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In California, It’s 72 With a Chance of “Weather Whiplash” | Connecting California

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In California, It’s 72 With a Chance of “Weather Whiplash” | Connecting California


Why is it so hard to make seasonal weather predictions in California—and what’s the path to more accurate forecasts? Columnist Joe Mathews asks in the latest Connecting California. Satellite image courtesy of NOAA Photo Library/Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED).

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California weather is harder to predict than it looks. Even Harris K. Telemacher came to learn that.

Telemacher was a Los Angeles TV weathercaster with an ocean of knowledge—he had a PhD in arts and humanities and quoted Shakespeare—but no real meteorological training. So, he assumed that California weather was predictable and decided to tape his televised forecasts weeks in advance, always promising sunny and warm days. This worked until an unexpected Pacific storm deluged the Southland during one of his pre-recorded forecasts.

Telemacher was a fictional character invented and inhabited by Steve Martin in the classic satire L.A. Story. But he embodied a real-life cliché that needs retiring.

California weather has never been as predictable as a Steve Martin gag—especially when it comes to the rain and snow of Golden State winters like this one.

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In fact, no state in the lower 48 sees as much variability in its year-to-year precipitation as California. Such variability makes our weather at least as unpredictable as anything else in this volatile state. Last year, California was in the midst of the driest three-year run in recorded history when NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published a seasonal forecast for a drier-than-average winter. Instead, we experienced one of our wettest winters ever.

Now, another winter of weather surprises has arrived, demonstrating that California desperately needs better seasonal forecasts so we can plan and protect ourselves in this era of climate change.

Seasonal forecasts are not the predictions of tomorrow’s weather that you see delivered on your TV by Telemacher and his present-day imitators. Seasonal forecasts provide a range of possible weather and climate changes for the next season on the calendar, usually about a month or so in advance. (Federal agency forecasts for winter are usually out by Halloween.) Meteorologists will tell you that while it’s impossible to tell you the weather on a particular day months in advance, they should be able to predict, broadly, how wet or dry the next season should be.

But that’s always been hard to do in California. Lately, it’s become even harder because of the state’s “weather whiplash”—the term that the Public Policy Institute of California has used in recent years to describe the seesawing we’ve seen between flood and drought.

Our current inability to predict seasonal wet conditions makes it harder to manage water supplies (we need to store more in wet winters to prepare for drier years), prepare for disasters (including unpredictable floods, like the one that recently inundated San Diego), and do long-term economic planning for agriculture, which supplies food to the entire nation.

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Another winter of weather surprises has arrived, demonstrating that California desperately needs better seasonal forecasts so we can plan and protect ourselves in this era of climate change.

It’s not just winter weather that’s hard to foresee. Predicting scorching heat, as the state’s daily average maximum temperature rises by more than 4 degrees, is difficult. Impactful heat waves, called Heat Health Events, are expected to increase in frequency and duration, especially in the Central Valley and Sierra. Calling those ahead of time could be a matter of life and death.

But improving seasonal forecasts is easier said than done. Even the most advanced meteorologists have struggled with making seasonal forecasts. Indeed, recent studies, now getting attention in California policy circles, suggest that our state and its meteorologists need a better understanding of the peculiarities of the Pacific Ocean to improve their forecasts.

Making expectations about how much rain or snow is likely to fall in California depends on predicting atmospheric patterns over the northern Pacific Ocean. To do so, meteorologists have tended to look at sea surface temperatures in the South Pacific and the phenomena known as El Niño and La Ninã. Warm temperatures, or “El Niño” conditions, were believed to herald rain. Cool “La Niña” conditions were thought to signal a dry winter.

But a recent paper highlighted by PPIC, with authors from UCLA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, found that El Niño conditions don’t explain most of the variability of our weather. To cite one example, tropical sea surface temperatures and conditions were very similar in 2021–22 and 2022–23, but the first winter was dry and the second was one of the wettest in history.

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“It remains elusive how predictable the year-to-year variability of CA winter precipitation is and why it is challenging to achieve skillful seasonal prediction of CA precipitation,” the paper said.

According to its authors, to arrive at more accurate seasonal forecasts, scientists need a better understanding of the ocean’s “circulation anomalies,” which are deviations in averages and expected conditions independent of El Niño. Current climate models, the paper argued, “show nearly no skill in predicting these,” which means that they have “limited predictive skill for California winter precipitation.”

The paper also argued that current climate models can’t predict patterns that stem from tropical convection (i.e. tropical clouds and thunderstorms) or the stratospheric polar vortex. This means that for better seasonal forecasts, meteorologists need a better understanding of conditions and patterns not only in the relatively nearby western Pacific but also in waters as far away as the Indian and Arctic oceans.

How do we achieve this?

One answer is to devote more time and resources to observing oceans, sea ice, and clouds—and their impacts on precipitation. Another answer is to employ better computer capacity and artificial intelligence to build better climate models. This is a planetary problem—if you want better predictions of California precipitation, you need to improve modeling and data for the climate of the whole earth.

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But such improvements won’t happen fast. So, for at least a few more winters, we’re stuck with unreliable seasonal forecasts and unpredictable weather.



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Some artificial dyes could be banned from California schools

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Some artificial dyes could be banned from California schools


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California public schools could soon be banned from serving certain artificial dyes in food over concerns about developmental harm in children.

Dubbed a “first-in-the-nation” measure, state lawmakers this week passed Assembly Bill 2316 to prohibit six additives that are permitted by federal regulators to make food more colorful. California’s AB 2316, known as the California School Food Safety Act, is now on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

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The bill says state research suggests such synthetic dyes can result in hyperactivity and other behavioral problems. Similar previous research prompted the European Union to restrict food coloring. Nearly all of the products that the California bill would ban in schools require warning labels in E.U. products.

The bill would ban commercial dyes of Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6, in public schools in the nation’s largest state.

“California has a responsibility to protect our students from chemicals that harm children and interfere with their ability to learn,” state Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat who authored the bill, said in a statement. He said that he struggled with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, and he is now a parent.

On Saturday, a spokesperson said Newsom’s office didn’t comment on pending legislation. The deadline for Newsom to sign or veto legislation is Sept. 30, the spokesperson said.

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The nonprofit Environmental Working Group and the California Medical Association, which represents doctors, supported the bill.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals for the dyes banned under AB 2316 date back decades, the environmental nonprofit said. Those approvals were based on old studies not designed to detect behavioral effects in children, the medical association had said in its support of AB 2316.

The Consumer Brands Association, a dye industry representative, opposed the bill because it overrode existing food safety rules, and the group disputed findings about adverse health effects. John Hewlitt, the association’s senior vice president of packaging, sustainability and state affairs, said the bill was “advancing a political agenda.”

“The passage of this bill could cost schools and families money, limit choice and access, and create consumer confusion,” he said in a statement provided to USA TODAY. “The approach taken by California politicians flies in the face of our science and risk-based process and is not the precedent we should be setting when it comes to feeding our families.”

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A 2021 state Environmental Protection Agency assessment found American youth diagnosed with ADHD increased in the last 20 years, which prompted the state to look at food dyes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has similarly tracked increases in ADHD diagnoses in children in recent years.

Focusing on seven food dyes, including those that would be banned under AB 2316, state researchers reviewed prior studies on the effects of these dyes in humans and laboratory animals. Findings indicated they were linked to adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in children, and children varied in sensitivity.

On Friday, an FDA spokesperson told NBC News they had reviewed literature cited in California’s legislation. While saying most children have no “adverse effects” when they eat foods with color additives, the spokesperson reportedly said some evidence suggests certain children may be sensitive.

If signed into law, California’s ban would take effect in schools beginning in 2027.

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California’s governor has the chance to make AI history

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California’s governor has the chance to make AI history


Advocates say it is a modest law setting “clear, predictable, common-sense safety standards” for artificial intelligence. Opponents say it is a dangerous and arrogant step that will “stifle innovation.”

In any event, SB 1047 — California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s proposal to regulate advanced AI models offered by companies doing business in the state — has now passed the California State Assembly by a margin of 48 to 16. Back in May, it passed the Senate by 32 to 1. Once the Senate agrees to the assembly’s changes to the bill, which it is expected to do shortly, the measure goes to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

The bill, which would hold AI companies liable for catastrophic harms their “frontier” models may cause, is backed by a wide array of AI safety groups, as well as luminaries in the field like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, who have warned of the technology’s potential to pose massive, even existential dangers to humankind. It got a surprise last-minute endorsement from Elon Musk, who among his other ventures runs the AI firm xAI.

Lined up against SB 1047 is nearly all of the tech industry, including OpenAI, Facebook, the powerful investors Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz, and some academic researchers who fear it threatens open source AI models. Anthropic, another AI heavyweight, lobbied to water down the bill. After many of its proposed amendments were adopted in August, the company said the bill’s “benefits likely outweigh its costs.”

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Despite the industry backlash, the bill seems to be popular with Californians, though all surveys on it have been funded by interested parties. A recent poll by the pro-bill AI Policy Institute found 70 percent of residents in favor, with even higher approval ratings among Californians working in tech. The California Chamber of Commerce commissioned a bill finding a plurality of Californians opposed, but the poll’s wording was slanted, to say the least, describing the bill as requiring developers to “pay tens of millions of dollars in fines if they don’t implement orders from state bureaucrats.” The AI Policy Institute’s poll presented pro and con arguments, but the California Chamber of Commerce only bothered with a “con” argument.

The wide, bipartisan margins by which the bill passed the Assembly and Senate, and the public’s general support (when not asked in a biased way), might suggest that Gov. Newsom is likely to sign. But it’s not so simple. Andreessen Horowitz, the $43 billion venture capital giant, has hired Newsom’s close friend and Democratic operative Jason Kinney to lobby against the bill, and a number of powerful Democrats, including eight members of the US House from California and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have urged a veto, echoing talking points from the tech industry.

So there’s a strong chance that Newsom will veto the bill, keeping California — the center of the AI industry — from becoming the first state with robust AI liability rules. At stake is not just AI safety in California, but also in the US and potentially the world.

To have attracted all of this intense lobbying, one might think that SB 1047 is an aggressive, heavy-handed bill — but, especially after several rounds of revisions in the State Assembly, the actual law does fairly little.

It would offer whistleblower protections to tech workers, along with a process for people who have confidential information about risky behavior at an AI lab to take their complaint to the state Attorney General without fear of prosecution. It also requires AI companies that spend more than $100 million to train an AI model to develop safety plans. (The extraordinarily high ceiling for this requirement to kick in is meant to protect California’s startup industry, which objected that the compliance burden would be too high for small companies.)

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So what about this bill would possibly prompt months of hysteria, intense lobbying from the California business community, and unprecedented intervention by California’s federal representatives? Part of the answer is that the bill used to be stronger. The initial version of the law set the threshold for compliance at $100 million for the use of a certain amount of computing power, meaning that over time, more companies would have become subject to the law as computers continue to get cheaper. It would also have established a state agency called the “Frontier Models Division” to review safety plans; the industry objected to the perceived power grab.

Another part of the answer is that a lot of people were falsely told the bill does more. One prominent critic inaccurately claimed that AI developers could be guilty of a felony, regardless of whether they were involved in a harmful incident, when the bill only had provisions for criminal liability in the event that the developer knowingly lied under oath. (Those provisions were subsequently removed anyway). Congressional representative Zoe Lofgren of the science, space, and technology committee wrote a letter in opposition falsely claiming that the bill requires adherence to guidance that doesn’t exist yet.

But the standards do exist (you can read them in full here), and the bill does not require firms to adhere to them. It says only that “a developer shall consider industry best practices and applicable guidance” from the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Government Operations Agency, and other reputable organizations.

A lot of the discussion of SB 1047 unfortunately centered around straightforwardly incorrect claims like these, in many cases propounded by people who should have known better.

SB 1047 is premised on the idea that near-future AI systems might be extraordinarily powerful, that they accordingly might be dangerous, and that some oversight is required. That core proposition is extraordinarily controversial among AI researchers. Nothing exemplifies the split more than the three men frequently called the “godfathers of machine learning,” Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun. Bengio — a Future Perfect 2023 honoree — and Hinton have both in the last few years become convinced that the technology they created may kill us all and argued for regulation and oversight. Hinton stepped down from Google in 2023 to speak openly about his fears.

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LeCun, who is chief AI scientist at Meta, has taken the opposite tack, declaring that such worries are nonsensical science fiction and that any regulation would strangle innovation. Where Bengio and Hinton find themselves supporting the bill, LeCun opposes it, especially the idea that AI companies should face liability if AI is used in a mass casualty event.

In this sense, SB 1047 is the center of a symbolic tug-of-war: Does government take AI safety concerns seriously, or not? The actual text of the bill may be limited, but to the extent that it suggests government is listening to the half of experts that think that AI might be extraordinarily dangerous, the implications are big.

It’s that sentiment that has likely driven some of the fiercest lobbying against the bill by venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose firm a16z has been working relentlessly to kill the bill, and some of the highly unusual outreach to federal legislators to demand they oppose a state bill. More mundane politics likely plays a role, too: Politico reported that Pelosi opposed the bill because she’s trying to court tech VCs for her daughter, who is likely to run against Scott Wiener for a House of Representatives seat.)

Why SB 1047 is so important

It might seem strange that legislation in just one US state has so many people wringing their hands. But remember: California is not just any state. It’s where several of the world’s leading AI companies are based.

And what happens there is especially important because, at the federal level, lawmakers have been dragging out the process of regulating AI. Between Washington’s hesitation and the looming election, it’s falling to states to pass new laws. The California bill, if Newsom gives it the green light, would be one big piece of that puzzle, setting the direction for the US more broadly.

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The rest of the world is watching, too. “Countries around the world are looking at these drafts for ideas that can influence their decisions on AI laws,” Victoria Espinel, the chief executive of the Business Software Alliance, a lobbying group representing major software companies, told the New York Times in June.

Even China — often invoked as the boogeyman in American conversations about AI development (because “we don’t want to lose an arms race with China”) — is showing signs of caring about safety, not just wanting to run ahead. Bills like SB 1047 could telegraph to others that Americans also care about safety.

Frankly, it’s refreshing to see legislators wise up to the tech world’s favorite gambit: claiming that it can regulate itself. That claim may have held sway in the era of social media, but it’s become increasingly untenable. We need to regulate Big Tech. That means not just carrots, but sticks, too.

Newsom has the opportunity to do something historic. And if he doesn’t? Well, he’ll face some sticks of his own. The AI Policy Institute’s poll shows that 60 percent of voters are prepared to blame him for future AI-related incidents if he vetoes SB 1047. In fact, they’d punish him at the ballot box if he runs for higher office: 40 percent of California voters say they would be less likely to vote for Newsom in a future presidential primary election if he vetoes the bill.



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Bird flu spreads to California’s dairy cows

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Bird flu spreads to California’s dairy cows


A form of avian influenza that is highly fatal in birds has been confirmed in California dairy cattle, the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture announced on Friday afternoon.

No human cases have been confirmed and the virus, an influenza subtype known as H5N1, is not considered a significant public health threat, according to state health officials. At this stage, there is no concern about the safety of the commercial milk or food supply, they said.

But doctors are monitoring the farm workers who may be exposed to infected animals to ensure quick isolation and care, should they sicken, said the California Department of Public Health. Officials said they would provide official confirmation of any human cases associated with this outbreak.

It is the first time that cows infected with the virus have been identified in the state. California is the 14th state in the nation to report H5N1 infection in dairy cows.

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The animals, located in the Central Valley, showed signs of illness on Sunday, reported CDFA. Test results were confirmed on Friday by the nation’s veterinary testing lab. The herds have been quarantined.

“We have been preparing for this possibility since earlier this year when … detections were confirmed at dairy farms in other states,” said CDFA Secretary Karen Ross. “Our extensive experience in poultry has given us ample preparation and expertise to address this incident, with workers’ health and public health as our top priorities.”

Other states have reported four human cases in dairy workers since April 2024: one each in Texas and Colorado, and two in Michigan. All four of those people recovered and there have been no reports of further spread among the people around them.

Until recently, California’s dairy farms seemed to have been spared from the crisis. The state’s 1.7 million dairy cows supply about 20% of the nation’s milk.

“This is a tough time for our dairy farmers given the economic challenges they’re facing in a dynamic market,” said Ross, “so I want to assure them that we are approaching this incident with the utmost urgency.”

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Experts say it is crucial to gain more information about how the people were infected, and whether the virus has evolved to infect people more readily.

There is no state or federal requirement to routinely sample cows or milk. Clinical signs of flu occur in only a fraction of cases, so some experts fear that the virus may be hiding in untested animals.

State health officials recommend that personal protective equipment, or PPE — masks, gloves, caps, face shields, and safety goggles —  be worn by farm workers and emergency responders when working with animals or potentially infected materials.

“I’ve been worried about this for months,” Krutika Kuppalli, medical officer for COVID-19 Health Operations at the World Health Organization, said in a social media post. “This is why we need enhanced surveillance and transparency of testing protocols.”

Over the past three years, the deadly and highly contagious virus has circled the globe, taking a staggering toll on birds in more than 80 nations.

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After emerging in 2020, the virus triggered major outbreaks in Europe, Africa and Asia. It arrived in the U.S. in January 2022 and stormed through the nation’s largest concentrations of poultry farms in the East and Midwest, pushing up egg prices.

The virus has become so widespread in wild birds that it has repeatedly spread to mammals, especially species, such as foxes, that feed on infected birds.

Signs of H5N1 bird flu virus have been detected in wastewater sites in San Francisco, Palo Alto and the West County Wastewater facility in Richmond, among other sites.

But it is thought to have originated from wild bird waste in the sewer system that collects and treats both wastewater and stormwater.

The virus has already been found in wild birds and domestic poultry in the state. Last winter, it barreled through Sonoma County’s historic poultry region, forcing the slaughter of 1.1 million birds.

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The source of the new cattle infections is not known. The federal government requires that lactating dairy cattle must be tested for the virus before they can be moved across state lines.

“The main reservoir of the virus are waterfowl — the ducks and geese that like the really rich habitat that California supplies,” said veterinarian Maurice Pitesky of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Pitesky studies the spread of avian diseases.

For the most up-to-date information regarding avian influenza in livestock in California, go to the Department of Food and Agriculture’s website at www.cdfa.ca.gov/AHFSS.

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