Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
Whatever it has been that has kept the average global temperature from skyrocketing along with greenhouse gas concentrations is likely being overwhelmed. Of most significance is an unprecedented hot spot in the North Pacific that has probably signaled an end to the current cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Last summer’s global sea surface…
The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) report on March 19, 2015 shows Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest winter minimum on record. The record only goes back to 1979, but conclusions can be drawn from the record and global temperature that show global warming at work. This interactive chart is the NSIDC…
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific organization that produces the academic journal Science, has just begun a new open publishing journal; Science Advances (no paywall!). Their first issue includes a paper titled: Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains. Produced by researchers…
From the National Snow and Ice Data Center Website for March 4, 2015. There were four warm temperature state records set in February but surprisingly, no record cold state temperature records were set. There were 13 near-record cold state temperatures (2nd through 5th coldest) and three near-record warm state records (2nd and 3rd warmest). http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2015/03/possibly-low-in-the-north-definitely-high-in-the-south/…
First published on Truthout, March 5, 2015. Greenland is warmer than it has been in more than 100,000 years and climate disrupting feedback loops have begun. Since 2000, ice loss has increased over 600 500 percent, and liquid water now exists inside the ice sheet year-round, no longer refreezing during winter. Complete Article
Coal definitely creates less net warming in the short-term because of aerosols. Aerosols pollution emitted from coal is basically smog. The sulfates in smog rom burning fossil fuels are global cooling pollutants. Coal has far more sulfate pollution than oil and oil has far more sulfates than natural gas. Though natural gas emits less CO2…
Last summer the first of these appeared in the “formerly” frozen tundra of Siberia. When permafrost melts, methane can build up beneath impermeable soils and suddenly erupt. These holes are up to 100 feet wide and seven of them have been identified with many more smaller ones. Four of them have been located and three…
A new interactive website from Yale Climate Communications is up and it is very cool. And very scary too as the inset image shows. Only 63 percent of poll respondents believe climate change is happening and only 48 percent believe it is caused by man. Yale Project on Climate Communication Opinion Maps: http://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014/
From the abstract: “A devastating societal and economic toll on the central United States, contributing to dozens of fatalities and causing billions of dollars in damage. As a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture (the Clausius–Clapeyron relation), a pronounced increase in intense rainfall events is included in models of future climate. Therefore, it is crucial to examine whether the magnitude…
Princeton researchers have been testing abandoned oil wells in Pennsylvania and have revealed some surprising results. What do these findings mean? Stanford estimates that there are three million abandoned wells in the U.S. but this is just a guess. Some of the drilling goes back to the 19th century. Also a guess is how many…
The Arctic is warming on average twice as fast as the global average, but in places the warming is double even this rate. Implications are immense as the Arctic is literally the worlds air conditioner, or at least most of the world as most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere. Thaw out…
Satellite measurement of sea level rise is very accurate, but we have only had this technology for 20 years or so. Today’s sea level rise of 3.4 mm per year has not changed. The older data though, when evaluated with advanced statistical techniques, was not as much as had been previously assumed. This makes the…
First published on Truthout, February 11, 2015. The last time we had this discussion was 2013, remember? Before that it was 2010. Before that it was 2005 and everything started with the Super El Nino in 1998. Statistically, saying that 2014 was the hottest year ever is a very valid thing and if you understand…
Barrier island make up about ten percent of the world’s coastline and represent one of the most important coastal ecological resources.They also have an extremely fast and efficient way of recovering from what the weather may bring. High tides associated with coastal storms erode the face of dunes and bring sand, blown there by incessant…
Work from Leeds, Durham University, the Byrd Polar Research Center and University of California, Irvine, have taken a deeper look into melt lakes forming on the Greenland Ice Sheet. There modeling was for melt lake formation in the melt zone. The “melt zone” is that area around the edge of the ice sheet that melts…
First published on Truthout, December 26, 2014. As we move into 2015, the latest climate science continues to diverge from policy. New science tells us that, because of short-lived climate pollutants, current policies dealing with carbon dioxide pollution alone will likely produce more warming than doing nothing at all. Complete Article
I recently had the privilege of being the second reader on a thesis titled: Climate Change Virtue Ethics and Ecocriticism in Undergraduate Education, Barbara Krueger. Basically, this work evaluated the role of ethics and virtues in climate change education. To put the topic in my own words, to convey a chapter of climate change ethics…
Researchers at UC Cal Irvine and NASA, using four different measurement techniques, have found that West Antarctica’s ice loss has tripled since 1992. The measurements looked at glaciers discharging to a west central location of West Antarctica called the Amundsen Sea Embayment (see Amundsen Sea in the map on the right). This could possibly be…
Varying reports reveal that “tens of thousands” of individuals died in Europe in the 2003 heat wave with 15,000 in France alone. Reporting today still use the inaccurate estimates from the day. The European Union sponsored a study that laid to rest the speculation but this study’s results are so astonishing the numbers are still…
This work out of the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, reduces the lag in warming from CO2 emissions from 30 to 50 years to 10. But their constraints are quite different from what we have come to know as the temperature lag. This experiment looked at 6,000 model runs of a 100…
