Climate & Sustainability
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‘Godzilla’ El Niño: A Climate Scientist Explains What Could Happen in Terms of Surf, Snow, and Coastal Erosion
But Patrick Barnard, Research Director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience, urges caution. How El Niños behave in the era of climate change is increasingly difficult to predict, and future events may not mirror the patterns of the past.
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What could Santa Cruz’s disappearing sand mean for its iconic beaches and surf breaks?
Patrick Barnard, research director at UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience, said each approach has tradeoffs. At Its Beach and Lighthouse Point, nature-based solutions may be difficult because the beach is already so narrow, he said. Meanwhile, hard structures like seawalls tend to accelerate beach erosion. “If you want to have a beach…
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‘The warming trend nearly doubled after 2014’: The rate of global warming has accelerated more in the past decade than ever before
Robert Lund, a statistician at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also agrees there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming, but was less sure if we’re experiencing an accelerated warming rate.
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Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds
Claudie Beaulieu, a climate scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz, said the findings imply that the window for limiting warming even to 2C above preindustrial levels would “narrow substantially” if faster warming persists. “An important caveat, however, is that the acceleration may prove temporary,” said Beaulieu, who has published on the topic but…
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Seymour Studios goes live with new community science podcast
The center’s new podcast, “Science, Solutions, Santa Cruz,” debuted Tuesday, marking the first production to come out of Seymour Studios, a newly built, state-of-the-art recording space located on UC Santa Cruz’s Coastal Science Campus. It was designed to make professional audio and video storytelling accessible to people across the community who lack the technical experience…
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California mountain lions are now considered ‘threatened.’ But only in certain regions
“If we want to maintain mountain lion populations in these coastal regions, then we’ve got some work to do,” said Chris Wilmers, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and lead investigator of the Santa Cruz Puma Project.
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What one company’s shift towards data centers says about Imperial County’s lithium industry
Chris Benner, a professor of sociology and environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, comments on challenges to Imperial County’s emerging lithium industry.
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Climate action moves forward despite Trump’s policy rollbacks. Will it be enough?
In addition to making current methods of travel more efficient, changes in the transportation sector could include providing the public with better options, said Anne Criss, director of climate and sustainability initiatives at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering.
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Fishing vessels as sentinels of ocean health
“We found that the location of fishing vessels accurately revealed how heat waves impact target species. The tuna mirrored the fishing vessels: shifting north and inshore during The Blob but remaining in place during the following marine heat waves.” – By Heather Welch is a marine ecologist at UC Santa Cruz who uses big data…
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Rare Mountain Lion Standoff in San Francisco Ends Peacefully After a 30-Hour Search
“Males will often travel far out,” says Chris Wilmers, an ecologist at UC Santa Cruz and the lead researcher of the Santa Cruz Puma Project. “They’re essentially trying to find a vacant territory, and the Santa Cruz Mountains are pretty trapped in by development on all sides. They wander, and they keep going, and they…
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California’s iconic Highway 1 is fighting a losing battle against climate change. Can it survive?
“If our storm and other conditions were normal, we would expect closures and losses at some points,” said Michael Beck, director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience.
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Community unites to sustainably restore Santa Cruz’s iconic blue whale skeleton
The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Marco Rolandi’s lab, Halon Entertainment, and swellcycle are teaming up to restore and preserve Ms. Blue, an iconic blue whale skeleton.