Lawrence Culver

“Unprecedented flooding is quickly becoming a fact of life in some Southern California coastal communities… Hot water takes up more room than colder water, causing sea levels to rise.” This week maximum sea levels are nearly 2 feet higher than normal. www.latimes.com/california/s...

“I worry about loss of life and about our inability to be protected when we need our government the most”… “The risks are but a taste of what’s to come as the world warms. “If this is a real test”, of a hotter, more precarious future, we’re going to flunk”. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A Kelvin wave in California and king tides in Florida, both causing flooding: “Sea level rise has drastically increased the probability of coastal flooding in Miami, where sea level has increased by about 1.12 feet since 1931…Since 1994, sea level rise has accelerated, increasing by about 8 inches.”

“This is an idiotic project…Literally all of life on Earth evolved based on the rhythm of day and night and there is a ton of data showing that messing with this is not a good idea.” “The proposal for 50,000 of these satellite mirrors is crazy...” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Dangerous flooding is happening in the Southwest, the Four Corners, and on the Navajo Nation, and all of it may be just a taste of all the El Niño-related precipitation to come in the region.

A taste of what Southern Californians can expect with El Niño, videos showed drenched people pushing strollers through the flooded park while twinkling lights and cheerful music played [and] people wading through Frontierland as a cast member tried to unclog a drain. www.latimes.com/lifestyle/st...

Gift article: The California housing crisis, college edition: “When universities spend decades ceding their undergraduate housing market to nearby landlords while the student population grows, they lose control. Eventually, it becomes a crisis.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/b...

She arrived in the American West an enslaved person brought by Mormon settlers, but successfully petitioned a California court to recognize her freedom. At the end of her life she was an LA real estate magnate—and much more deeply entwined with LA history than General Pershing ever was.

Sun @ 2pm: "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West" at the Homestead Museum -> www.homesteadmuseum.org/event-detail... "Born in bondage, #BiddyMason endured one of the longest forced migrations in American history—3,000 miles on foot from GA -> CA."

“Severe heat killed more than 50,000 people in European cities and towns this summer, according to peer-reviewed estimates released by scientists in London on Friday.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/c...

the cuyahoga river.

Gift article: The place that became the first Superfund site is still producing nightmares: “This was how Ms. Hawk and Mr. Bradley learned that they had been letting their 3-year-old daughter play in a yard contaminated by Thorium-232 and other radioactive isotopes.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/n...

In 1950 “1,450 glaciers were threaded throughout the mountains of the American west, providing cool water for ecosystems and agriculture… The total area of glaciers in the west has shrunk by a third, and 300 of these glaciers have functionally disappeared.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Information on slavery, climate change, and Indigenous history removed from another national park: “The removed signs reflected “the good stuff.” “These signs don’t say 96% of Wabanaki people died from smallpox, or there were 26 nations and now there’s four.” apnews.com/article/nati...

“Gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.” John Wesley Powell, 1893

This metaphor is ridiculously obvious and unsubtle. Fire the writers. They're hacks.

“What is happening on the peninsula represents a defeat in a decades-old battle against the sea…leaving multiple homes falling into the ocean, much of the historic Long Beach boardwalk destroyed, and the seawall exposed for the first time in living memory.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

A “persistent myth of climate discourse is the idea that trying to stop the planet from becoming a charred hellscape is antithetical to the affordability of life’s basic needs. Have you seen charred hellscapes? They tend to be short on essentials, and shortages usually make things more expensive.”

“We’re in a crisis…Our beaches are eroding and our wildfire risk is very high.” Ideal California beach town San Clemente, a “Spanish Village by the Sea,” finds that “the factors that make it such a desirable place to live and play also bring immense risks for destruction—sometimes simultaneously.”

Gift article: The new report “illustrates in unsettling detail just how quickly the climate is being reshaped…how a changing climate could threaten beloved ways of life in California, such as skiing in the Sierra Nevada and going to the beach.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/u...

“The insurance didn’t cover much of anything…The government agencies are not really doing what they’re supposed to do.” “To find out that your own country can’t even do what it has historically done for other survivors of disasters, that’s very disheartening.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

BREAKING: Arizona has joined a lawsuit by Nevada over the Trump administration's plan to impose major water cutbacks. Top official Tom Buschatzke says the cuts in the state's Colorado River water allotment “would devastate Arizona’s economy.” www.latimes.com/environment/... @latimes.com

Rogério Renato Mateucci, the rector of a private Brazilian university died Friday afternoon in a freak accident while on a walking tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s historic Taliesin West home in Scottsdale. www.azfamily.com/2026/10/17/b...

Much of California’s coastline was developed during an unusually “calm climate period”…”People built on the cliffs, they built on the bluffs, they built on the dunes.” Now more volatile weather has returned, threatening beaches, real estate, and more. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“This is a glimpse of our future,” said former California Coastal Commission Director Jack Ainsworth. “This is it. It’s here.”

The dams “could collectively endanger as many as 1.5 million people and cause more than $265 billion in economic damage. Disasters are rare. But when they do occur, like in Oroville, or the 1928 collapse of St. Francis dam northwest of LA—they can be catastrophic.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

“Chaparral’s ability to quickly regrow has enabled a quick fire return in the Santa Monica Mtns. But so many back-to-back ignitions are jeopardizing the ecosystem’s long-term viability—and making it even more fire-prone as invasive plants squeeze out native species.” www.latimes.com/environment/...

Wow

Pretty sure I already sat through an associate provost’s slide deck read-through on this last week

“This is a story with villains – the greedy fossil fuel companies wrecking the planet and sticking Americans with the bill... Frustrated voters are hungry to see politicians fighting for them, and the climate fight presents a real opportunity to show them that.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Terrifying new research out of Hawaii finds wildfire survivors have high amounts of toxic metals in their urine up to 18 months after the fire. Additional research out of LA County belatedly finds insane levels of lead in the Eaton fire smoke plume: www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Gift article: “The catastrophe…only ended when the rivers said so… What people came to realize during the Great Flood was that a river is not what we can see on any given day. A river is wherever it has been and could return to again.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/u...

Gift article: “Nothing in our past experience has prepared us for impacts at once so varied, broad and seemingly random and yet so existential and life-threatening.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/o...

LA was promoted as a place with a Mediterranean climate, free of tropical diseases. But with increasingly hot, humid summers, and nights no longer cold enough to curb them, mosquitoes have arrived in force in SoCal, bringing new public health worries with them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The history of East Potomac and other public golf courses in DC, important as shady public places and spaces where golf was democratized and racially integrated. Trump, of course, wants to cut down the trees and make it private. www.nps.gov/articles/lin... www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“It represents the best of California living: indoor-outdoor spaces, panoramic views of the city and a pool to ride out days of endless sun.” “The best representation for what Los Angeles was, is and will continue to be.” Maybe, but whether anyone wants to buy it in 2026 is a different question.

Just did some number crunching using latest (Oct 1) ECMWF seasonal data, and I must say that I've never seen such high predictive confidence in a very wet California winter. This is a truly extraordinary forecast amid a record-strength El Niño event. [Thread: please read to end.]

McPhee’s “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” and “Assembling California” are 2 classics of many. His gripping description of the the Loma Prieta earthquake is epic, as is his prose: “In response to the axiom you should never build on a flood plain, California has responded with its capital city.”

It may not be anywhere near the Great Flood of 1862, but the El Niño rainfall this winter in California is potentially going to be *really* something.

As an Alabama native, I believe SEC football could survive the heat death of the universe, but the stereotypical late summer/early fall Saturday afternoon outdoor stadium college football game may not survive climate change, and how hot future autumns could get in many parts of the US.

RIP Eva Marie Saint at 102 “The last of the Hollywood stars” gets overused in obits, but she was the real thing. By the late 50s she was tired of domestic or working class roles, and Hitchcock promised her that in North by Northwest there wouldn’t even *be* a kitchen sink. youtu.be/VgZGicWQbMk?...

Las Playas Intaglio, in Cabeza Prieta Nat’l Wildlife Refuge, 6,500-7,300 years old, was “the oldest scientifically dated geoglyph in the Americas…” A border barrier construction crew scraped a 50-ft. wide cut through it. ”It’s a cultural and historical atrocity.” www.gadgetreview.com/trumps-borde...

“Los Angeles is butted up against nature…We’re inside this huge natural park – way bigger than Central Park – and also much more native. And then you’ve got this man-made sign of it that’s meant to withstand rockslides and landslides and winds.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“Joshua Tree is home to multiple climate refugia: higher-elevation areas that are expected to remain cool enough to support Joshua trees even as much of their range becomes too hot and dry. But wildfires have burned several of these areas in recent years.”

The bill had called for state agencies to address “the inequities regarding access to, and control over, water caused by state-sanctioned acts of termination, removal, and assimilation,” dating to the loss of Indigenous lands, water rights, and lives in the wake of the Gold Rush.

Gift article: Place your bets—which gets irradiated and contaminated first? Texas, Florida, or the moon? (And look up Project A119 if you’ve never heard of it.) “The race for a lunar reactor is as much a spectacle of power as it is a matter of exploration.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/w...

“Students want to be involved in climate action, in environmental literacy, in green careers…They’re often doing the work already but don’t have the recognition. They didn’t see a sort of pathway to continue that work and embark on that as a potential career.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

East of Eden . . . and south of the Bay Area housing market: Steinbeck’s native Salinas Valley, now one of the least affordable places in America, “at the sharp edge of a national affordability crisis that is reshaping politics across the US, and the world.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Gift link: “Both the Palisades and Altadena fires ignited in dense metropolitan communities that back up to fire-prone wilderness areas and foothills, a development pattern that has become increasingly common in California as affordable housing has become scarcer.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/u...

“The findings…confirm key reporting by The Times, particularly about how a historically Black neighborhood where the majority of fire victims died received delayed evacuation alerts, and how the LAFD neglected signs that a Jan. 1 fire in Pacific Palisades…was still smoldering.”