Amid a coast-to-coast barrage of winter storms, a firehose of moisture is poised Thursday to bring heavy rains and high winds to Southern California.
Threat level: The heavy rains will bring a "high likelihood" of flooding, the National Weather Service warns. The greatest risk is for mudslides and debris flows in Southern California's large, recent burn scars.
The nonprofit World Resources Institute has landed $75 million to launch an energy transition center that aims to speed deployment of "pragmatic, scalable solutions."
Why it matters: It's designed to convene expertise in finance, tech deployment, policy and other fields that together can overcome barriers, with initial focus on the U.S. and India.
Elon Musk's budgetary chainsaw is looming over U.S. disaster prediction and response agencies — just as climate change is making certain types of extreme weather events more common and intense.
Why it matters: Cutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency — possibly entirely — and slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s budget and mission amid a parade of climate disasters could have disastrous consequences.
The United States was perceived as the most corrupt it's been since 2012 in a watchdog group's annual index of nations around the globe.
The big picture: The U.S. received its lowest ever Corruption Perceptions Index score since Transparency International's current scale was established in 2012, according to the group's annual global ranking of public sector corruption across 180 countries released Tuesday.
Why it matters: The 1.5°C long-term goal, while largely symbolic, marks a point at which the ramifications of warming further are likely to become far more significant for humans and ecosystems.
