Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
China may not be leading the world in climate change policy, but, er, neither is the U.S. China’s emissions grew 75 percent in the five years from 2002 to 2007 and in 2010 their emissions grew 10.4%, even with the world-wide recession. Now China proposed emissions cap is getting closer to approval and they have…
2011 represents the highest damage cost-to-date in the U.S. for any year since 1980 when we began tracking Billion-dollar disasters. Economic damage costs to date in the US approach $32 Billion. The damage cost-to-date in the U.S. from natural disasters is typically less than $6 Billion, from the usual combination of winter storms, crops losses…
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110727131407.htm http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/29/us-tundra-fire-study-idUSTRE76S5VY20110729?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2Fenvironment+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Environment%29
A broad spectrum of ecological indicators are all headed in a negative direction in the Great North. Warming has been identified as the culprit. The more it warms, the greater the impacts. The forests that have evolved with the climate in the North are not at all adapted to the climate up there now. Widespread…
Every ten years NOAA recalculates their average temperature. the average temperature is what we hear every night on television when the weathergirl says “the normal low temperature today was fourtysomething (or whatever).” NOAA, the parent organization of the National Weather Service, supplies these “normal temperatures. They are based on the average temperature for the high…
247 of Texas’ 254 counties are under Texas Forest Service burn bans. In Austin we have only had 50% of our normal annual rainfall (9 inches behind) and we are about 60 percent behind for the last 10 months. We have had 36, 100-degree days so far this year and our normal is 12 days…
Climate science moves ahead. Recent findings continue the increase in the rate of sea level rise (Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva, 2009; Jevrejeva, Grinsted, and Moore, 2009; Rahmstorf, 2007; Vermeer and Rahmstorf, 2009.) It is not just that sea level continues to rise, the rate that it is rising is increasing. In other words, as our…
Permafrost in the Arctic is melting fast. This paper by scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NOAA published a paper in February has some wild news. Where was the media in February? You know the sensationalistic alarmist ones? Me thinks that Murdoch has been talking to them, he owns many of…
We have more acronyms for your increased state of general confusion. The AR5 is coming up (Assessment Report 5) to be relapsed by the IPCC in 2013 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.) This generation’s report will look at newly created scenarios that more appropriately simulate atmospheric physics than the current scenarios. Scientists are leaving behind…
New modeling of permafrost shows that the worst-case scenario will see almost as many greenhouse gases emitted because of melting permafrost than man has emitted since the beginning of time. The time frame for these emissions is two centuries (190 years.) In addition, wetlands area of the far north will decrease by 75%. One of…
Climate Progress quote: "NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” Science 5 March 2010: Vol. 327 no. 5970 pp. 1246-1250 DOI: 10.1126/science.1182221 Report Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1246.abstract Climate…
The big deal here is that the PETM (Pleistocene Eocene Thermal Maximum) was a massive ocean extinction event. There was a minor extinction event on land, but the big deal happened in the world’s oceans. The global temperature change was only about five degrees and it was short lived (20,000 years.) What likely happened was,…
The Queens University press release announces that they and Carleton Universities have completed research that has, as the press release states "…uncovered startling new evidence of the destructive impact of global climate change on North America’s largest Arctic delta." The study looked at a storm surge during the summer of 1999 that created a widespread…
From Science Daily: "What’s alarming to us as scientists is that there were only very slight natural changes that resulted in the onset of hypoxia in the deep ocean," said Professor Kennedy. "This occurred relatively rapidly — in periods of hundreds of years, or possibly even less — not gradually over longer, geological time scales,…
They’ve been telling us for decades, that we must change our path. The chairman and CEO of Allstate Insurance says that we have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of hailstorms, golf balls, football-sized hail (he said it not me), straight-line winds to 80 miles an hour, 120 tornadoes … you see a lot…
A phone conference and press release about climate change induced extreme weather, by the Union of Concerned Scientists, brings to light what climate scientists have been telling us for decades. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969,…
From Lund University in the UK: “Impacts of climate change on snow, water, ice and permafrost in the Arctic,” was compiled by about 200 researchers for the Arctic Councils basis for their part of the IPCC 2014 report. The last five years in the Arctic have been the warmest five years since record keeping began…
Abstract: “During this decade, the Amazon region has suffered two severe droughts in the short span of five years – 2005 and 2010. Studies on the 2005 drought present a complex, and sometimes contradictory, picture of how these forests have responded to the drought. Now, on the heels of the 2005 drought, comes an even…
The World Wildlife Fund says that we could lose 57 billion acres of forest to development and agriculture by 2050. There is NO mention of loss of forests due to climate change in their new report. Even though, 64 million acres are dead from a climate change induced insect attack in the North American Rockies….
April 30, More and more scientists are finally making the realization that this common excuse for the wicked climate change induced extremes of weather we have been having are actual ALL being caused by climate change. Today in real climate science land, "we can not tell if any one individual weather event is caused…
