Southwest Climate News

Colorado’s cutthroat trout live life on the edges, at high elevations and in isolated pockets other trout haven’t been able to reach. It appears to have toughened them up, according to a recent study looking at climate change’s impact on the species.

Beneath winter’s deep snows there is a secret world of frozen insects and amphibians in quasi-hibernation. Now, the subnivium, as scientists have dubbed it, is at risk from global warming.

Rocks tumbled down the nearly vertical slope as Todd Keeler-Wolf jumped, slid, clutched branches and crawled over crumbly rock and poison oak to reach what, to scientists, is a cliffside holy grail: the last living specimen of the magnificent ancient forests that once dominated the East Bay hills.

A poleward shift of the subtropical jet stream and warmer temperatures over the equatorial central Pacific will combine to make the powerful storms two to three times as likely by the last quarter of the century, according to scientists with the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Climate-sensitive economic sectors like agriculture and energy are already feeling the pinch of more extreme fluctuations in the weather, driven by global climate change, according to the World Meteorological Organization, which released its annual climate statement for 2012 last week.

Climate change is happening now, right here in Arizona, and if we fail to take control of our own energy and climate future, we will fail future generations of Arizonans by leaving them a state that barely resembles the one we know and love today.

A growing trove of scholarly studies, interviews with former Republican politicians and with leaders of the denial camp show a concerted public relations campaign to cast doubt on climate science.

When Daniel Wilson learned earlier this year that the state of California wants to bulldoze his family's pear orchard to build a giant Sacramento River water diversion, he and his brother were making a major new investment in the crop.

Jerry Meral, deputy secretary at the California Natural Resources Agency, said the tunnel plan - known technically as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP - won't ultimately help the delta.

A strange seabird hanging around the Farallon Islands has created quite a ruckus among scientists, who have identified the sleek, mostly white creature as a species of booby never seen before in this part of the world.