Wildfires and climate change are locked in a vicious circle: Fires worsen climate change, and climate change worsens fires. Last week, wildfire smoke prompted another round of unhealthy air quality in California. Fires in Oregon and Northern California sent smoke into Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Research and funding priorities tend to shift from one disaster to the next, which has resulted in a sparse evidence base and hampers the nation’s ability to respond to public health emergencies in the most effective way, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Less than two months into the new year, there have already been more than 60 mass shootings in the United States and 5,103 people killed by gun violence, including the January shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay.
Dr. Akihiro Nishi, UCLA Fielding School assistant professor of epidemiology, will serve as co-principal investigator on a $1 million National Science Foundation project to improve pandemic preparedness.
Aldama Elementary School PTA president, Kamren Curiel, bent down to a shaded asphalt area outside the fence of the school's playground and pressed the trigger on an infrared thermometer.
"Right now, it's 104 because we're in a shaded space on asphalt," Curiel said of the reading.
"But I put it down on that rubber surface today at 12," she said, pointing to the ground around the playground jungle gym. "And it was 168. Which is ... unbelievable."
A nearly two-decade effort by Californians to cut their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide may have been erased by a single, devastating year of wildfires, according to UCLA and University of Chicago researchers.
UCLA scientists are embarking on a comprehensive, five-year study to understand the health consequences of what is, to this day, the nation’s largest natural gas blowout. From 2015-16, an estimated 109,000 metric tons of methane was released into the air from the Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon underground gas storage facility in the San Fernando Valley.
On Nov. 1, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health awarded roughly $21 million to UCLA to conduct a wide-ranging assessment of the disaster.
A team of UCLA researchers has been awarded $20,993,333 by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to conduct the Aliso Canyon Disaster Health Research Study.
CLIMATE CHANGE CONTINUES to wreak havoc on the health of the planet and its inhabitants. “This is an escalating health emergency,” says Dr.