Matter of Degrees: How Hot It Gets Still Depends on Us
Author’s prologue
Author’s prologue
Janet Napolitano and I met in her office in downtown Oakland on the afternoon of November 4, 2016, just four days before Hillary Rodham Clinton was thwarted in her attempt to make history by becoming the first woman president of the United States of America.
Some people thought that Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona and Secretary of Homeland Security in the first Obama administration, might herself have been a candidate for the White House. Instead, she became the first woman president of the University of California in 2013.
The decision by Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration to lift mandatory water restrictions is good news for any Californian who likes to raise petunias and zucchini and take showers lasting longer than three minutes. But is it really a good idea? After all, last winter’s greatly hyped and much-anticipated El Niño turned out to be something of a bust.
Posted on May 27, 2016 - 2:52pm
The recent rains have blunted the psychological impact of California’s four-year drought, washing down the streets, perking up the landscaping, and heightening anticipation for a stormy El Nino-driven winter. We know, however, that one wet year is highly unlikely to end water shortages. What we may not fully grasp is that the damage done to the state’s forests is so far reaching that it may be permanent.
Posted on November 12, 2015 - 10:31am
As the 2015 enrollment data shows, the real UC Berkeley is an extremely diverse place. But UC Berkeley as depicted on television? Not so much.
TV Land has been slow to surrender its use of Berkeley as code for Birkenstock-wearing, bean-sprout-loving, radical feminist tree-huggers. Only a few shows are acknowledging the contemporary reality of an institution perennially ranked at or near the top of the public universities worldwide.
Posted on August 10, 2015 - 1:03pm
Enacting one of the toughest vaccine mandates in the country, California Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill to require virtually all California school children to be vaccinated against potentially deadly diseases—or be home-schooled.
Posted on June 25, 2015 - 10:58am
As a UC Berkeley School of Public Health emeritus professor specializing in infectious diseases, John Swartzberg knows viruses as well as other people know their lapdogs. So when he gets concerned about a bug, so should you. And right now he’s pretty concerned about measles.
Posted on January 27, 2015 - 3:42pm
It’s being called a treacherous game of chicken. A brutal chess match in which students are pawns. A battle for the soul of public higher education in California.
Whatever it is, it isn’t over yet.
Posted on November 20, 2014 - 5:44pm
Steven Shladover thinks that you, my human friend, are an excellent driver—and that fact makes his job exceptionally difficult. That is because Shladover, program manager at UC Berkeley’s Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH), has spent 40 years researching automated vehicle systems. The Holy Grail of this field is the self-driving car: the artificially intelligent chauffeur that promises to one day relieve us of our driving duties. If recent media accounts are to be believed, this sci-fi dream may be right around the corner, but the veteran Shladover is not so sure.
Way back in 1986—when it was still Morning in America and women wore padded shoulders and men slathered on so much hair gel their coiffures looked molded in aspic—a citizen referendum passed in California that foreshadowed the current Era of Open Data. Ever since, Proposition 65 has required companies with more than 10 employees to post notices about carcinogenic compounds found on site, and granted private citizen the right to sue businesses that don’t prominently display the requisite warnings.
Posted on January 17, 2014 - 12:32pm