Contents

1.  Summary
2.  New Climate Action Team Report
3.  How Global Warming Could Affect California
4.  Call for Solutions
5.  New UCS Fact Sheets and Mini-Documentary Videos

Summary

By sending nearly 7,000 letters of support, UCS activists helped promote a groundbreaking new state report outlining a blueprint for aggressively reducing California’s global warming emissions. The report contains disturbing new information on the projected effects of global warming on California. It also highlights the importance of precedent-setting new state legislation created by UCS and others to reduce heat-trapping emissions. UCS Climate Scientist Amy Luers served on the team coordinating the work of more than thirty scientists who contributed to the report. The new findings are summed up in a series of “mini” documentary videos and fact sheets now available online.

New Climate Action Team Report

Thanks in part to pressure from UCS activists, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fully embraced the Climate Action Team (CAT) report and its recommendations for dramatically reducing the state’s global warming emissions. On April 4, he congratulated the team of scientists, economists, and policy experts who had contributed to the report by proclaiming that "The debate is over. The science is in. The time to act is now. Global warming is a serious issue facing the world and California has taken an historic step with the release of this report. We are all convinced that we can protect our environment and leave California a better place without harming our economy."

UCS played an important role in coordinating the scientists and economists who contributed to the report, which outlines technology and policy strategies to reduce the state’s emissions of global warming gases to 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020.

Main Scientific Findings: How Global Warming Could Affect California

The report concludes that if global warming emissions continue unchecked, temperatures could rise as much as 8-10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, having widespread impacts on the state including:

• Up to 90 percent loss of the Sierra snowpack, which is a major source of California’s water supply in the spring and summer months
• 50 percent rise in the frequency of large wildfires
• 75-85 percent increase in the number of days conducive to ozone formation
• Dramatic changes in California’s agriculture and forestry industries—as water supplies become less reliable, the productivity and quality in some crops decline due to higher temperatures, and the range and frequency of pest and disease outbreaks increase

Call for Solutions

The CAT report highlights the need for innovative new programs to reduce global warming emissions, such as new legislation written by UCS experts that, if implemented, will dramatically reduce global warming pollution from vehicles—the largest source of global warming emissions in California. Under this new program, as proposed in AB 2791, Californians buying clean new vehicles will receive a discount of up to $2,500. These discounts will be funded through one-time surcharges on the purchase of high-polluting new vehicles.

New UCS Fact Sheets and Mini-Documentary Videos

To help educate policymakers and the public about the main scientific findings in the new Climate Action Team Report, UCS will be releasing a mini-documentary series of frontline reports on global warming impacts in California. Highlighting California scientists, as well as some of the Californians most likely to be affected, the mini-documentary videos focus on the links between global warming and key impacts on health, agriculture, and wildfires. To learn more, visit www.climatechoices.org.