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Bruce Melton PE

Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.

Climate Change T-shirts Launches: Why Global Warming Psychology Will Save the World

By Climate Policy, Climate Reform, global warming psychology, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Psycho, Strategy

Global warming psychology, this burgeoning new discipline of science that seeks to understand why we don’t trust climate scientists when we trust virtually all other scientists almost implicitly, is very clear in its findings: old science communications strategies have failed and we must use new techniques to communicate the climate change challenge. None of the…

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Warm Winter, Early Spring: Is Climate Change a Mixed Bag or are we Kidding Ourselves?

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Beaches coastal, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, Deniers and Delayers, Drought, economics, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Extreme Weather, forest health, Forest Mortality, Glaciers, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, in-depth and Popular Press, modeling, Negative emissions, Oceans, pine beetle, politics, Psycho, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Shifting Ecology, West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Winter Weather

President Trump it seems, has given us permission to backslide with our thinking about climate change. Until we have rule or law that tells us we must do something about climate pollution, “those that would rather it not be real” have won. This allows the debate to rage encouraging doubt. The Clean Power Plan and…

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Climate Change 2016: The Year the Future Arrived

By Uncategorized

First published on Truthout, December 29, 2016. Our planet’s systems have a tremendous capacity to absorb punishment before they begin to show signs of degradation. Earth’s ecology self-heals like a cut on a finger. It assimilates pollution by chemical, physical and biological means — it changes pollutants into non-hazardous materials and proceeds upon its merry…

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Climate Predictions Come True: Extreme Rainfall

By Deniers and Delayers, Extreme Weather, Impacts, rainfall, Temperature

In 1834 and 1850, two European scientists (Clausius and Clapeyron) developed scientific principles that told us that warmer air holds more water. In the 1960s and 70s the computer models that first simulated our climate showed that more atmospheric CO2 would increase Earth’s temperature, relative humidity, and total precipitation because of the Clausius–Clapeyron principles. In the…

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We Can Have a Healthy Climate With Zero Warming in Our Lifetimes, by Bruce Melton

By Abrupt changes, Drought, forest health, Forest Mortality, Impacts, in-depth and Popular Press, pine beetle, Shifting Ecology, Truthout.org

  We can have a healthy climate — a climate with zero warming — in our lifetimes. The message for the last 20 years has been that we have to reduce emissions drastically to prevent dangerous climate change of more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F). This strategy would have likely worked when it was…

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How Hot Is it? The New Hockey Stick

By Temperature

Super Nino may have caused the temperature peak, but the chaos is weather too. The big question is, “how much will it cool off next year?” It may not be much. The way the extremes are increasing (and have you seen the recent jump in sea level rise) it is becoming obvious that we have…

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West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Collapse: The Latest Case for Zero Warming

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, ice sheet, Oceans, Sea Level Rise, Strategy, underice

New research has for the first time defined the tipping point between a stable WAIS and an Antarctica that collapses uncontrollably. Potsdam Institute researchers (Levermann and Feldmann) tell us is that if we do not return our oceans to their preindustrial temperature by 2050, we will see out of control collapse of the WAIS and…

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Climate Control Moon Shot: Do We Have the Technology Already?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, economics, Negative emissions, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy

We have entered the non-linearly increasing phase of climate change impacts. This is pretty much standard climate science that climate scientists said we would endure if we delayed action. Could they have imagined that we would delay for 20 years? What would they have said 20 years ago about what we should expect if the had…

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2 Degrees C., 1 Degree C. or 0 Degrees C.?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, economics, Forest Mortality, Legacy Policy, Strategy, Temperature

Two degrees C was first suggested as an upper limit to where we should allow our climate to warm by Nordhaus (Yale) in the American Economic Review in 1977 with the justification that this amount of change would exceed the temperature envelope where our mature civilization has developed. Nordhaus cites Sellers 1974 and NCAR 1974…

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Critical Climate Time Frames: New Strategy is Needed

By Abrupt changes, alternatives, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy

Scientists have been planning for how to implement a transformation to an alternative energy infrastructure for more than several years now. Jacobson 2013, represents years of effort and others have been doing the same. We know how to evolve our energy infrastructure, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how efficient…

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An Easier Solution to Climate Change

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, aerosols, alternatives, Climate Policy, climate pollutants short-lived, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, economics, Extreme Weather, in-depth and Popular Press, Sea Level Rise, Shifting Ecology, Strategy, Temperature, What we can do

The driver of our climate system has changed in the last two decades from one that is controlled by annual emissions, to one that is controlled by already emitted CO2. This means that previous strategies to control annual emissions are no longer meaningful and we must now turn our attention to the already emitted climate…

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What is Important and Why? A Zero-Warming Healthy Climate

By Abrupt changes, aerosols, alternatives, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, economics, Emissions, Negative emissions, Solutions, Strategy

For 24 years we have been attempting to implement climate reform, but because strategies are complex, controversial and inequitable, we have nothing to show for this effort save a near-failing carbon credit program in the EU. By giving ourselves permission to seek zero warming, we go beyond the failed strategies of the past into a…

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Rain Bombs: Increasing Precipitation Extremes

By Extreme Weather, flood, Impacts, rainfall

Increasing extreme storms are a big deal. Our civil infrastructure design is based on our old climate. Meteorologist across the country have been evaluating the historic record to see exactly how much change has already taken place. Climate modeling is still advancing towards being able to robustly understand exactly how much the most extreme storms will increase in the…

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NOAA — Ice Sheet Collapse in Our Time: Zero Warming Climate Solution

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Climate Policy, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, ice sheets, in-depth and Popular Press, modeling, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

We have delayed too long and now must urgently reduce the load of warming gases already emitted to our sky. We have been warned this would happen for decades, we just didn’t think it would happen so soon. This is exceedingly bad news, though the good news with climate change is very good indeed. The…

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The Beetles: Eighty-Nine Million Acres of Abrupt Climate Change

By Climate Catastrophes, forest health, Forest Mortality, in-depth and Popular Press, Uncategorized

First published on Truthout February 16, 2016 by Bruce Melton. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart of the US Rockies on a 6,000-mile journey of observation. Our film, What Have We Done, the North American Pine Beetle Pandemic, was released in…

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