Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
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…
This one is stranger than strange. scientists have long been puzzled by what looked like fungal bodies that seem to cover many fossils of different kinds from what is called the end-Permian. This “end-Permian” is how the end of the Permian Epoch is described. It’s also called Permian Triassic Extinction 251 million years ago when…
Whenever we have an extreme weather event, whether it be unprecedented in the historic record or not, the climate unchangers come out of the woodwork. They are at the ready with their cries of, “It’s not unprecedented!” All the while, they appear to not be listening to what the scientists have to say. They are…
“The death of the forests – primarily comprised of conifers, which are distant relatives of today’s pines and firs – was part of the largest extinction of life on Earth, which occurred when today’s continents were part of one supercontinent, Pangaea. The so-called Permian extinction likely was triggered by immense volcanic eruptions in what is…
This is a big one. The myth that volcanoes emit more CO2 than mankind is an old one, and old climate change myths die hard. The science concerning greenhouse gases and volcanoes is robust, yet a few stale papers continue to give the climate pretenders hope that it will all just be a bad dream…
The National Snow and Ice Data Center has completed a big evaluation of the Larson Ice Shelf. You may remember the Larson B — it collapsed in 2002 in a colossal way. An area the size of Rhode Island collapsed in about 30 days. The collapse was caused by increased meltmater draining onto the crevasses…
For the same reasons that “Those people who would have us distrust our climate scientists” tell us that climate change is either: not real, not as bad as the climate scientists say or will be good for the planet and her peoples, the solutions to climate change will be easier than public knowledge suggests. We…
An article in Nature News, in the journal Nature, describes the prediction of this famine and it linked to climate change. Last summer, the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) set up by the US Agency for International Development to help policy makers prevent humanitarian disasters, predicted this major and growing famine. At risk…
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…
