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.

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.

California's strict limits on diesel air pollution appear to have paid off. Since the limits were added in 1990, diesel exhaust-related deaths have been halved, with the largest reductions in deaths seen in lower-income communities, a new study finds. "Everybody benefits from cleaner air, but we see time and again that it's predominantly lower-income communities of color that are living and working in close proximity to sources of air pollution, like freight yards, highways and ports. When you target these sources, it's the highly exposed communities that stand to benefit most," said study author Dr. Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

California's electricity prices are among the highest in the country, new research says, and those costs are falling disproportionately on a customer base that's already struggling to pay their bills. PG&E customers pay about 80% more per kilowatt-hour than the national average, according to a study by the energy institute at UC Berkeley's Haas Business School with the nonprofit think tank Next 10. "California's retail prices are out of line with utilities across the country," said UC Berkeley assistant professor and study co-author Meredith Fowlie, citing Hawaii and some New England states among the outliers with even higher rates. "And they're increasing."

Climate-induced sea-level rise, along with natural and human-induced subsidence is causing coastal communities to experience sea-level rise four times faster than the global average. In a study published in 2018, Manoochehr Shirzaei at Arizona State University and Roland Bürgmann at the University of California, Berkeley show that major portions of San Francisco Bay's shoreline are sinking faster than the sea is rising. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

California's electricity prices are growing so high that they threaten the state's ability to convince enough people to ditch fossil fuel-powered cars and appliances, new research says. The state's electric rates are now two to three times what it costs to provide power, a paper released by the energy institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and the nonprofit think tank Next 10 reported. Severin Borenstein, a UC Berkeley energy economist who spearheaded the paper, said he's concerned that California is saddling its electric rates with too many things that are divorced from the direct cost of powering homes and businesses. The state could end up in a situation where electric rates are "vastly higher than the true cost of using electricity," Borenstein said. "At the same time, we're going to have rates that are going to be so high that it will be a huge discouragement to using electricity for things that we need people to adopt if we're going to decarbonize the economy."

President Joe Biden and his administration want to recalibrate the "social cost of carbon," a metric used to inform public policy decision making by putting a price on the non-market impacts of carbon emissions on the environment and human health. In a new paper, a group of researchers in the fields of economics, ethics and environmental science offered a series of recommendations for the revision process. "Economic analysis is at the heart of the regulatory process in the U.S. and will therefore play a major role in shaping and informing the ambitious climate goals from the new administration," said David Anthoff, study co-author and assistant professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. "Our recommendations offer a roadmap for how this can be done in a way that is both scientifically rigorous and transparent."

A new study published this week in the journal Nature shows that while human-controlled freshwater sources make up a minimal portion of the world's ponds, lakes, and rivers, they are responsible more than half of all changes to the Earth's water system. Using NASA's ICESat-2 satellite, researchers monitored more than 227,000 bodies of freshwater–ranging in size from the Great Lakes to tiny ponds over period spanning roughly a year and a half. Researchers found that 57% of global seasonal water storage variability occurs in human-controlled reservoirs. "This large proportion is even more striking when one considers that reservoirs only account for 3.9% of the 227,386 lakes analyzed in this study," said UC Berkeley professor Sarah Cooley, the study's lead author. "While the water cycle is generally portrayed as a natural process, our finding that humans are responsible for the majority of seasonal surface water storage variability shows that we are now a key regulator of the water cycle."

In the struggle to survive the ever hotter deserts of California, there are winners and losers.

Air pollution killed more Indians last year than any other risk factor, and Delhi is among the most polluted cities in the country. But the burden is unequally shared. Children from poor families in Delhi spend more of their lives outdoors. Their families are more likely to use wood-burning stoves, which create soot. They can't afford the air filters that have become ubiquitous in middle-class homes. And often, they don't even think much about air pollution, because they face more pressing threats, like running out of food. Joshua Apte, a pollution scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped with The New York Times study's research design, showing that pollution can shave years off a child's life.

The Bay Area's popular commuter corridors are also generators of carbon dioxide and micro pollutants. So what happened when COVID-19 forced most commuters off the road and into their homes? "...We saw this incredible change. The amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere in the Bay Area was 25% lower in that period than just before the lockdown six weeks before," says UC Berkeley professor Ron Cohen. "So we've been thinking about this as a model for the electric car." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. A story on this topic also appeared in Science Daily.

As wildfires get bigger, more frequent and more dangerous, experts predict there will be no easing off unless the state and federal government spend billions of dollars on forest management, a reversal of decades-long policies of forest preservation. Listen as UC Berkeley professor of fire science, Scott Stephens joins other experts in talking about how to reduce fires in the coming years.

The best available science suggests that before Europeans arrived in California, wildfires claimed from 4.4 to 12 million acres annually. Native Americans knew to regularly burn their environment. "On reflection, anthropogenic burning is higher than what we had for the lower estimate," said the lead author of that paper, Scott Stevens of UC Berkeley. "You talk to Native American elders and they say they burned oak woodlands every 2-3 years."