Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
“Climate change looks far more threatening than it did six years ago” said Lord Nicholas Stern, a professor of economics and chairman of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics. Stern, Chief economist for the Blair administration in the UK, World Bank Chief Economist, and author of the single most exhaustive evaluation…
Have I got a couple of good ones for you tonight(?!) From the Australian National Institute of Science (CSIRO–Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) and the Dresden University of Technology in Germany; One’s opinion on climate change is not as common as one thinks. We tend to overestimate how many people have the same opinion…
Recent reports of a record low ozone hole are everywhere. I cannot think of a word more appropriate for these reports except “bogus.” Some of the headlines say “lowest in 20 years” and some of the reporting makes this distinction, but do they tell you that before 1979 there was no ozone hole and today…
I get this question all too often. It goes to show the power and tenacity of the deniers’ propaganda. This myth has been explained time and again, but their propaganda is more extensive than “ours.” And remember, “propaganda” can be both negative and positive, false and true. The voices of vested interests and even some…
I have been busy and let my posting fall behind. Not because of the Zombie Apocalypse—it’s not that bad yet, I have simply fallen behind because of: Three articles on Truthout (see below), my book printer has a new beautiful color printing process and lots of local advocacy work. I also have several other posts…
Published on Truthout.org March 13, 2013: Climate change messaging is changing these days. One only needs to look as far as the Sierra Club’s unprecedented encouragement of civil disobedience with the Keystone Pipeline to see this happening. The polls are telling us that some 70 percent or more of Americans believe the Earth is now…
Published on Truthout.org February 21, 2013: Beginning in just eight years, we could see permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest that are comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. The latest research from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University published in December 2012 has some truly astounding news. The megadroughts referred…
Published on Truthout.org January 11, 2013: As incredible as it sounds, the effects of climate change are worse than the World Bank Report says in its latest report: “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4 degree C world Must be Avoided,” a summary of the latest findings in climate science. Much of this work is…
We have another mechanism conspiring to launch our planet into abrupt climate change. The Great Southern Ocean, or the Antarctic ocean is the culprit this time. Work out of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, Columbia University, Cambridge and Princeton has taken a million year look at sediment two sediment cores from the Antarctic. They found…
The details of the temperature record are a lot more extreme than the National Weather Service averages reveal. Their current January average for Camp Mabry is 2.1 degrees above normal, but it’s nearly 5 degrees warmer than the 1980 average. Is this just the normal chaos of weather? The annual average Austin temperature has increased…
University of Georgia forest ecologist Jacqueline Mohan tells us that not only is poison ivy already responding favorably to warming in Georgia, but its poison is getting more poisonous. The reason that poison ivy and other similar woody vines flourish in warmer climates (think Precambrian) is a symbiotic relationship with kind of fungi called arbuscular…
This report says: “Environmental groups overlooked growing opposition to environmental protections among conservatives voters and, underestimated the rising force of the Tea Party, believing – wrongly, as it turned out – they could still somehow win over Republican members of Congress through insider grand bargaining.” It goes on to let Obama off the hook and…
The most recent discoveries in climate science bear little resemblance to what we hear in the media. Greenland’s melt in 2012 for example has been widely advertised in the media as just another weather event, similar to many in the past. The adage that we cannot tell for sure if any single weather event was…
In an announcement of its latest Energy Poll results, the University of Texas Business School said that the increased agreement that climate change is happening was most notable in a group of Southern states, including Texas. The report states: This increase occurred across all political parties (Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and independent voters) with the greatest…
Original Discussion: https://climatediscovery.org/20-years-of-climate-change-in-my-gardens-in-austin-texas/ Planted tomatoes the first week of February. I was amazed to find plants at Home Depot. Normally we don’t get tomato plants until the first of March. For the last half dozen or so years spring has been coming earlier, requests for transplants rising and the suppliers have been meeting the demand,…
Welcome to climate change. It gets weirder every day. An old old friend saw a white-tail hawk in Manvel last week. Manvel is just south of Houston and is an uncommon sighting on the far northern edge of this Mexican bird’s normal territory. We have red bud trees blooming in Austin on the first day…
It appears that we have truly crossed a threshold. Since 2005, every year Arctic sea ice extents have been below every other year in the record back to 1979. Of course, we can’t tell with absolute statistical certainty. But we have been warned for decades that this would happen. This year’s melt record exceed the…
One last time: We do not have to have statistical certainty to be certain that Sandy was caused by climate change. When climate scientists have been warning us for twenty years that superstorms like this would happen as our planet warms—and it happens—how big of a fool do those deniers and delayers think we are?…
After twenty years of the D & D game climate change is much worse than it would have been if we had of started reducing emissions as the Kyoto Protocol, and nearly every single climate scientist on the planet suggested was prudent. First published on the Rag Blog, August 8, 2012. Before I tell you…
Part One: Warming over land will be twice the global average because of cool ocean water. Why didn’t they tell us this to start with for goodness sakes! An average considers warming over land and water. Warming over land is much greater than it is over water. Anyone who has ever been to the beach…
