Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
January 22, 2009
5. Agencies, Programs, People –
Levee leaking, but not in danger of breaching (9:26 a.m.)
PPIC says new public works financing needed
Seasons change -- earlier than before, study says
The hottest and coldest days of the year come roughly two days sooner than they did 50 years ago, according to a study published in Nature. The change coincides with the rise in global temperatures.
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Levee leaking, but not in danger of breaching (9:26 a.m.)
Don Strickland, a California Department of Water Resources spokesman, said state officials have been out to inspect the levee at Upper Jones Tract and do not believe it will fail again.
Most levees that have been repaired generally leak "to a more or lesser degree," Strickland said. It is not uncommon for levees to seep to a certain extent.
Strickland said DWR will continue to inspect and monitor the levee.#
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090122/A_NEWS/90122010
PPIC says new public works financing needed
By Dan Walters
California may need a half-trillion dollars to expand and upgrade transportation systems, schools, water delivery and other infrastructure during the next 20 years but the state's system for financing public works is "seriously flawed," the Public Policy Institute of California says in a new report.
With constraints on taxes, including super-majority votes in the Legislature and among local voters, state and local governments rely on general obligation bonds whose repayment must compete with other claims on public treasuries. But, PPIC's report says, GO bonds are a "mixed blessing" and repaying the large amounts of money needed for infrastructure are beyond the capacity of state and local budgets without alternative financing.
"The Obama administration may include funding for state infrastructure projects in an economic stimulus package," Ellen Hanak, PPIC research director and author of the report, said in a statement accompanying its release. "But
Lowering the vote threshold on local school bonds from two-thirds to 55 percent resulted in a dramatic increase of voter passage and the report suggests, among other steps, that the same change occur on other local government bond issues as well. Another step proposed in the report is to return to reliance on user fees, such as gasoline taxes.#
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/018725.html
Seasons change -- earlier than before, study says
The hottest and coldest days of the year come roughly two days sooner than they did 50 years ago, according to a study published in Nature. The change coincides with the rise in global temperatures.
By Catherine Ho
The seasons begin two days earlier than they did 50 years ago, a shift that may be related to human activity, according to researchers at UC Berkeley and
The season skewing means that the hottest and coldest days of the year come about two days sooner than they did 50 years ago, according to a study published in the Jan. 22 edition of the journal Nature. The study also found that the difference between average winter and summer temperatures shrank in the same 50-year span, indicating winters are heating up faster than summers.
The change coincides with the rise in global temperatures, which could suggest a link to human-induced global warming, said Alexander Stine, the study's first author and a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Department of Earth & Planetary Science.
"The pattern that we see suggests there's a relationship between global warming and the shifting of the seasons," Stine said.
Earlier seasons could affect farming, rainfall distribution, water supplies and the diversity of ecosystems, said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
"When you see a shift like this, or what appears to be the beginning of a shift, it's yet another red flag about the potential implications of humans fiddling with the climate," he said.
An earlier spring could lengthen wildfire season in Western states and affect the availability of water resources, said Stephanie McAfee, a PhD student at the
"We rely on water that falls as snow in the mountains that melts and delivers water to our reservoirs," she said. "The earlier that snow starts to melt, the less of a buffer we have."
Stine worked with Peter Huybers, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, and Inez Fung, professor of atmospheric science at UC Berkeley. They studied global surface temperature measurements from 1850 through 1953, and 1954 through 2007. In the first period, land temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere peaked around July 21; in the later period, they peaked 1.7 days earlier.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-climate22-2009jan22,0,5529316.story?track=rss
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