Got global warming?

If you don't get it, or even if you do, the Golden State's most brilliant minds are ready to help.

Beginning Monday, California is serving up a feast of global warming information, its Fifth Annual Climate Change Conference, with three days of speeches, panels and presentations streamed live on video. No state has done more to examine the causes, effects and possible adaptation to climate change than California, which enacted the nation's first and most stringent greenhouse gas control law.

At the Sacramento conference, more than 70 scientific researchers and policymakers will present their findings and analyses, focusing on issues with California-specific perspectives. Will the sea rise? Will species die out? Will agriculture suffer? Will water supplies dwindle?  Will forests burn? Experts from such institutions as the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the California Air Resources Board, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and a passel of universities will weigh in with the latest information.

Sunbathers take note: There is even a presentation on "Estimating the Potential Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Southern California Beaches."

Presentations can be downloaded from the website. And video of the conference will be archived on the climate conference website.

-- Margot Roosevelt

Image: Robert Neubecker / for the Los Angeles Times

Comments

[bc]

From what I am reading in article after article is we are now in a cooling phase. Wake up. The Farmers almanac has a good article on the cyclical phases that weather goes through. Now we can start driving again to drive the temperature back up. Has been a very cool summer in midwest following 2 very cold winters and calling for another.

[cinnamon barks]

"From what I am reading in article after article..."

Where would that be, exactly? I'm not seeing that alleged "cooling phase" in the scientific journals I'm reading (like "Nature," "Scientific American," and "Science"). What articles there are that explore this subject draw entirely different conclusions -- look at the melting of Arctic ice, and the recent calving of the ice shelf in Greenland.

You think that much ice melts in a cooling phase?

Stop relying on predigested versions of this information -- that is, don't have someone else do your thinking for you. Read the articles for yourself and then draw your own conclusions.

Try the IPCC report for starters: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm