Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
More than 175 have been killed. Let’s put this into perspective. In 1936, the U.S. population was about 128 million. Today it has almost tripled to 308 million. Supposing that the population density has remained the same (it has not, many more people live in the cities now than they did in the ’30s) we…
The earth warms and NASA quietly adds a new color to their legend to accommodate the change. No fanfare, no press release. The skeptical denialists did not even dispute the action. What does it mean? Think of your computer back in the 1990s. Remember how big that first upgrade to a 40 megabyte hard drive…
The yearly average global temperature last year beat out 2005 as the warmest ever by a few hundredths of a degree. The UK Met, The United Kingdom’s national weather service, tells a little different story, but not much. They had 2011 as the second warmest ever, just behind 1998. Why the difference? The Goddard Institute…
This study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation) combines three major areas of climate science in this report and summarizes 137 separate studies. The three focus areas were drought across the world over the last 1,000 years, drought between 1950 and 2008, and our future as…
One of the interesting things that this study has discovered is that decreased growth rates due to drought stress is not necessarily related to soil moisture. Forests with normal soil moisture can experience drought stress from excessive heat. It’s like their vascular system evolved without excessive heat and therefore the capacity of the trees vascular…
Sounds good? More king crab is always good! Except when you are the vast southern oceans biologic community that has not seen claws or pinchers for forty million years. This development has been caused by a warming southern ocean, that is of course attached to the rest of the world’s oceans that are warming because…
Abstract below. The summer of 2010 was exceptionally warm in eastern Europe and large parts of Russia. We provide evidence that the anomalous 2010 warmth that caused adverse impacts exceeded the amplitude and spatial extent of the previous hottest summer of 2003. "Mega-heat waves" such as the 2003 and 2010 events broke the 500-year-long seasonal…
March 6, 2011 – The culprit in both accounts is warming. The North Atlantic Oscillation has been affected by the Arctic Oscillation, which has been enhanced by warming. The Arctic is warmer and more energetic. This energy is transferred to the jet stream. The energized jet stream pushes Arctic storms further south. Because the storms…
Think Again! I have been reading articles about the impacts of warming on solid earth for years now. It is only logical to think that warming would have an impact on solid earth. Everything expands as it warms. Earth is no exception. This expansion would be realized, likely, at fault zones. These pre-cracked areas of…
This is yet another climate change impact happening before it was supposed to – a big one too. Findings from this team led by a biologist at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and including scientists from the USGS and the US Forest Service tells us that the black spruce forest of Alaska (much of…
I do not make this stuff up. These are the scientists words, not mine. The title of this review comes directly from the article titled "Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World". It was published in January in the most prestigious academic journal in the U.K., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society….
January saw the lowest recorded sea ice extents in the Arctic and a hyperactive jet stream that just kept on pummeling the eastern half of the U.S. with one major winter storm after another. Oddly enough, some of the lowest Arctic sea ice concentrations were seen in areas closest to the U.S. in the Labrador…
A study from the Academy of Sciences of Germany, Alfred Wegner Institute of Polar and Marine Research and the University of Colorado, Boulder has quotes “We find that early 21st century temperatures of Atlantic Water entering the Arctic Ocean are unprecedented over the past 2,000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of…
ebruary 5, 2011 – The 2009 data have been crunched at the U.S. Energy Information Agency. They have tallied the world’s CO2 emissions for us. You can see the raw data at the link below. U.S emissions have fallen 10 percent during the recession, China’s emissions, after being ranked number 2 behind the U.S. in…
In 2005, the Amazon had a one-hundred year drought. An event like this is basically supposed to be once in a hundred-year occurrence. Five years later they had another. But the 2010 drought was likely more than half again as extreme as the 2005 drought. We can not say with scientific certainty that because we…
February 1, 2011 – A paper by Stieg et. al. in 2009, widely accepted as the best in Antarctic temperature analysis in recent history, has recently come under fire from a paper by O’Donnell, et. al. O’Donnell’s paper says that warming in Antarctica is only half of what Stieg says. The denialists are wild with…
January 27, 2011 – "Enhanced Modern Heat Transfer to the Arctic by Warm Atlantic Water", Science, (abstract) The Arctic is responding more rapidly to global warming than most other areas on our planet. Northward-flowing Atlantic Water is the major means of heat advection toward the Arctic and strongly affects the sea ice distribution. Records of…
This little guy is one of my (and my wife’s) favorite animals on the planet. It lives in alpine scree or talus slopes – giant rock piles created as craggy mountains disintegrate over eons. These rock piles are devoid of trees and have scanty alpine vegetation (arctic tundra basically) in patches where a little dirt…
On a warmer planet, winter weather becomes more volatile. The extremes get more extreme. Read More
These biogeochemists are getting smarter everyday. Now they have determined how to identify different species of nitrogen that have been created in different areas. Tropical waters create one kind of nitrogen, polar waters create another. Deep water corals utilize nitrogen in growth. These researchers have sampled deep water corals in the northwest Atlantic off of…
