Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
First Published on Truthout, March 18, 2014 Today, we are burning fossil carbon one million times faster than it was naturally put in the ground, and carbon dioxide is increasing 14,000 times faster than anytime in the last 610,000 years (1,2). Climate is now changing faster than it has during any other time in 65…
A 30 page booklet by the American Psychological Association that helps us understand how behavior is ultimately responsible for this climate pollution mess we are in. Whether it is from $7 billion in climate change counter-movement funding (link) or sheer laziness, the results are the same. This booklet can give insights into why it is…
The climate change enhanced polar vortex has continued to break logic records. While we are experiencing a Great Lakes with ice cover greater than anything in 20 years, large parts of the North American West are experiencing their warmest winters ever recorded and Arctic sea ice is flirting with the lowest extent in the record…
Have you ever been incensed by a Facebook post citing some authoritative sounding person proclaiming yet again that climate science is all smoke and mirrors? Or have you ever been flummoxed in an email discussion about climate change where up is down, black is white and all of science is stood on its head? Where…
The polar jet stream normally runs around the roof of the world like the Siberian express. It spins around the top of the world and keeps Arctic cold bottled up and has been called the “polar vortex” ever since we have understood how different facets of Earth’s jet streams influence global weather. There is one…
From Drexel and Stanford Universities: “The climate change counter-movement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on the issue of global warming … Like a play on Broadway, the counter-movement has stars in the spotlight – often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians – but behind…
Even though global emissions are way up, US carbon dioxide emissions appear to be way down; down 16 percent since the peak in 2007. This would be good, but it’s a mirage. In 2011, 1.5 gigatons of CO2 were offshored in China (mostly) through goods produced there and shipped to the US. This leaves the…
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works heard climate testimony as to whether or not climate change was real. Conservatives on the committee continued to use their tried and true talking points from the smoking, acid rain, and ozone depleting chemical controversies: that the science is not clear, the cause is not certain,…
There is surprising new sea level rise news coming from the UK and Bangladesh is in trouble. Bangladesh is a tropical monsoon nation that gets hit by cyclones on average 16 times per decade. A cyclone struck the southeastern coast in May 1991, killing 136,000 people. One to one and a half meters of sea…
First Published on Truthout 12/26/2013 : We are in the midst of an era of frightening contradictions, when it comes to public understandings of climate change. While climate changes are occurring more quickly than scientists have ever predicted, most people’s knowledge of these realities remains hazy and clouded by political overtones. Because of both the…
In May 2011 it began. Lawsuits in 50 states and the Federal Government have been filed to force the states and President Obama to implement comprehensive Climate Recovery Plans or rules on greenhouse gas emissions. The lawsuits were implemented largely by iMatter – Kids v Global Warming and Our Children’s Trust.The basis for the suits…
Climate change projected by the IPCC 2013 report under the business as usual scenario (RCP8.5) projects climate change in the next 100 years to be as big as the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction event 56 million years ago. Changes today however are happening 100 times faster than the PETM. The PETM was likely a methane…
In the long-term, extreme weather will certainly become more extreme, with hotter heat waves and less intense cold waves, more intense precipitation events and longer drought. But in the short-term (40 years or less) things may reverse regionally or they may increase even more dramatically than the long-term rate suggests. This new modeling work shows…
Methane (and natural gas), and black carbon (soot) are short-lived greenhouse gases relative to carbon dioxide, N20 (nitrous oxide) and CFC (chlorofluorocarbons). Limiting these short-lived greenhouse gases have obvious benefits in reducing warming. Focusing emissions reductions on these gasses also gives the benefit of delaying warming in the short-term, but really only in a world…
Arctic Amplification means more energy in the Arctic. It’s warmer there now so there is more energy there. The “amplification” part of Arctic Amplification refers to how the Arctic, which is warming at twice or more the rate of the rest of the world, reacts with the rest of world. The global air currents that…
New work out of the University of York in the UK and the University of Ottowa in Canada has pretty much patched another hole in perceived temperature flattening myth. We live and we learn. This story has two parts. One is about the UKs temperature dataset and the other about the main US data set…
(See the new gallery about this trip to Padre Island National Seashore: link) Padre Island National Seashore, October 19 and 20, 2013 (PINS) First day out: Saturday October, 19th 2013. We had planned a leisurely trip, birding, staying in town at a hotel, eating seafood, light four-wheeling and enjoying the beach. Then, Friday night a…
A study in Geophysical Research Letters has found moss beneath a recently melted glacier on Baffin Island that dates back 44,000 to 120,000 years using radiocarbon-14 dating. This technique uses the radioactive decay rate of carbon-14, a rare but predictable version of a normal carbon atom, to date things that were once alive. The radioactive…
ClimateCom Podcasts: Miss the event at Scholtz’ Beirgarten on the 6th? Download the podcasts and listen at your leisure. We are very pleased at the success of the forum. We filled Scholz’ to near capacity and everyone stayed for the entire event(!) Podcasts of each segment as well as the whole nine yards are linked…
Climate scientists said to expect surprises. How can we have a bigger drought than ever before with our rainfall increasing? It’s all about evaporation and it’s not lake evaporation. It is evaporation from plants that use more water in what is now a much warmer world in Central Texas. It is about that warmer world…
