LOS ANGELES - Average temperatures across California rose slightly from 1950 to 2000, with the greatest warming coming in the state's big cities and mostly caused by urbanization -- not greenhouse gases -- authors of a study released on Wednesday said. "Everybody's talking about the carbon coming out of the SUV exhaust or the coal plant, but in the past 50 years in California the bigger impact has been urbanization and suburbanization," said Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the study's authors.
"This (warming) has already had a huge impact on the state of California," Patzert said. "It's changed the way we do agriculture, it's changed the energy and water demands, it's changed the number of days we've had frost or extreme heat."
Read full (Reuters): http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/41177/story.htm