News Archive

February 20, 2020 — A long-feared scenario in which global warming causes Arctic permafrost to melt and release enough greenhouse gas to accelerate warming and cause catastrophe probably won’t happen. Researchers conclude that even if methane is released from permafrost, very little actually reaches the atmosphere.

January 13, 2020 — New research from the University of California San Diego finds that solar geoengineering—the intentional reflection of sunlight away from the Earth’s surface—may reduce income inequality between countries.

December 2, 2019 — UC San Diego professor and world-renowned composer Lei Liang wins the 2020 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his orchestral work that both evokes the realities of climate change and offers the enduring potential for healing.

October 31, 2018 — New research shows for the first time how the changing climate in Asia, from 5,000 to 1,000 years ago, transformed people’s ability to produce food in particular places. The computer model simulates crop failures and enables the co-authors to get at the causes of some dramatic historic and cultural changes.

September 24, 2018 — For the first time, researchers have developed a data set quantifying what the social cost of carbon—the measure of the economic harm from carbon dioxide emissions—will be for each of the globe’s nearly 200 countries, and the results are surprising.

August 27, 2018 — The State of California today released California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, which details new information on the impacts of climate change and provides planning tools to support the state’s response. Among the assessment’s warnings are that two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches could completely disappear and the average area burned by wildfires could nearly double by 2100. Dan Cayan, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, served as editor-in-chief of the assessment and researchers from Scripps and California Sea Grant contributed to several of its technical and summary reports.

August 5, 2018 — New research in climate science indicates that extreme events, such as heat waves, the collapse of major ice sheets, and mass extinctions are becoming dramatically more probable. Though cuts in rising emissions appear unlikely with the stalled 2015 Paris agreement, University of California San Diego scientists argue that new developments present an opportunity to shift the politics around climate change. For the first time, scientists can make a strong case that no one is exempt from the extreme and immediate risks posed by a warming world.

October 30, 2017 — On the eve of international climate talks taking place in Bonn, Germany, a new study led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego evaluates the extent to which parties to the historic Paris Agreement on climate have considered the oceans in their plans to address climate change. The study shows that while many countries include the oceans, a striking number do not.

June 19, 2017 — Can the continental United States make a rapid, reliable and low-cost transition to an energy system that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar and hydroelectric power? While there is growing excitement for this vision, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by 21 of the nation’s leading energy experts, including David G. Victor and George R. Tynan from the University of California San Diego, describes a more complicated reality.

May 26, 2017 — Unusually warm nights can harm human sleep, researchers show, and the poor and the elderly are most affected. Rising temperatures could make sleep loss more severe.