Wildfire smoke now accounts for up to half of all fine-particle pollution in the Western U.S., according to a new study that blames climate change for worsening air quality and health risks in both urban and rural communities in recent years.
California wildfires could upend years of progress fighting air pollution [San Francisco Chronicle]
Jan. 14 Wildfires in the western United States have exacerbated pollution enough to threaten decades of progress toward sustaining cleaner skies, according to new research underscoring one of the alarming ways that climate change can harm public health.
The findings from researchers at Stanford University and UC San Diego show that wildfire smoke is now responsible for as much as half of the fine-particulate air pollution in western states. That’s about double the level that smoke accounted for in the mid-2000s, according to the paper published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wildfire smoke now accounts for up to half of all fine-particle pollution in the Western U.S., according to a new study that blames climate change for worsening air quality and health risks in both urban and rural communities in recent years.
The study by researchers at Stanford University and UC Sa
California wildfires could upend years of progress fighting air pollution sfchronicle.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sfchronicle.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Climate change caused one-third of historical flood damages
In a new study, Stanford researchers report that intensifying precipitation contributed one-third of the financial costs of flooding in the United States over the past three decades, totaling almost $75 billion of the estimated $199 billion in flood damages from 1988 to 2017.
The research, published Jan. 11 in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to resolve a long-standing debate about the role of climate change in the rising costs of flooding and provides new insight into the financial costs of global warming overall.
“The fact that extreme precipitation has been increasing and will likely increase in the future is well known, but what effect that has had on financial damages has been uncertain,” said lead author Frances Davenport, a PhD student in Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “Our analysis allows us to is