Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
Just a quick note. One of the continuous warnings from climate scientists is not continuous drought, warming that makes Minnesota like Texas, floods that rival Noah’s, melting permafrost, loss of Arctic sea ice, global economic crippling sea level rise, ocean acidification or any of dozens more; it’s “Expect the unexpected.” One of the biggest examples…
Canadian boreal forest mortality is already ten times higher than normal. In a similar study in the Western U.S., five times higher mortality than normal was found. The Canadian boreal forest is that northern area of Canada where almost nobody lives. It extends north through some of the wildest lands ever known to the arctic…
Melting permafrost changes mountainsides into dirt pudding . If your read my reporting on mega-tsunamis from March 13, 2011, you know that evidence of astronomically large landslides has been recorded in Hawaii and evidence exists around the world of similar events. The evidence shows tsunami debris 1,200 feet above sea level from the last interglacial…
Rag Radio 2012-08-10 – Bruce Melton & Roger Baker on Climate Change & the Global ‘Tipping Point’ by Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer Podcast – https://archive.org/details/RagRadio2012-08-10-BruceMeltonRogerBaker Rag Blog writers Bruce Melton and Roger Baker discuss developments in climate science, including the current record-setting heat wave and drought, in the context of increasing global warming caused by…
How many times in the reporting of this event have you heard that we still cannot tell if any single weather event is caused by climate change? It is time we stopped comparing climate change caused weather events with similar events in the past. Our country is suffering through a second year in a row…
HMS Challenger Expedition gave us exceptional baseline data for 21st century ocean warming evaluation. Average global ocean temperature change is 0.59 degrees C. The Royal Society, University of Edinburgh and Mechiston Castle School sponsored the expedition around the globe to explore the deep oceans. Led by Captain George Nares, the expedition is credited with the…
The question about range and forest fires and prehistory is an excellent example of one of the most important things about climate change that is so poorly understood by the public. Doing something to an ecosystem like burning it or chopping it down,only has a significant impact on our climate if that ecosystem does not…
Methane: so much news. First, methane from the decomposition of recently grown organic stuff is not really a problem. How ’bout that. It’s fossil methane that’s a problem. Recently grown organic material cycles through the growth/decay process rapidly relative to climate change’s semi-geologic timescale. So it’s factored in to the equation. Burning fossil fuels releases…
For decades, the concept of installing privies in every house, business, and public building, and then piping human waste to a central treatment system, was perceived as lunacy that would bankrupt society. First published on the Rag Blog Part 3 of a three part series: Part 1: The Climate Awareness Drought is Over: Time to Change…
Warming Over Land will be Twice the Global Average Because of Cool Ocean Water (Posted on the Ragblog August 9, 2012 http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/bruce-melton-biggest-misunderstanding.html) 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…
Which side is biased and how do we tell with all the noise in the media? First published on the Rag Blog Part 2 of a three part series: Part 1: The Climate Awareness Drought is Over: Time to Change the Tone Part 2: The Climate Change awareness drought is over Part Two: Voices tell us ‘the warmists…
International Energy Agency (IEA) Says Oil Shall Fracking May Kill Alternatives: The Bad News Is That Natural Gas Production Produces Greater Warming than Coal The International Energy Association (IEA) in their new report “Golden Rules for the Golden Age of Gas” says cheap natural gas from fracking oil shale may kill the budding alternative energy…
The shift in awareness is very encouraging and seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase. First published on the Rag Blog Part 1 of a three part series: Part 1: The Climate Awareness Drought is Over: Time to Change the Tone…
Five degrees of change—a half zone. Not average temperature; this is based on the average last freeze. I gave a presentation to the Austin Organic Garden Society last month and I remembered USDA had recently come out with new hardiness zone maps. The USDA changes in 2012 are not so much different than the 2006…
More Evidence of West Antarctic Ice Sheet Disintegration from the Jackson School of Geosciences in Austin The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the only “marine ice sheet” remaining on Earth. A “marine” ice sheet is one that whose base rests on rock below sea level. These peculiar ice sheets were numerous during ice ages…
Across the northern hemisphere, extreme heat that once happened across 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the Northern Hemisphere now happens across ten percent–every year. The most extreme events are happening nearly 5,000 times more often than normal. April 14, 2012: In Just the Last 30 Years, Climate Extremes Have Increased 10 to 100 Times— Dr….
In the twelve months prior to April 16, high temperature records outnumbered low temperature records 3 to 1. James Hansen told the U.S. Senate in 1988 that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” After all of the recent unprecedented…
What was previously thought to be the threshold or complete melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet was an average global warming of 3.4 to 9.2 degrees F has now been refined to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees F. this is roughly half the warming that we previously understood. What was previously thought to be the threshold…
It is not because of increased population and it is not because of increased observation. Think that our growing population is enduring increasing impacts from severe weather and you would be correct. But adjusting extreme weather events for what the scientists call “population bias” is nothing new. What is new is the amount of…
How Many Unprecedented Historic Weather Records Have to be Broken for Climate Change to Get Some Respect? The Science of Early Spring So far in 2012 in Austin we have had bout the same amount of rain than we did in the 12-month period that marked the drought that peaked last summer (the deepest 12-month…
