News & Commentary

And so it begins...

A man from the island nation of Kiribati has applied for refugee status to the country of New Zealand. The basis for his application is forced migration due to climate change. His application has been submitted, and rejected, twice now. But he is appealing the case.

Kiribati is a string of thirty-some atolls in the south Pacific, the average height above sea-level of which is about six and a half feet. Due to the rising ocean waters - about an inch per decade - things in Kiribati have been getting worse.

If you're dismayed, perhaps even a little angry that the government shutdown has closed national parks, prepare to discover how much worse it is than you know. Although parks are closed (to paying visitors, oil and gas production activities continue) they still occupy the acquisitive thoughts of some politicians, those who wish to facilitate the moving of publicly owned lands into the hands of companies who might then profit.

It's getting harder and harder to be a climate change denier.

One of the last rhetorical vestiges propping up denial of how the world is changing due to fossil-fuel use is the now-standard response to any mention of warming in the context of extreme weather events - "You can't say that hurricane/wildfire/tornado/etc. was caused by global warming!" Of course this is essentially true. We cannot attribute any particular weather event to climate warming. Scientists and advocates for action on climate change understand this, and have pointed it out all along. But when used by "skeptics," the rejoinder is often meant to cast doubt on the broader concept of connections between extreme events and warming climate.

A recently released climate change study out of UCLA predicts that snowfall in the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin  will be reduced by 30-40% by 2050. Without some sort of mitigating emissions policies that decline could increase to as much as two thirds by the end of the century. For an already water-stressed area that continues to drag its feet on conservation and other water issues (i.e., ridiculously unbalanced subsidies) while it also continues to grow, this is a pretty dismal forecast.

The study focused on the L.A. area by changing the normal low-resolution, large-scale modeling used for global assessments to a more narrowly prescribed model using 1981-2000 data from the local mountains and their communities.