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The effects of climate change on mountain snowpacks is “potentially catastrophic” for water management, according to a study from the Berkeley Lab.

To meet an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, California’s policymakers are relying in part on forests and shrublands to remove CO 2 from the atmosphere, but researchers at the University of California, Irvine warn that future climate change may limit the ecosystem’s ability to perform this service. In a paper published today in the American Geophysical Union journal  AGU Advances, the UCI Earth system scientists stressed that rising temperatures and uncertain precipitation will cause a decrease in California’s natural carbon storage capacity of as much as 16 percent under a...

'Thirsty,' from West Berkeley filmmaker Josh Peterson, is a poetic, cautionary portrayal of rueful regret set amid the forbidding high desert.

Oil and gas production is one of the top sources of methane emissions. (Credit: iStock) What is the cost of 1 ton of a greenhouse gas? When a climate-warming gas such as carbon dioxide or methane is emitted into the atmosphere, its impacts may be felt years and even decades into the future – in the form of rising sea levels, changes in agricultural productivity, or more extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and heat waves. Those impacts are quantified in a metric called the “social cost of carbon,” considered a vital tool for making sound and efficient climate policies. Now ...

As the planet continues to warm, the twin challenges of diminishing water supply and growing energy demand will intensify. But water and energy are inextricably linked. For instance, nearly a fifth of California’s energy goes toward water-related activities, while more than a tenth of the state’s electricity comes from hydropower. As society tries to adapt to one challenge, it needs to ensure it doesn’t worsen the other. To this end, researchers from UC Santa Barbara, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have developed a framework to evaluate how different climate adapt...