Why doesn’t California get hurricanes?

Over the past two weeks, two massive hurricanes have killed more than 240 people and caused tens of billions of dollars of damage in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and other states.

California struggles every year with plenty of disasters — including devastating earthquakes, wildfires and floods. But it doesn’t have hurricanes. Why not?

Experts said Thursday it mostly comes down to two words: water temperature. “Warm tropical ocean waters are hurricane fuel. We don’t have that in California,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Not even close.”

On Thursday afternoon, the water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico off Tampa, Florida where Hurricane Milton slammed ashore the night before, was 81 degrees. It was 84 in the middle of the Gulf.

—Bay Area News Group

1 dead, 4 injured and 12 people trapped in Colorado gold mine after elevator malfunction

DENVER — One person is dead, four people are injured and 12 are trapped underground in a Colorado gold mine on Pikes Peak after an elevator malfunction, according to the Teller County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office was responding to an equipment malfunction at the Mollie Kathleen Mine, a tourist attraction near Cripple Creek, as of 2 p.m., agency officials said in a post on Facebook.

Emergency crews are trying to determine what went wrong with the elevator system in order to safely rescue the 12 people currently stuck 1,000 below the surface, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell said at a briefing. Eleven people have been rescued from the mine so far.

First responders also have other rescue options available, Mikesell said. He declined to provide further details about the person who died, but said the four people hurt sustained minor injuries.

—The Denver Post

Could natural, underground hydrogen be a gusher of clean energy in Alaska?

SEATTLE — Alaska geologist Mark Myers hopes that underground reserves of hydrogen could fuel a new state energy industry. His dreams were launched by a well drilled in the African country of Mali that yields enough hydrogen to fuel a village electric power plant.

Myers is hopeful that hydrogen deposits also exist in Alaska in a metamorphic rock called serpentinite, which is often found in subduction zones where one plate of the Earth's crust is pushed underneath another.

"Do we have those source rocks?" Myers asked. "The answer is all over the place. But the big question is how much of this hydrogen gets created — and preserved. We don't know."

Myers' push to find hydrogen reservoirs is driven by his concerns about climate change spurred by fossil fuel combustion. He is convinced that scientific models of a warming Earth are accurate, and justify a concerted effort to move off coal, oil and gas.

—The Seattle Times

Israeli army deliberately killed doctors in Gaza, UN panel says

Israel has carried out a concerted effort to destroy Gaza’s health-care system, including by deliberately killing medical staff in the war zone, a United Nations panel said.

The Israeli military has “deliberately killed, wounded, arrested, detained, mistreated and tortured” health-care personnel and has targeted medical vehicles and facilities amid its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a U.N.-backed commission said in a report out Thursday. Those violations constitute war crimes, it said.

Spokespeople for the Israeli mission to the U.N., as well as the Israeli army and the foreign ministry, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, and the U.N. said Israel didn’t cooperate with the investigation. Israel has previously denied targeting civilian or humanitarian facilities or staff, saying they’ve been endangered because Hamas uses such places as cover.

The commission also found that the Israel Defense Forces deliberately targeted pediatric and neonatal facilities, which has led to “incalculable suffering” especially among women and small children. Those actions could lead to the “the destruction of generations of Palestinian children and, potentially, the Palestinian people as a group,” the panel said.

—Bloomberg News