Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
AUSTIN — If this is not climate change, then this is exactly what climate change will be in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with these unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the climate scientists have been warning us about for over 20 years….
Update: The final count is 301 million, right in the middle of the 100 to 500 million estimate. See October 24, 2012 discussion https://climatediscovery.org/final-count-for-2011-drought-tree-kill-in-texas/ In a preliminary report, the Texas Forest Service says that 100 million to 500 million trees have been killed across Texas. A more detailed evaluation is due out in the spring….
The latest analysis of global temperature from GISs looks at the 12-month running average global temperature. Using the twelve month average smoothes out the chaos of monthly weather changes. The running average averages successive twelve month periods: March through February, April through March, May through April, etc. It’s a little different way of looking at…
I am talking about climate science business as usual. As in: classic conservative science. The scientists responsible for this report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are stuck inside of their science as usual box. This a long a ridiculous debate where the “air capture” of CO2, in the world of industrial…
Already competitive with subsidies in many places, already competitive in several places without subsidies, Especially to natural gas, wind energy will be competitive world-wide with gas, oil and coal in five years. Bloomberg New Energy Finance issued a statement on November 10 with this news. Wind energy will drop 12% in the next five years…
A classic report, full of conservative information created by committee. Not that the IPCC does not represent the best science that we have. It’s just that these guys do things by enormous committees and compromise is the standard operating procedure when creating policy, or anything really, by committee. So what does this report mean? Honestly,…
It’s been happening for more than a decade. Drought, insects and disease are recreating the landscape of western North America. A paper out of Oregon State tells the story: “A huge “migration” of trees has begun across much of the West due to global warming, insect attack, diseases and fire, and many tree species are…
Over the years I have been watching the reports reporting how sea level rise slowly increasing. Slowly however is a misnomer. Sea level rise has rapidly increased since about 1990. The papers tell the story. Throughout most of the 20th century, sea level rise was between 1.2 and 1.5 mm per year. About 1990, it…
An article in Science, published by the good folks at the Smithsonian, reports that 56 million years ago when Earth was 3 to 5 degrees C warmer durign a freak super abrupt climate change called the Eocene / Paleocene Thermal Maximum; in 10,000 years, CO2 doubled. The reuslting warming lasted for 200,000 years. The best…
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has returned a valuable yet frightening assessment of our current and future energy use and climate change. We have just five years to bring our energy sources into line with climate change mitigation scenarios or we default on our planet. Says the IEA: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use…
CO2 Emissions Rise a Whopping 6 Percent! Emissions in the U.S. rose 3.2 percent from 2009 to 2010, but they were still 3.7 percent below 2008 levels. This was not the case across large parts of the developing world. While many areas in Europe were mirroring U.S. emissions, many developing nations saw emissions skyrocket. When…
Professor Rich Mueller’s The Current Status of Climate Change – A Non-Partisan Analysis, has done what hundreds of others have in the last several decades — confirmed the facts of climate science. Will it make a difference? Personally, I don’t believe so. The greed and selfishness portrayed by those who have created the propaganda is…
Widespread one foot totals, even more widespread 2 foot totals, with peaks up to 32 inches fell in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Eleven dead, 3 million without power. Heavy wet snow with leaves still on the trees. NJ Conn and New York – states of Emergency. The storm blanketed states from Virginia to Maine and its…
Our buddy Tedesco at Cryospheric Processes tells us that The Greenland Melt Index ranked 6th in 2011. The melt index anomaly is the number of days with detectable surface melt compared to the baseline period of 1979-2010, and is estimated from satellite microwave observations. But this “melt index” is something like comparing sea ice extents…
I just ran across this in the Athens paper (Georgia). I recognized the researcher, but have not had the time to chase down the article that the Athens paper, uh, failed to mention in their reporting… But the title says it all anyway. The Athens reporter did say that this researcher says “Forests in Georgia…
It is about time that the climate scientists have decided that it is appropriate to start blaming all of these ultra extreme weather events on climate change. The message is finally beginning to gain broad acceptance in academic circles. At the Annual American Meteorological Society meeting this year, Kevin Trenberth, one of a handful of…
We had 2.5 inches at the airport and an inch an a half in Oak Hill! The last time we had more than a nickel’s worth of rain in Oak Hill was the middle of June — four months ago!
This is an article that I wrote for the Sierra Club Central Texas Chapter newsletter; the Austin Sierran. If this is not climate change, then this is exactly what climate change will be in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with these unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts…
The Antarctic ozone hole was caused by man-made emissions of “ozone depleting chemicals.” When we realized that Earth was in grave danger because of the great threat to our ozone layer that these emissions presented, we the people of this planet agreed to do something about it. A treaty was formed called the Montreal Protocol….
The State Climatologist is little different from most climate scientists. I have one thing to say about climate scientists and State Climatologists: They can not say what they see coming, only what their data tell them. The conservative nature of science demands that scientific proclamation be robustly supported by long term data. This makes it…
