A new NASA study shows that even during a time of minimal energy from the sun, planet Earth continued to retain more solar radiation than it emitted back into space.

It’s a powerful addition to an already strong body of evidence pointing to human greenhouse-gas emissions as the main driver of global warming.

As a boy in coastal San Diego in the 1980s, Jim Randerson loved the exotic fish, birds and even tides of red crustaceans that washed ashore during storms created by temperature changes in far-off seas. Across the globe, Yang Chen was a child in rural southeast China witnessing the pollution created by new manufacturing and power plants.

“I actually grew up at the same time that China was opening up and expanding. I saw the factories being built – and the effects on air and water,” he says.

At some point in your life, you probably turned on the tap and wondered where all that water comes from.  All you have to do is turn a handle and water flows effortlessly - until you decide it’s time to turn it off.  But how does it all get there?  And, how is the access to this precious resource so easy, considering it barely rains in southern California for much of the year?  Before we can answer how your water gets to your home and flows from your tap, we need to explain how water exists on our planet and where we’re likely to find it in California.

In my article over the weekend about the climate risks from buried Arctic carbon, I omitted any discussion of one issue that sometimes appears in the news: methane deposits under relatively shallow seawater near the coasts of Siberia, Canada and Alaska. It was a purposeful omission because my piece focused on carbon buried on land, which presents a climate risk if it eventually emerges as methane or carbon dioxide.