WACD Reading List

Last week, a “thousand-year” heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest and adjacent British Columbia with widespread highs topping 100 degrees, resulting in a death toll in the hundreds. The Canadian province’s Lytton climbed to 121 degrees and established new national records three days in a row before the town burned in heat-intensified wildfires. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday that the heat wave helped the United States clinch its hottest June on record. Eight states had their hottest Junes, including Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah.

Extreme climate change has arrived in America

Scandinavian societies of the first millennium adapted their farming practices to volcano-driven climate changes.

But this record-setting heat wave’s remarkable power, size and unusually early appearance is giving meteorologists and climate experts yet more cause for concern about the routinization of extreme weather in an era of climate change. These sprawling, persistent high-pressure zones popularly called “heat domes” are relatively common in later summer months. This current system is different.

It's a tough time to be a young person. COVID-19 has robbed many of them of experiences and plans. Their unemployment rate remains high. College enrollment is down. To address those concerns and bolster preparedness for a warming world, President Biden wants to retool and relaunch one of the country's most celebrated government programs: the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Human-caused climate change was putting humanity’s future in peril, she said in recorded remarks. Survival would depend on Earth’s original carbon-capture machines, the most effective tools for getting rid of greenhouse gases. People needed to find new ways to grow plants — and soon.

Once officially launched, AIM for Climate will catalyze greater investment in agricultural R&D and innovation to help to raise global ambition and underpin more rapid and transformative climate action in all countries, including by enabling science-based and data-driven decision and policy-making.

It was clear humans were warming the planet for some time -- now we have official confirmation.

SB 5126 passed out of the Senate Ways and Means Committee last night, bringing one of the legislature’s most ambitious pieces of climate legislation ever considered one step closer to enactment. The bill creates a system referred to as “cap and invest” where funds generated from auctioning the rights or licenses to create carbon emissions will be invested into capital infrastructure. In the case of the current bill, this would equal between $272m and $551m per year dedicated to transportation infrastructure starting in FY 2023.

With nearly two-thirds of the United States abnormally dry or worse, the government’s spring forecast offers little hope for relief, especially in the West where a devastating megadrought has taken root and worsened.

The media is full of stories suggesting that global warming has greatly reduced the mountain snowpack in the Pacific Northwest...Yes, there are some random, low snow-depth years (like 2015), but no trend is apparent during the period when global warming has been greatest.

Water scarcity is baking cropland and ramping up wildfire risk from California to Texas

With over 59 million acres of Native-operated farms across over 30 states within the United States, Tribal Nations and Native producers are perhaps the single most underappreciated resource for sustainable, rural economic development in the U.S.

With nearly two-thirds of the United States abnormally dry or worse, the government’s spring forecast offers little hope for relief, especially in the West where a devastating megadrought has taken root and worsened.

Could randomly selected Washingtonians from all walks of life come up with something better? That’s what the Washington Climate Assembly is hoping to find out.

Rising temperatures and lack of rain threaten to decrease water supplies and bring more wildfires this summer and in the years to come.

New research suggests mountain snowpack in the Cascades is among the most vulnerable in the U.S. to the effects of climate change.

The climate crisis is affecting our planet to such an extent, summers in the Northern Hemisphere could last half the year by 2100, scientists have warned.

From country towns to South Seattle, activists say the government must listen to long-marginalized communities that feel climate change’s biggest impacts.

Producers could see three new revenue streams from climate mitigation, he said. They were income from carbon markets, from conversion of agricultural waste into products ranging from chemicals to fabrics, and capture of methane from manure for use as a renewable fuel.

From floods to wildfires, mapping programs in Cascadia are showing scientists which communities face higher risk.

U.S. agriculture faces a triple imperative — market, environment, and income — in responding to climate change, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday, his first day on the job. “We don’t have a day to waste on this,” he told reporters while indicating that the USDA will move at deliberate speed to identify and support successful mitigation practices.

“A lot of these practices, while they may be good, aren’t always free or they require some investment or they require some new knowledge,” said Bonnie.

With the resolution of a disputed election in New York State, the House Agriculture Committee is ready for action with climate change as its top issue. “Everything will tie into climate change,” says the committee chief of staff, and the first hearing of the year will focus on climate change’s impact on agriculture.