Center for Climate Science

Who is measuring the problem and how is LA trying to cool down the city? Urban heat is disproportionate across the county and many residents do not have air conditioning. Learn about the dangerous costs of heat islands and the increase of heat days in this KCRW piece, referencing Alex Hall’s end-of-century warming projections.

Record high heat waves, multiple blazes, and microbursts all throughout California- is this what climate change looks like? Learn more about Dr. Daniel Swain's thoughts about whether this is correlated with climate change, as featured in the New York Times. 

Is Scott Pruitt’s plan to televise climate change “debates” a good idea? No, say Center for Climate Science associate director Katharine Reich and a host of climate scientists and policy experts.

Center for Climate Science associate director Katharine Reich and UCLA climate law experts explore the parallels between the HBO hit fantasy saga Game of Thrones and climate change in the real world.

Climate researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have created forecasts of how many days of extreme heat — defined as more than 95 degrees — the Los Angeles region could expect if nothing was done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Downtown Los Angeles, for example, now has roughly a week’s worth of extreme heat days a year, said Alex Hall, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at U.C.L.A.

“The amount of accumulated snow in the Eastern Sierra is large enough that it will almost certainly lead to a flood when it melts and drains into the Owens Valley,” UCLA climate researcher Alex Hall wrote in an e-mail interview.

“In most places, when you get a heat wave now, there is probably a human finger print,” says Daniel Swain, an author of the paper and a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.  

Daniel Swain, Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability: Overall, this piece accurately describes the findings of a new research paper by Mann et al on linkages between rapid Arctic warming and extreme weather at Earth’s more temperate latitudes.

In 2015, after four years of drought, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California hit a record low. Global warming is to blame for a quarter of that loss, a UCLA Center for Climate Science study based on climate models suggests.

“The cryosphere — frozen parts of the planet — has shown the earliest and largest signs of change,” said UCLA climate scientist Alex Hall, who along with study co-author Neil Berg modeled what future California droughts will look like in terms of snowpack loss. 

“Past observations offer a context in which to view today’s climate — one in which Earth’s atmosphere is filled with the largest concentration of carbon dioxide in human history,” says UCLA’s Aradhna Tripati.

In this op-ed, UCLA’s Alex Hall and Mark Gold discuss why it’s critical to help California’s infrastructure and communities adapt to climate change.