregon and Washington. According to the most recent data, the sardine populations has been wiped out with populations seeing a decline of 91% in just the last eight years. Meeting outside Santa […]

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