CLEARLAKE, Calif. — The Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College is hosting an “Express Registration” and Culinary Round-Up on Saturday, Aug. 5, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
If you’ve been thinking of taking college classes, learning English or completing your high school diploma or equivalency, this is your opportunity.
They will provide application assistance, financial aid support and academic counseling during this event. All participants will receive Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College, or LCC, swag.
Culinary students can earn a Certificate of Achievement in Culinary Arts and Baking in addition to a Culinary Arts Associates of Arts Degree.
Hospitality and food services is the fourth largest industry sector in the county. Employers are constantly in need of staffing. Great opportunities are consistently available in the industry, granting anyone with a certificate or degree a variety of careers to pursue from hospitality to kitchen management.
In addition to the culinary program, LCC offers more than 50 degrees and certificate programs.
Woodland Community College is ranked among the top 40 community colleges in the U.S., according to WalletHub.
The college offers a variety of instructional and student support services that help students to succeed.
Graduates can find employment in a variety of regional industries or transfer to bachelor’s programs.
LCC also provides adult basic education classes to improve your skills and confidence necessary to be successful in college.
In addition, they can help you learn English, if it isn’t your first language.
The adult education program can assist you in becoming proficient in English, completing your high school diploma or getting ready to take the HiSET or GED high school equivalency tests.
Anyone interested in this event is encouraged to attend. For more information call the campus at 707-995-7900.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Scotts Valley Community Advisory Council will next meet on Monday, July 24.
The group will meet at 5 p.m. at the Scotts Valley Women’s Clubhouse, 2298 Hendricks Road in Lakeport.
Council business includes Fourth District updates and news, the council’s boundary of influence, roadwork and utilities for Scotts Valley community roads, the land use permit report, Clear Lake hitch in the Scotts Valley area, and groundwater updates and observation.
There also will be discussion regarding maintenance of Scotts Creek, including input on efforts to clean out the creek, tree and gravel removal, and replacement, repair and maintenance of water flow gauges at the Green River and Eickhoff bridges.
Under new business, the council will discuss the procedure to submit meeting minutes and plan for the Fall Neighborfest.
The council includes Chair Greg Scott, Vice Chair Jared Hendricks, Secretary Jason Weston, and members Jody Altic and Cornelia Sieber-Davis.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has a full shelter of dogs waiting to be adopted.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Anatolian shepherd, Belgian malinois, border collie, Chihuahua, German shepherd, hound, mastiff, pit bull, plott hound and terrier.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
German shepherd puppy
This male German shepherd puppy is 7 months old, with a short black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 2, ID No. LCAC-A-5315.
Male Great Pyrenees
This 1 and a half year old male Great Pyrenees has a white coat.
He is in kennel No. 3, ID No. LCAC-A-5469.
Female German shepherd
This 3-year-old female German shepherd has a black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 4, ID No. LCAC-A-5396.
Anatolian shepherd-mastiff mix
This 3-year-old male Anatolian shepherd-mastiff mix has a short fawn coat.
He is in kennel No. 5, ID No. LCAC-A-5276.
Male Chihuahua
This 5-year-old male Chihuahua has a short tricolor coat.
He is in kennel No. 6, ID No. LCAC-A-5500.
‘Roasie’
“Roasie”is a 2-year-old female pit bull terrier with a short black and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 7, ID No. LCAC-A-5434.
Female pit bull
This 3-year-old female pit bull has a short brown coat.
She is in kennel No. 8, ID No. LCAC-A-5505.
‘Trixie’
“Trixie” is a 3-year-old female hound with a short brown coat.
She is in kennel No. 9, ID No. LCAC-A-5433.
Female pit bull terrier
This 3-year-old female pit bull terrier has a brown and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 10, ID No. LCAC-A-5400.
Female Chihuahua
This 9-year-old female Chihauhua has a short brown and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 11, ID No. LCAC-A-5511.
Female German shepherd
This 2-year-old female German shepherd has a black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 12, ID No. LCAC-A-5488.
Male shepherd
This 2 and a half year old male shepherd has a short black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 14, ID No. LCAC-A-5479.
Female border collie
This 2-year-old female border collie has a black and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 15, ID No. LCAC-A-5513.
‘Zeta’
“Zeta” is a 1-year-old female pit bull terrier with a black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 16, ID No. LCAC-A-5427.
Male plott hound
This 2-year-old male plott hound has a short brown coat.
He is in kennel No. 18, ID No. LCAC-A-5143.
Male Chihuahua-terrier mix
This 2-year-old male Chihuahua-terrier mix has a short white coat.
She is in kennel No. 20, ID No. LCAC-A-5381.
Female Chihuahua
This 2-year-old female Chihuahua has a short brown and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 21, ID No. LCAC-A-5379.
Male shepherd
This 2-year-old male shepherd has a black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 22, ID No. LCAC-A-5423.
Male pit bull
This 3-year-old male American pit bull has a short gray and white coat.
He is in kennel No. 23, ID No. LCAC-A-5499.
Female pit bull terrier
This 6-year-old female pit bull terrier has a short tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 24, ID No. LCAC-A-5410.
Male pit bull terrier
This 4-year-old male pit bull terrier has a short gray coat with white markings.
He is in kennel No. 25, ID No. LCAC-A-5446.
Male shepherd
This 1 and a half year old male shepherd has a short tricolor coat.
He is in kennel No. 26, ID No. LCAC-A-5424.
Female shepherd
This 2-year-old female shepherd has a short yellow and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 27, ID No. LCAC-A-5369.
Male pit bull puppy
This 5-month-old male pit bull puppy has a white coat.
He is in kennel No. 29, ID No. LCAC-A-5325.
Male Belgian malinois
This 1 and a half year old male Belgian malinois has a tan and black coat.
He is in kennel No. 30, ID No. LCAC-A-5409.
Male shepherd
This 2-year-old male shepherd has a short tan coat with white markings.
He is in kennel No. 31, ID No. LCAC-A-5344.
Male shepherd mix puppy
This 6-month-old male shepherd mix puppy has a black coat with white markings.
He is in kennel No. 32, ID No. LCAC-A-5408.
Female shepherd mix
This 2-year-old female shepherd mix has a short yellow coat.
She is in kennel No. 33, ID No. LCAC-A-5277.
Female shepherd
This 10-month-old female shepherd has a tricolor coat.
She is in kennel No. 34, ID No. LCAC-A-5323.
‘Jojo’
“Jojo” is a one and a half year old female pit bull terrier with a short tricolor coat.
She is in kennel foster care, ID No. LCAC-A-5312.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lake County Library makes social reading experiences available to all through various free online and in-person book clubs.
The library’s newest book club, The Happy Trails Hiking Book Club, will facilitate book discussions about outdoor literature during group hikes at Anderson Marsh State Historic Park in Lower Lake at 8 a.m. on the last Saturday every month.
Hikers and readers who love the outdoors will find kindred spirits in The Happy Trails Book Club.
“Each month the theme changes,” explained Mickey Price at the Redbud Library. “This month’s theme is marsh or wetland. Members can read any fiction or nonfiction that has to do with a marsh or a wetland, and then we will chat about it while we hike. We chose Anderson Marsh as our location due to its accessibility.”
To find out each month’s theme, participants can attend meetings or call Mickey at 707-994-5115.
The public is also welcome to attend any of the Lake County Library’s other free book clubs. Each club has a unique theme, time, and location:
• Great Reads Book Club: Third Wednesday of every month at noon — meets online. At this meeting, readers share the books they’ve read independently and make recommendations of our own. Contact Amy Patton at 707-263-8817, Extension 17105 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to get the login information.
• Lakeport Evening Book Club: First Wednesday of every month at 5:30 p.m. at the Lakeport Library — meets in person. Led by a library volunteer. Reads and discusses the same book as a group each month. Call 707-263-8817 for more information.
• Cookbook Club: Second Thursday of every month at noon at the Lakeport Library — meets in person and online. Prepare, share and critique recipes. To sign up, call Lakeport Library at 707-263-8817 or email aThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to join via Zoom.
• Aging, Dying and Afterlife Discussion Group: Third Saturday of every month at noon at the Upper Lake Library — meets online and in person. Led by a library volunteer. Discuss the same book each month on the topics of aging, dying and the afterlife. To join, please call Lee at 707-772-9252 or email her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
• Garden Book Club: First Tuesday of every month at 10 a.m. — meets online. Contact Amy Patton at 707-263-8817, Extension 17105 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to get the login information.
The Lake County Library website also offers many other free digital resources, including free access to the New York Times, free classes on Skillshare and more.
Almost 1 in 4 people in the United States are socially vulnerable and have low resilience to extreme heat exposure, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data.
The Community Resilience Estimates, or CRE, for Heat, an experimental data product released in April, measures the capacity of individuals and households in a community to withstand the stress of exposure to extreme heat based on their social characteristics.
The standard CRE measures social vulnerability that inhibits community resilience while the CRE for Heat adjusts certain risk factors like quality of housing, transportation modes and financial hardship to gauge social vulnerability specifically to extreme heat exposure.
The tool produces national, state, county and census tract (neighborhood equivalent) estimates using individual and household data from the 2019 American Community Survey, or ACS, restricted microdata and the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program, or PEP.
The experimental climate-focused data product was developed with Arizona State University’s Knowledge Exchange for Resilience, known as KER. The product was released at a joint Census Bureau-KER climate resilience symposium in Washington, D.C.
“This collaboration is an example of how we can leverage data and innovation to identify and address social inequalities and improve the resilience of communities in the face of climate change,” said Patricia Solís, KER’s executive director.
CRE for Heat findings
CRE for Heat suggests greater social vulnerability and geographic variation compared to the standard CRE.
When measuring social vulnerability to heat exposure, the proportion of individuals with three or more risk factors increases from 21.6% in the standard CRE to 23.8% in CRE for Heat.
Similarly, the share with 0 risk factors decreases from 34.6% in the standard CRE to 31.7% in CRE for Heat.
In other words, when accounting for additional housing and transportation characteristics, more people in the United States are socially vulnerable or less resilient to rising heat temperatures.
There were also differences in the number of areas flagged as statistically higher or lower than the national rate.
The CRE for Heat shows that 24.3% of counties have a greater proportion of individuals with three or more risk factors than the national rate — much higher than the 13.2% in the standard CRE.
At the same time, 4.6% of counties had a lower proportion of individuals with high risk (3+ risk factors) compared to the national rate, higher than the 1.8% in the standard CRE. This suggests the additional heat exposure risk factors produce greater distinctions across U.S. counties.
How CRE for heat came about
The first CRE was published as an experimental data product in June 2020 to provide information about the COVID-19 pandemic. It was also published to garner feedback from data users and stakeholders on the quality and usefulness of such a product.
KER reached out to the CRE team to further discuss the product and was particularly interested in how the CRE could be leveraged for measuring social vulnerability to heat exposure.
In consultation with KER, the CRE modified three of the 10 risk factors to adjust for social vulnerability to heat exposure.
While the standard CRE simply had a unit level crowding measure (0.75 people or more per room), CRE for heat has a housing-quality exposure indicator that also accounts for structure type or where people live (mobile home, boat, RV, or other).
Also, the original CRE has an indicator for no household vehicle but the CRE for Heat’s transportation exposure indicator also contains commute type (public transportation, walking, biking or other nonpersonal vehicle method).
Finally, while the CRE simply had a poverty indicator, the CRE for Heat’s financial hardship indicator also includes whether the household’s housing costs are greater than 50%.
Even though the number of risk factors didn’t change in the CRE for Heat, some characteristics or conditions like transportation modes were added. A person only needs to meet one of the conditions to receive a risk factor flag. For example, if a household does not have unit-level crowding but lives in a mobile home, it will be flagged for having a housing quality risk. If the household meets both conditions, it’s only flagged once.
Factors that put communities at risk if hit by a disaster/extreme heat
It is important to note that CRE for Heat does not measure which areas are warmer than others or which areas are more likely to experience future heat waves. Instead, it identifies which areas exhibit low resilience if faced with extreme heat.
This new product comes with the same goals as the original CRE. Its publication should provide a new useful data source about a pressing topic and allow data users and stakeholders to provide feedback on potential enhancements.
Benjamin Gurrentz is a survey statistician in the Census Bureau’s Small Area Modeling and Development Branch – Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division. R. Chase Sawyer is the technical lead for Modeled Data Product Development in Small Area and Longitudinal Estimates – Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division.
Despite misconceptions and stereotypes – ranging from what librarians Gretchen Keer and Andrew Carlos have described as the “middle-aged, bun-wearing, comfortably shod, shushing librarian” to the “sexy librarian … and the hipster or tattooed librarian” – library professionals are more than book jockeys, and they do more than read at story time.
They are experts in classification, pedagogy, data science, social media, disinformation, health sciences, music, art, media literacy and, yes, storytelling.
But these battles are not new; book banning can be traced back to 1637 in the U.S., when the Puritans banned a book by Massachusetts Bay colonist William Pynchon they saw as heretical.
Library professionals maintain that books are what education scholar Rudine Sims Bishop called the “mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors” that allow readers to learn about themselves and others and gain empathy for those who are different from them.
The drive to challenge, ban or censor books has not only changed the lives of librarians across the nation. It’s also changing the way librarians are now educated to enter the profession. As a library school educator, I hear the anecdotes, questions and concerns from library workers who are on the front lines of the current fight and are not sure how to react or respond.
What once, and still is, a curriculum that includes book selection, program planning and serving diverse communities in the classroom, my faculty colleagues and I are now expanding to include discussions and resources on how students, once they become professional librarians, can physically, legally and financially protect themselves and their organizations.
More than shelving books
Degreed librarians are professionals with master’s degrees from nationally accredited academic programs. I have personally gone through such a program and now teach in one.
In fact, many librarians who work on college and university campuses have subject masters and doctorates, and K-12 librarians must have a valid teaching license or a state endorsement to work in a school library or media center. They know how to select appropriate materials for communities.
Librarians adhere to core values, standards and professional ethics. They see it as their duty to create and maintain a collection that reflects the diverse needs and interests of the entire community, not just for a select, vocal part of the community. The Freedom to Read statement of the American Library Association tells us: “It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians, as guardians of the people’s freedom to read, to contest encroachments upon that freedom by individuals or groups seeking to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at large; and by the government whenever it seeks to reduce or deny public access to public information.”
Books are challenged and banned for many reasons, including profanity, depictions of sex, LGBTQIA+ content, depictions of sexual abuse, equity, diversity and inclusion content, depictions of drug use and alcoholism, anti-police rhetoric and providing sex education. Reasons for challenges can be personally subjective, and claims that books present divisive topics that should be excluded from collections are increasing.
George Johnson, author of the frequently banned book “All Boys aren’t Blue,” has said that he believes books are challenged to eliminate narratives that elucidate the truths of marginalized groups and depict the everyday diversity of their lives. Johnson believes the stories of the LGBTQIA+ and minoritized communities are specifically under attack.
Johnson is a complainant in a recently filed federal lawsuit against Florida’s Escambia County School District and School Board, which unanimously voted to remove Johnson’s book from their school libraries because of passages that describe a sexual experience.
But with the current controversies about racially diverse and LGBTQIA+ books, policies are no longer enough to demonstrate the integrity of professionally curated library collections.
The current threats to librarians and the books they circulate are necessitating a shift in the content of graduate library education. Librarians obviously need to know the content of books. But educators like me now know we need to provide graduate students with information about how to physically and legally protect themselves and their organizations.
When we teach intellectual freedom, we also teach students how to prepare for protesters and contentious board meetings. When we teach information professionals how to select materials for their libraries, we emphasize their need to know how to articulate, in writing, the reasons for having a particular book, film or material item in their collection.
I believe that our students now need to consider getting professional liability insurance in case they are sued for buying a contested book. And when we teach story-time planning, we can pair that with strategies to devise a safety plan in case they are threatened or receive a bomb threat because of their work.
Librarians and the future librarians we teach have always loved books and reading. While our work has changed in this era of increasing censorship, in one sense it has not: We’re still devoted to the idea that we serve our communities by providing them with books that open the world to them and give them the opportunity to learn about themselves and others.
Michaela Barnett, University of Virginia; Leidy Klotz, University of Virginia; Patrick I. Hancock, University of Virginia, and Shahzeen Attari, Indiana University
You’ve just finished a cup of coffee at your favorite cafe. Now you’re facing a trash bin, a recycling bin and a compost bin. What’s the most planet-friendly thing to do with your cup?
Many of us would opt for the recycling bin – but that’s often the wrong choice. In order to hold liquids, most paper coffee cups are made with a thin plastic lining, which makes separating these materials and recycling them difficult.
In fact, the most sustainable option isn’t available at the trash bin. It happens earlier, before you’re handed a disposable cup in the first place.
Our results show that a decadeslong effort to educate the U.S. public about recycling has succeeded in some ways but failed in others. These efforts have made recycling an option that consumers see as important – but to the detriment of more sustainable options. And it has not made people more effective recyclers.
Experts have long recommended tackling the waste problem by prioritizing source reduction strategies that prevent the creation of waste in the first place, rather than seeking to manage and mitigate its impact later. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other prominent environmental organizations like the U.N. Environment Programme use a framework called the waste management hierarchy that ranks strategies from most to least environmentally preferred.
The familiar waste management hierarchy urges people to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” in that order. Creating items that can be recycled is better from a sustainability perspective than burning them in an incinerator or burying them in a landfill, but it still consumes energy and resources. In contrast, reducing waste generation conserves natural resources and avoids other negative environmental impacts throughout a product’s life.
R’s out of place
In our surveys, participants completed a series of questions and tasks that elicited their views of different waste strategies. In response to open-ended questions about the most effective way to reduce landfill waste or solve environmental issues associated with waste, participants overwhelmingly cited recycling and other downstream strategies.
We also asked people to rank the four strategies of the Environmental Protection Agency’s waste management hierarchy from most to least environmentally preferred. In that order, they include source reduction and reuse; recycling and composting; energy recovery, such as burning trash to generate energy; and treatment and disposal, typically in a landfill. More than three out of four participants (78%) ordered the strategies incorrectly.
When they were asked to rank the reduce/reuse/recycle options in the same way, participants fared somewhat better, but nearly half (46%) still misordered the popular phrase.
Finally, we asked participants to choose between just two options – waste prevention and recycling. This time, over 80% of participants understood that preventing waste was much better than recycling.
Recycling badly
While our participants defaulted to recycling as a waste management strategy, they did not execute it very well.
This isn’t surprising, since the current U.S. recycling system puts the onus on consumers to separate recyclable materials and keep contaminants out of the bin. There is a lot of variation in what can be recycled from community to community, and this standard can change frequently as new products are introduced and markets for recycled materials shift.
Our second study asked participants to sort common consumer goods into virtual recycling, compost and trash bins and then say how confident they were in their choices. Many people placed common recycling contaminants, including plastic bags (58%), disposable coffee cups (46%) and light bulbs (26%), erroneously – and often confidently – in the virtual recycling bins.
This is known as wishcycling – placing nonrecyclable items in the recycling stream in the hope or belief that they will be recycled. Wishcycling creates additional costs and problems for recyclers, who have to sort the materials, and sometimes results in otherwise recyclable materials being landfilled or incinerated instead.
Although our participants were strongly biased toward recycling, they weren’t confident that it would work. Participants in our first survey were asked to estimate what fraction of plastic has been recycled since plastic production began. According to a widely cited estimate, the answer is just 9%. Our respondents thought that 25% of plastic had been recycled – more than expert estimates but still a low amount. And they correctly reasoned that a majority of it has ended up in landfills and the environment.
Empowering consumers to cut waste
Post-consumer waste is the result of a long supply chain with environmental impacts at every stage. However, U.S. policy and corporate discourse focuses on consumers as the main source of waste, as implied by the term “post-consumer waste.”
Other approaches put more responsibility on producers by requiring them to take back their products for disposal, cover recycling costs and design and produce goods that are easy to recycle effectively. These approaches are used in some sectors in the U.S., including lead-acid car batteries and consumer electronics, but they are largely voluntary or mandated at the state and local level.
When we asked participants in our second study where change could have the most impact and where they felt they could have the most impact as individuals, they correctly focused on upstream interventions. But they felt they could only affect the system through what they chose to purchase and how they subsequently disposed of it – in other words, acting as consumers, not as citizens.
As waste-related pollution accumulates worldwide, corporations continue to shame and blame consumers rather than reducing the amount of disposable products they create. In our view, recycling is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for overproducing and consuming goods, and it is time that the U.S. stopped treating it as such.
As scorching heat grips large swaths of the Earth, a lot of people are trying to put the extreme temperatures into context and asking: When was it ever this hot before?
Globally, 2023 has seen some of the hottest days in modern measurements, but what about farther back, before weather stations and satellites?
Some news outlets have reported that daily temperatures hit a 100,000-year high.
As a paleoclimate scientist who studies temperatures of the past, I see where this claim comes from, but I cringe at the inexact headlines. While this claim may well be correct, there are no detailed temperature records extending back 100,000 years, so we don’t know for sure.
Here’s what we can confidently say about when Earth was last this hot.
This is a new climate state
Scientists concluded a few years ago that Earth had entered a new climate state not seen in more than 100,000 years. As fellow climate scientist Nick McKay and I recently discussed in a scientific journal article, that conclusion was part of a climate assessment report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2021.
Earth was already more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times, and the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were high enough to assure temperatures would stay elevated for a long time.
Even under the most optimistic scenarios of the future – in which humans stop burning fossil fuels and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions – average global temperature will very likely remain at least 1 C above preindustrial temperatures, and possibly much higher, for multiple centuries.
This new climate state, characterized by a multi-century global warming level of 1 C and higher, can be reliably compared with temperature reconstructions from the very distant past.
How we estimate past temperature
To reconstruct temperatures from times before thermometers, paleoclimate scientists rely on information stored in a variety of natural archives.
The most widespread archive going back many thousands of years is at the bottom of lakes and oceans, where an assortment of biological, chemical and physical evidence offers clues to the past. These materials build up continuously over time and can be analyzed by extracting a sediment core from the lake bed or ocean floor.
These sediment-based records are rich sources of information that have enabled paleoclimate scientists to reconstruct past global temperatures, but they have important limitations.
For one, bottom currents and burrowing organisms can mix the sediment, blurring any short-term temperature spikes. For another, the timeline for each record is not known precisely, so when multiple records are averaged together to estimate past global temperature, fine-scale fluctuations can be canceled out.
Because of this, paleoclimate scientists are reluctant to compare the long-term record of past temperature with short-term extremes.
Looking back tens of thousands of years
Earth’s average global temperature has fluctuated between glacial and interglacial conditions in cycles lasting around 100,000 years, driven largely by slow and predictable changes in Earth’s orbit with attendant changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. We are currently in an interglacial period that began around 12,000 years ago as ice sheets retreated and greenhouse gases rose.
Looking at that 12,000-year interglacial period, global temperature averaged over multiple centuries might have peaked roughly around 6,000 years ago, but probably did not exceed the 1 C global warming level at that point, according to the IPCC report. Another study found that global average temperatures continued to increase across the interglacial period. This is a topic of active research.
That means we have to look farther back to find a time that might have been as warm as today.
The last glacial episode lasted nearly 100,000 years. There is no evidence that long-term global temperatures reached the preindustrial baseline anytime during that period.
If we look even farther back, to the previous interglacial period, which peaked around 125,000 years ago, we do find evidence of warmer temperatures. The evidence suggests the long-term average temperature was probably no more than 1.5 C (2.7 F) above preindustrial levels – not much more than the current global warming level.
Now what?
Without rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth is currently on course to reach temperatures of roughly 3 C (5.4 F) above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, and possibly quite a bit higher.
At that point, we would need to look back millions of years to find a climate state with temperatures as hot. That would take us back to the previous geologic epoch, the Pliocene, when the Earth’s climate was a distant relative of the one that sustained the rise of agriculture and civilization.
BERKELEY, Calif. — Scientists have devised a new technique for finding and vetting possible radio signals from other civilizations in our galaxy — a major advance in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, that will significantly boost confidence in any future detection of alien life.
Most of today's SETI searches are conducted by Earth-based radio telescopes, which means that any ground or satellite radio interference — ranging from Starlink satellites to cellphones, microwaves and even car engines — can produce a radio blip that mimics a technosignature of a civilization outside our solar system. Such false alarms have raised and then dashed hopes since the first dedicated SETI program began in 1960.
Currently, researchers vet these signals by pointing the telescope in a different place in the sky, then return a few times to the spot where the signal was originally detected to confirm it wasn't a one-off. Even then, the signal could be something weird produced on Earth.
The new technique, developed by researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project at the University of California, Berkeley, checks for evidence that the signal has actually passed through interstellar space, eliminating the possibility that the signal is mere radio interference from Earth.
Breakthrough Listen, the most comprehensive SETI search anywhere, monitors the northern and southern skies with radio telescopes in search of technosignatures. It also targets thousands of individual stars in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is the likely direction a civilization would beam a signal, with a particular focus on the center of the galaxy.
“I think it's one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time,” said Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, or BSRC, which operates the world's longest running SETI program. “It's the first time where we have a technique that, if we just have one signal, potentially could allow us to intrinsically differentiate it from radio frequency interference. That's pretty amazing, because if you consider something like the Wow! signal, these are often a one-off.”
Siemion was referring to a famed 72-second narrowband signal observed in 1977 by a radio telescope in Ohio. The astronomer who discovered the signal, which looked like nothing produced by normal astrophysical processes, wrote “Wow!” in red ink on the data printout. The signal has not been observed since.
“The first ET detection may very well be a one-off, where we only see one signal,” Siemion said. “And if a signal doesn't repeat, there's not a lot that we can say about that. And obviously, the most likely explanation for it is radio frequency interference, as is the most likely explanation for the Wow! Signal. Having this new technique and the instrumentation capable of recording data at sufficient fidelity such that you could see the effect of the interstellar medium, or ISM, is incredibly powerful.”
The technique is described in a paper appearing today in The Astrophysical Journal by UC Berkeley graduate student Bryan Brzycki; Siemion; Brzycki's thesis adviser Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of astronomy; and colleagues at Cornell University and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
Siemion noted that, in the future, Breakthrough Listen will be employing the so-called scintillation technique, along with sky location, during its SETI observations, including with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia — the world’s largest steerable radio telescope — and the MeerKAT array in South Africa.
Distinguishing a signal from ET
For more than 60 years, SETI researchers have scanned the skies in search of signals that look different from the typical radio emissions of stars and cataclysmic events, such as supernovas.
One key distinction is that natural cosmic sources of radio waves produce a broad range of wavelengths — that is, broadband radio waves — whereas technical civilizations, like our own, produce narrowband radio signals. Think radio static versus a tuned-in FM station.
Because of the huge background of narrowband radio bursts from human activity on Earth, finding a signal from outer space is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
So far, no narrowband radio signals from outside our solar system have been confirmed, though Breakthrough Listen found one interesting candidate — dubbed BLC1 — in 2020. Later analysis determined that it was almost certainly due to radio interference, Siemion said.
Siemion and his colleagues realized, however, that real signals from extraterrestrial civilizations should exhibit features caused by passage through the ISM that could help discriminate between Earth- and space-based radio signals.
Thanks to past research describing how the cold plasma in the interstellar medium, primarily free electrons, affect signals from radio sources such as pulsars, astronomers now have a good idea how the ISM affects narrowband radio signals.
Such signals tend to rise and fall in amplitude over time — that is, they scintillate.
This is because the signals are slightly refracted, or bent, by the intervening cold plasma, so that when the radio waves eventually reach Earth by different paths, the waves interfere, both positively and negatively.
Our atmosphere produces a similar scintillation, or twinkle, that affects the pinprick of optical light from a star. Planets, which are not point sources of light, do not twinkle.
Brzycki developed a computer algorithm, available as a Python script, that analyzes the scintillation of narrowband signals and plucks out those that dim and brighten over periods of less than a minute, indicating they've passed through the ISM.
“This implies that we could use a suitably tuned pipeline to unambiguously identify artificial emission from distant sources vis-à-vis terrestrial interference,” de Pater said. “Further, even if we didn’t use this technique to find a signal, this technique could, in certain cases, confirm a signal originating from a distant source, rather than locally. This work represents the first new method of signal confirmation beyond the spatial reobservation filter in the history of radio SETI.”
Brzycki is now conducting radio observations at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to show that the technique can quickly weed out Earth-based radio signals and perhaps even detect scintillation in a narrowband signal — a technosignature candidate.
“Maybe we can identify this effect within individual observations and see that attenuation and brightening and actually say that the signal is undergoing that effect,” he said. “It's another tool that we have available now.”
The technique will be useful only for signals that originate more than about 10,000 light years from Earth, since a signal must travel through enough of the ISM to exhibit detectable scintillation.
Anything originating nearby — the BLC-1 signal, for example, seemed to be coming from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri — would not exhibit this effect.
Other co-authors of the paper are James Cordes of Cornell, Brian Lacki of BSRC and Vishal Gajjar and Sofia Sheikh of both BSRC and the SETI Institute. Breakthrough Listen is managed by the Breakthrough Initiatives, a program sponsored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — This week the Board of Supervisors will consider extending the agreement for the county’s emergency homeless shelter.
The board will meet beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday, July 25, in the board chambers on the first floor of the Lake County Courthouse, 255 N. Forbes St., Lakeport.
The meeting ID is 950 1537 0146, pass code 956689. The meeting also can be accessed via one tap mobile at +16694449171,,95015370146#,,,,*956689#.
All interested members of the public that do not have internet access or a Mediacom cable subscription are encouraged to call 669-900-6833, and enter the Zoom meeting ID and pass code information above.
At 10 a.m., the board will consider the second amendment to the county’s agreement with Sunrise Special Services Foundation for the homeless shelter at the former juvenile facility on Whalen Way in Lakeport.
The amendment would increase the total compensation under the agreement to $460,800 for fiscal years 2022-23 and 2023-24.
Interim Behavioral Health Services Director Stephen Carter, also the county’s assistant administrative officer, said in his memo to the board that the amendment represents a three-month extension of services through Oct. 24.
“Lake County Behavioral Health Services Department, as the lead Administrative Entity of the Lake County Continuum of Care, issued a Request for Proposals for Temporary Emergency Shelter Services,” Carter wrote. “The RFP was not successful, in that no applicant was selected. The Lake County Continuum of Care Executive Committee voted to extend sheltering services provided by Sunrise Special Services Foundation for three months to allow for another RFP to be conducted. These services are funded by the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program.”
In an untimed item, the board will consider scheduling a special meeting to interview public defender candidates in closed session.
The full agenda follows.
CONSENT AGENDA
5.1: Approve agreement between county of Lake and Ford Street Project for ASAM Level 3.2 services for fiscal year 2023-24 in the amount of $100,000 and authorize the board chair to sign.
5.2: Approve agreement between county of Lake and New Life Health Authority dba New Life LLC for substance use disorder outpatient drug free services, intensive outpatient treatment services, and narcotic treatment program services for fiscal year 2022-23 for 2021-22 services in the amount of $95,662.58 and authorize the board chair to sign.
5.3: Approve annual renewal of veterans subvention certificate of compliance and Medi-Cal Cost Avoidance Program certificate of compliance and authorize the board chair to sign certificates.
5.4: Approve the supplemental services Agreement No. 3 between the county of Lake and Armstrong Consultants for consulting services related to Lampson Airfield and authorize the chair to sign the agreement.
5.5: Approve Amendment No. 1 to Supplemental Services Agreement No. 1 between the county of Lake and Armstrong Consultants for consulting services related to Lampson Airfield and authorize the chair to sign the agreement.
5.6: (a) Approve the purchase of eight commercial grade fitness items; and (b) authorize the sheriff/coroner or his designee to issue and sign a purchase order not to exceed $50,000 to 360 Fitness Store, 727 Francisco Blvd., San Rafael, California.
5.7: Adopt proclamation commending Lynn Prescott for his 23 years of service to the county of Lake.
5.8: Approve Amendment No. 1 to agreement for professional services between county of Lake and RTLawrence Corp.
TIMED ITEMS
6.2, 9:07 a.m.: Pet of the Week.
6.3, 9:08 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation commending Lynn Prescott for his 23 years of service to the county of Lake.
6.4, 9:20 a.m.: Consideration of a request for assistance under the California Disaster Assistance Act to mitigate pervasive tree mortality, including a cover memo, hazard tree removal plan, and letter requesting waiver of 25% local match requirement.
6.5, 10 a.m.: Consideration of Amendment No. 2 to the agreement between county of Lake and Sunrise Special Services Foundation increasing the total compensation under the agreement to $460,800 for fiscal years 2022-23 and 2023-24 and authorize the board chair to sign.
6.6, 11:15 a.m.: Public hearing, continued from July 11, sitting concurrently as Clearlake Keys CSA#1, #2, #6, #13, #20, #21-Board of Supervisors, Kelseyville County Waterworks District #3 and Lake County Sanitation District - Board of Directors) - consideration of (a) resolution confirming collections of annual lighting fees; (b) resolution confirming collections of delinquent water fees; (c) resolution confirming collections of delinquent water and sewer fees; (d) resolution of delinquent sewer fees for Lake County Sanitation District.
6.7, 11:30 a.m.: Public hearing, consideration of ordinance amending Chapter 5 of the Lake County Code and adopting by reference Appendices C and J of the 2022 California Building Code, Part 2 of the California Code of Regulations, Title 24.
UNTIMED ITEMS
7.2: Consideration to schedule a special meeting to interview public defender candidates in closed session.
7.3: Consideration of the following advisory board appointments: Mental Health Board, Heritage Commission.
CLOSED SESSION
8.1: Conference with legal counsel: Existing litigation pursuant to Gov. Code sec. 54956.9 (d)(1) – FERC Project No. 77, Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project.
8.2: Conference with real property negotiators pursuant to Government Code Section 54956.8 Property: APN 013-056-04; 16540 State Hwy 175, Cobb, CA negotiating parties: (a) County Negotiators L. Ewing, Susan Parker, Stephen Carter and (b) Robert Vardenega. Under negotiation: Price and terms of payment.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — A Clearlake Police officer has been honored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving for his efforts to stop impaired driving in the city.
On Tuesday, Officer Daniel Eagle received MADD’s recognition award during the organization’s awards ceremony in Citrus Heights.
This award recognized Officer Eagle for his dedication to driving under the influence, or DUI, enforcement.
In 2022, Officer Eagle made 30 DUI arrests, officials said.
Police said the arrests helped to prevent the potential for traffic collisions and the unnecessary risk to citizens of the community and those traveling through it.
The Clearlake Police Department publicly thanked Eagle for his dedication and service to the community.
Eagle has been a valued member of the Clearlake Police Department since 2018.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — The Clearlake City Council on Thursday evening approved an agreement with the Konocti Unified School District to reestablish a school resource officer at the district.
Police Chief Tim Hobbs noted in his written report to the council that there hadn’t been a school resource officer, or SRO, assigned to the district since October 2020.
Lt. Martin Snyder, who was on hand to give the report on behalf of Hobbs, explained that the Clearlake Police Department’s staffing level now allows for assigning one officer as a full-time SRO.
Under the memorandum of understanding the council approved with Konocti Unified, the district will pay $142,956.32 to fund the cost of a full-time SRO, which includes salary, benefits, overtime, training and vehicle usage costs. The city also can recover additional overtime costs for other officers used at school events, according to Hobbs’ written report.
Konocti Unified’s superintendent, Dr. Becky Salato, told the council that, on behalf of the school district, she was grateful for the council’s consideration.
She said it has been a tough three years since the district last had an SRO in October 2020.
At the same time, she said they truly appreciate the police department. In the interim, even without an SRO, Salato said the police department responds immediately to the district.
She added that the SRO is a “super important” position for the school district.
Councilman Russ Cremer moved to approve the agreement, which was seconded by Councilwoman Joyce Overton and approved by the council 3-0. Council members David Claffey and Russell Perdock were absent.
In other business, the council awarded a $46,715 contract for traffic signal updates at the intersection of Olympic Drive and Old Highway 53 to DC Electric. The funds come from the Coronavirus Response and Relief supplemental appropriations through Caltrans.
The council also awarded a contract for guardrail installation to Midstate Barrier for $46,500.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.