IoES in the News

KPCC

Monsoons in Southern California? Here’s why it’s so cloudy

"I think a lot of people are always intrigued to find out there is, in fact, a monsoon in the desert Southwest,"said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and author of the California weather blog Weather West.

Featured: Daniel Swain

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Novel legal strategy underpins sea level rise lawsuits against oil and coal

“We’re in uncharted territory here pretty fundamentally,” said Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the UCLA law school’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “The theory behind it is an interesting one: that essentially, petroleum products should be considered defective when used as directed because of the harms that they cause.”

Featured: Sean Hecht

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Imperial Beach, two counties sue fossil fuel companies for money to deal with sea level rise

A number of earlier lawsuits against oil and gas companies failed because they focused on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, said Ann Carlson, faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law. “Here, this is a more conventional lawsuit” in the sense of asking for damages, she said. “The lawyers have done a very good job. The courts will have to take this seriously.”

Featured Faculty: Ann Carlson

KPCC

Gov. Brown has 2 bills to help California’s air quality

Up until Monday evening, the future of the program looked uncertain. But, after months of discussion, Governor Jerry Brown revealed legislation Monday that extends the program to the year 2030. For analysis, Take Two spoke to Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA.

Featured Faculty: Cara Horowitz

California Health Report

Rising Temperatures Will Put Seniors at Risk, Experts Predict

“Literally every decade we have more record-breaking years with respect to temperatures,” said Aradhna E. Tripati, a climate scientist at UCLA. “We’re already paying a cost and it’s going to keep going up.” Seniors are especially vulnerable during heat waves because they have a harder time than younger adults adjusting to sudden changes in temperature.

Featured Faculty: Aradhna Tripati

Los Angeles Times

Gov. Brown unveils plan for global climate summit, further undercutting Trump’s agenda

Last month, Brown discussed climate change with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, an unusual level of engagement between the Chinese head of state and a governor. (Energy Secretary Rick Perry, by contrast, did not meet with Xi in a recent trip to China). “He wants to make clear that if you can’t look to Washington, you can look to California on progressive environmental policy,” said Ann Carlson, professor of environmental law at UCLA.

Featured Faculty: Ann Carlson

Who Is the Jon Snow of Climate Change?

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…

Featured: Katharine Davis Reich

Time

California’s Drought Is Over. But This Wildfire Season Will Still Be Severe

“In California, we are always going to have drought,” said Glen MacDonald, the John Muir Memorial Chair of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. “So we’ve had one good year of precipitation this year. This is no time to relax and exhale and assume that this has passed.” “This is the same thing with fire,” he said.

Featured Faculty: Glen MacDonald

Al Jazeera

As Trump ditches Paris, California leads on environment

Brown's meeting with Xi took place a mere five days after President Donald Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and according to Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at UCLA, this timing mattered. "Governor Brown is essentially signalling to the world that he is going to be the face of progressive climate policy in the United States," Carlson told Al Jazeera.

Featured Faculty: Ann Carlson

Will China Become a Leader in Clean Energy?

China’s leaders have a self-interest above all else to champion clean energy because of the high costs it has paid and continues to pay for the pollution caused during its economic boom, said Alex Wang, professor of law at UCLA.

Featured Faculty: Alex Wang

Yale Environment 360

Why the World’s Rivers Are Losing Sediment and Why It Matters

“Ten or twenty years ago most wetlands scientists in most places viewed sediment as a negative,” says Richard Ambrose, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Too much sediment would come in and bury the marsh. Now people realize sediment is a resource, and we need it to keep up with sea level rise.”

Featured Faculty: Richard Ambrose

The New York Times

The Extreme Heat to Come

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.

Featured Faculty: Alex Hall

San Gabriel Valley Tribune

Feds give $320,000 grant to group working on cooling LA County, reducing hot spots, heat-related deaths

If a second federal grant is awarded by end of summer, the group will have received the full $2 million to complete a four-year project that studies how heat events, in part caused by global climate change, affects the most vulnerable local communities identified in a previous UCLA study: the San Fernando Valley, Huntington Park and Sunland and others.

Featured Faculty: Aradhna Tripati

Twelve top US universities reaffirm commitment to climate change pact

“There’s a lot of power that subnational jurisdictions have over the sort of instruments and sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and if they’re willing to wield that power aggressively and ambitiously, they actually don’t need the federal government in order to do so”, said Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California Los Angeles.

Featured Faculty: Cara Horowitz