Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
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…
Greenland’s ice mass loss appears to be 22 percent more than 2013 IPCC suggests. The IPCC uses four major outlet glaciers to define Greenland ice mass loss. The most recent evaluation uses 130 glaciers and nearly 100,000 satellite laser altimetry points across Greenland. This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…
Earth has warmed about 0.9 degrees C on average and the Arctic on average has warmed two to three times as much as the average. Daily temperature variation and annual temperature variation make a difference. Climate scientists have been warming us for over a generation that climate change would mean greater insect infestations on a…
With the IPCC suggesting strong negative emissions, or strong removal of atmospheric carbon, as the only way to avoid dangerous climate change (see here), we have no choice. We must remove already emitted carbon dioxide from our skies. The U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) is looking at one of the better ways of doing this using…
(Author’s note: Although this report focuses on the 18 to 25 year age bracket, these things appear to include communications techniques that are ageless.) From the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science we have a new detailed look at young people and climate…
The Yale Project on Climate Communication brings us work that shows us climate regulations are far behind. A very significant majority of republicans support. This study also looked at Conservative Catholics vs. Conservative non-Catholics. Overall, 65 percent of Republicans support policies to reduce global warming. Breaking down Catholics, 71 percent of Catholic Republicans and 64…
This study uses 1,008 survey participants to evaluate where extra effort should be applied to leverage increasing awareness in climate issues after extreme weather events. Extreme weather has already increased because of warming in some circumstances (including cold weather extremes) and experiencing extreme weather increases climate change awareness of individuals. This work suggest using extreme…
Forbe’s states: “Higher electricity prices in states producing the most wind power are taking a devastating toll on disposable incomes and the overall economy… From 2008-2013 electricity prices rose an average of 20.7 percent in the top 10 wind power states, which is seven-fold higher than the national electricity price increase of merely 2.8 percent.”…
This research, funded by the Swiss and U.S. National Science foundations, looked at Greenland Ice Sheet movement in the melt zone that extends inland 50 to 100 miles from the edge of the ice sheet. This is where melt water moves through the crevasses in the ice sheet, then flows down to bedrock and lubricates…
This installment discusses challenges with our ability to collect valid ocean warming data and how these challenges have systematically underestimated the role that our oceans have played in keeping our atmosphere cooler than the models say it should be. One thing that the climate deniers get right, maybe the only thing, is that we still…
Itzcuauhtli (Eat-Squat-Lee) is an 11 year old indigenous eco hip-hop activist who went on a 45 day silence strike to draw awareness to climate change. http://www.climatesilencenow.org/ This child’s action is extraordinarily selfless and I have something important to relate that is highly relevant. One of my climate science colleagues and I were talking about how…
Work from the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW (The University of New South Wales), Australia Shows what temps would be like without anthropogenic interference—including aerosols in the mid 20th century! These researchers used the latest generation of climate model simulations to investigate the occurrence of hiatus periods in the past and under two future scenarios….
The news is not new in scientific circles, but new research has somehow piqued the interest of the media and the word is out. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is in the initial stages of irreversible collapse. This will ultimately lead to 13 to 20 feet of sea level rise in time frames between…
First Published on Truthout, August 27, 2014 (link) The fundamental climate change policy question today is not how much we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions by when, but what will currently proposed carbon dioxide emissions reductions do to our climate in the near-term? In addition, what are the ramifications of short-lived climate pollutants that are…
Direct atmospheric removal (air capture) should not be confused with geoengineering. These air capture techniques, old and new, remove CO2 from the atmosphere just like we remove other pollutants from say, water in our wastewater facilities, or simply sweeping up dirt from the kitchen floor. Existing technologies extract CO2 from the air with chemicals such…
The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the global average, Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere snow cover are decreasing faster than the models project, more frequent extreme weather events are occurring and more frequent severe winters are occurring too. Three potential drivers of these events are: changes in storm tracks, the…
The North Atlantic is warming and Greenland’s ice loss has quadrupled in the last 20 years. Warm water is getting under the floating edges of outlet glaciers and causing thinning which in-turn causes the glaciers to speed up. New research has identified another and possibly new dimension to the increase of outlet glacier flow that…
This presentation was given to the Texas Chapter of Mensa on August 16, 2014. (link to presentation) Calling it climate change, global warming, climate disruption — these all scare people or mean things to them that are not good for the cause. Call it what it is—Climate Pollution. We know what pollution is and what…
Damage from wind, bark beetles and wildfires have increased in Europe’s forests since 1900. This report quantifies these damages and models then out to 2030 for the purpose of evaluating forest management techniques on limiting damages. There work finds that management techniques will have a difficult time keeping up and relative to the overall European…
First published on the Rag Blog, August 5, 2014 The future is bright and breezy, not black and dirty. Whatever is going on with Austin Energy misses some very important and fundamental news. AUSTIN — Really? Austin Energy is against alternative energy? A report in the Austin American Statesman on Friday, August 1, says just…
