If everyone on the planet hypothetically stopped eating meat, the shift wouldn't just reduce new emissions. A new study calculates that if animal agriculture was phased out, it would also unlock substantial "negative emissions," helping shrink greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so dramatically that the world could reach net zero emissions for decades even if other pollution continued unabated. The study, coauthored by Stanford University biochemistry professor emeritus Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics and development at UC Berkeley, calculates the climate impacts of different scenarios in the food system, including what would happen if the world phased out animal agriculture over the next 15 years. This story appeared in several media outlets. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Wildfire risk reduction in California is a climate conundrum. In early 2021, the state set a goal of reducing wildfire risk on a million acres of forest per year through prescribed burning and forest thinning. However, thinning treatments lower the forest's capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the harvested smaller, low-value trees are typically burned or left to decay, which releases even more carbon. In a study published early this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, provide a possible path to limiting both carbon emissions and wildfires by turning the low-value wood harvested during forest thinning into new products.

An all-season "smart roof" coating keeps homes warm during the winter and cool during the summer, without using natural gas or electricity, a study published Thursday in the journal Science found. The technology, called temperature-adaptive radiative coating, outperformed currently available commercial cool-roof systems in energy savings in cities representing 15 different climate zones across the continental United States, the researchers said. With temperature-adaptive radiative coating installed, the average household in the United States could save up to 10 percent of electricity consumption annually, researchers said."Our all-season roof coating automatically switches from keeping you cool to warm, depending on outdoor air temperature," study co-author Junqiao Wu said. "This is energy-free, emission-free air conditioning and heating, all in one device, said Wu, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Each degree Celsius of warming will erase 1.2 percent of the United States GDP, according to Solomon Hsiang, a climate scientist and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-director of the research group Climate Impact Lab. If U.S. companies do not act now to halt climate emissions, Hsiang predicts a loss of up to 10.5 percent of annual GDP, which equates to approximately $2.2 trillion per year. Most organizations do not understand the gravity of the need to address emissions now. Businesses across industries and throughout the world are facing an existential threat that can no longer be ignored. It's time to address the impact of rapidly accelerating climate change in the corporate sector. The effect of harmful emissions on the bottom line can't be overstated.

The Morning Show with Nikki Medoro speaks with UC Berkeley's city and regional planning professor Zachary Lamb about how cities along the coast can protect themselves from the coming ravages of climate change. 

Scott Stephens, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkeley and co-director of Berkeley Forests, joins SHORT WAVE, the daily science podcast from NPR with an urgent message: They've been here 1,500 years, and each tree maybe survived 60, 70, 80 fires. That's incredible. And then one fire comes in 2020. And all of a sudden, they're gone. That is a travesty. Unless we see some regeneration at some of these sites, my goodness, you're not going to see sequoia here.

University of California experts recently gathered for a wildfire symposium where they discussed new technology created to assist in wildfire events and the overall understanding of wildfires in the state. John Battles, professor and researcher at UC Berkeley, discussed the role that climate plays in wildfire behavior. "Even in the most optimistic future conditions, temperature is going to continue to increase through time," Battles said. He said the consequence for fire is that it creates a huge influx of surface fuels as dead trees fall. "The major concern is that this new surface fuel load can actually create new fire behavior … fire behavior we haven't seen before," Battles said. "Where we have these large massive heavy fuels that burn for days and create new fire physics."

As the Arctic warms and previously barren land turns green, a team of Berkeley scientists has come up with a way to calculate the magnitude of change. Led by assistant environmental science, policy, and management professor Trevor Keenan, who has a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the researchers have found that 16 percent of the land that used to be too cold for extensive plant growth is now warm enough for vegetation. By 2100, they estimate that only 20 percent of the northern hemisphere's vegetated land will be hampered by cold temperatures. "Although the greening might sound like good news as it means more carbon uptake and biomass production, it represents a major disruption to the delicate balance in cold ecosystems," Professor Keenan says. This story originated at Berkeley News.

The 1972 Clean Water Act led to significant improvements in water quality nationwide, according to a new study co-authored by Berkeley and Iowa State University researchers. The most comprehensive study of its kind to date, it analyzed 50 million water quality measurements from 240,000 monitoring sites between 1962 and 2001, determining that most of 25 water pollution measures had improved, and 12 percent more rivers were safe for fishing after the bill's enactment. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

An analysis of the New York Times' coverage of climate change since 1980 reveals that the paper has poorly presented the basic facts that could persuade skeptics that the problem is real, that it's happening now, that the changes will be permanent, and that humans are responsible for it. "If The New York Times isn't doing it, my guess is that it is just not happening across print journalism," says earth and planetary science professor David Romps, who co-authored the paper with Jean Retzinger, former associate director of Berkeley's Media Studies program. "One of the hopes is that, by at least pointing this out, it might occur to people to take a look at what kind of context is provided in news coverage of climate change." As an example of the poor coverage, the researchers found that only 4 percent of the paper's climate change stories mentioned that there's a scientific consensus on the issue, with 99 percent of scientists in agreement. "The notion that there is a scientific consensus has been referred to as a gateway belief by people who study how the public thinks about climate change," Professor Romps says. "They find that, if you can get people to understand that fact, it kind of pries the door open and makes them open to learning more and potentially changing their minds." This story originated at Berkeley News.

An analysis of the New York Times' coverage of climate change since 1980 reveals that the paper has poorly presented the basic facts that could persuade skeptics that the problem is real, that it's happening now, that the changes will be permanent, and that humans are responsible for it. "If The New York Times isn't doing it, my guess is that it is just not happening across print journalism," says earth and planetary science professor David Romps, who co-authored the paper with Jean Retzinger, former associate director of Berkeley's Media Studies program. "One of the hopes is that, by at least pointing this out, it might occur to people to take a look at what kind of context is provided in news coverage of climate change." As an example of the poor coverage, the researchers found that only 4 percent of the paper's climate change stories mentioned that there's a scientific consensus on the issue, with 99 percent of scientists in agreement. "The notion that there is a scientific consensus has been referred to as a gateway belief by people who study how the public thinks about climate change," Professor Romps says. "They find that, if you can get people to understand that fact, it kind of pries the door open and makes them open to learning more and potentially changing their minds." This story originated at Berkeley News.

Most plastics advertised as "biodegradable" aren't all that degradable. In fact, researchers estimate that most of these supposedly eco-friendly plastics end up in landfills and last just as long as forever plastics. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new method for composting biodegradable plastics -- one that actually works. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

The science of climate change is more solid and widely agreed upon than you might think. But the scope of the topic, as well as rampant disinformation, can make it hard to separate fact from fiction. A 2017 study found that the poorest one-third of counties, which are concentrated in the South, will experience damages totaling as much as 20% of gross domestic product, while others, mostly in the northern part of the country, will see modest economic gains. Solomon Hsiang, an economist at University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of the study, has said that climate change "may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country's history." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

As climate change leads to warmer winters, many tropical plants and animals are moving north, according to a new study appearing this week in the journal Global Change Biology. "Quite a few mosquito species are expanding northward, as well as a lot of forestry pests: bark beetles, the southern mountain pine beetle," said Caroline Williams, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the paper. "In our study, we were really focusing on that boundary in the U.S. where we get that quick tropical-temperate transition. Changes in winter conditions are one of the major, if not the major, drivers of shifting distributions." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.