IoES in the News
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Daniel Swain in Desert Sun: Tired of triple-digit heat? Palm Springs set to break record for most 100-degree days in a year
Thursday will be the city’s 136th day with triple-digit temperatures in 2020, surpassing the previous record of 135 days set in 1958, according to the National Weather Service. Moving forward, 2020’s…
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Daniel Swain in San Francisco Chronicle: Wine Country fires burn homes, force evacuations from Santa Rosa to Napa Valley
The Wine Country awoke in flames Monday as windblown wildfires closed in on the Napa Valley from the east and west and swept into Santa Rosa, forcing thousands of North…
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Daniel Swain in The Washington Post: Wildfire danger in West to escalate as intense heat dome builds this weekend
Record highs and dry land-to-sea winds are in the forecast yet again. According to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, the fire weather…
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Daniel Swain in The New York Times: Record Wildfires on the West Coast Are Capping a Disastrous Decade
“We’ve broken almost every record there is to break,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, referring to his home state, where catastrophic fires…
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2020 Pritzker Finalist Leah Penniman in Mic: Our food system is broken and racist. Meet the farmers trying to change the way we eat
“You have to wonder how we as a society justify that approximately 98% of the farmable land in this country is white-owned,’ says 2020 Pritzker finalist and co-founder of Soul…
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CBI field station featured in Travel Africa
Travel Africa Magazine featured the Congo Basin Institute’s Bouamir Field Station located in the Dja Faunal Reserve of Cameroon. Aided by local researchers and guides, visitors conducting field research in…
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Daniel Swain in The New York Times: Heat and Drought Team Up More Frequently, With Disastrous Results
A new study finds that what used to be a rare weather double whammy has been occurring more frequently in recent decades because of climate change. A climate scientist who…
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Ann Carlson in CalMatters: Newsom orders ban of new gas-powered cars by 2035
In a dramatic move to tackle climate change, Gov. Gavin Newsom today ordered state officials to ban new gasoline-powered cars within 15 years. Under the Clean Air Act, California must…
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Daniel Swain in NBC News: As wildfires rage, climate experts warn: The future we were worried about is here
Wildfires in the U.S., Australia and Siberia have driven home how climate change is already threatening to destroy ecosystems in various parts of the world. Wildfires in the U.S., Australia…
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Research Director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities Eric Fournier in UCLA Newsroom: What the wildfires tell us about the shortcomings of California’s electric grid
In addition to the vast destruction they have caused, the wildfires that have engulfed California in recent weeks have laid bare serious concerns about the state’s electric grid. In an…
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Daniel Swain in The Washington Post: Trump’s plan for managing forests won’t save us in a more flammable world, experts say
On a single day last week, red-flag warnings on fire weather stretched along the entire West Coast from the U.S. border with Mexico to Canada. “It really is a shocking escalation,”…
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Zifang Zhu in The New York Times: The Air We Breathe
The worst effects of the wildfires are the direct ones: the deaths, the loss of homes and the destruction of natural habitat. But the secondary pollution effects — from the…
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Daniel Swain in The Atlantic: The Most Important Number for the West’s Hideous Fire Season
A little-noticed indicator was flashing red before any of the blazes began. The vapor-pressure deficit VPD indexes 2 measurements: the air temperature and the relative humidity. In California this year,…
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Jon Christensen Christensen in KCET: Environmental Politics and the Work of Nevada Senator Harry Reid Highlighted in New 90-Minute Documentary from EARTH FOCUS
Anew documentary exploring environmental politics, which was researched, reported and produced by UCLA faculty and students in conjunction with the Southern California public media channel KCET, is slated to air…
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Daniel Swain in The New York Times: Where the Wildfires Are Burning, and Other Answers You Need
Daniel Swain, a California climate expert, said recently that he was stunned by the sheer breadth and acreage of the blazes burning at the same time across a variety of…
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Jon Christensen and “Earth Focus” on Link TV
Environmental Politics and the Work of Nevada Senator Harry Reid Highlighted in New 90-Minute Documentary from EARTH FOCUS “The New West and the Politics of the Environment” Premieres Sept. 29…
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Yifang Zhu in The Philadelphia Inquirer: How climate change is fueling record-breaking California wildfires, heat and smog
In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet’s inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase…
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Glen MacDonald in ABC 7 Los Angeles: La Nina forms in the Pacific – here’s what that means for California’s rain and fire seasons
As wildfires rage up and down California, federal weather officials say the possibility of any relief in the form of rain is slight due to a La Nina weather system…
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Suzanne Paulson in Newsweek: Air Pollution From California Wildfires in Some Regions ‘Unprecedented’
Air pollution from the California wildfires is spreading across the state, with hazardous levels being recorded in many regions. In several areas the Air Quality Index showed regions where pollution…
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Daniel Swain in the New York Times: A Climate Reckoning in Fire Stricken California
If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a year ago, today it is all too real for Californians fleeing wildfires and being smothered in a blanket of smoke, the…
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Daniel Swain in KXAN NBC: ‘Smoke cyclone:’ Airborne ash from California fires creates disturbing satellite image
For the better part of a month, fires from across the western United States have filled the skies with smoke and ash, creating unhealthy air conditions for millions of Americans. …
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Daniel Swain in Los Angeles Times — A sizzling summer: Hottest August on record in California
In the midst of the state’s most destructive wildfire season, California has garnered another dubious distinction: the hottest August on record in California, according to a report from UCLA climate scientist Daniel…
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Pritzker Finalist Clara Pratte in Good News Network: Solar-Powered Panels Pull Water Out of the Air For Navajo Families Who Have None
What if there was a way of pulling vapor from the atmosphere and bringing it through faucets as clean, drinkable water. Harnessing the power of the sun, Zero Mass Water’s…
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Yifang Zhu in The Bakersfield Californian — Los Angeles suffers worst smog in almost 30 years
Lung-damaging ozone pollution in Los Angeles reached its highest levels in a generation and set records in other parts of Southern California during the blistering Labor Day weekend heat wave,…
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Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative in Curbed: A 2006 Heat Wave Was a Warning from the Future. Why Didn’t L.A. Pay Attention?
The deadly impacts of climate change on a hot, hardscape city were clear 15 years ago. This summer, the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative released its own findings — during…
