Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
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…
New photovoltaic technology first reported almost a year ago is emerging that is nearly five times more efficient than current technology. It uses silicon, like normal crystalline cells, but a unique fabrication process uses only about 2% of the amount of silicon that normal cells use and the material is created in a flexible film….
January 1, 2011 CO2 A researcher at the University of Exeter in the UK leads a team that has published a paper in Nature Geoscience about projections for 2011 CO2 emissions. Based on emissions declines during the recession and projections of economic out put for 2011, the team has found that CO2 emissions will likely…
Recent studies using the new GRACE gravity measuring satellites (see here) have shown startling new results for ice melt / ice loss from Antarctica. As the dataset from the new satellites, put up in 2003, grows larger, the melt / ice loss continues to grow. Previous studies have shown the melt/loss coming mainly from West…
Non CO2 Greenhouse Gas Warming Will Persist for Longer Than 1,000 Years Abstract: Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change. Carbon dioxide displays exceptional persistence that renders its warming nearly irreversible for more than 1,000 years. Here we show that the warming due to non-CO2 greenhouse…
The ice fields atop Mount Kilimanjaro have lost 85 percent of their coverage since 1912; The Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru — the largest tropical ice field on Earth, has retreated 25 percent since 1978; Ice fields in the Himalayas that have long shown traces of the radioactive bomb tests in the 1950s and…
In the thousands of scientific papers on climate change that I have reviewed, most of the results talk about how lab tests sequestered far more carbon than imagined; about how the new techniques have been “scaled up” to mass production capacity and shown to be valid. The cost analyses show what at first would seem…
A decrease in Polar sea ice and the extreme winter events of the northeastern U.S. and Europe in 2005 have been recreated in modeling. It appears that warmer temperatures in the Arctic have an impact thousands of miles away as the jet stream makes a huge bend south. The results are snowpocali, or snowpocalypses. Only…
Two US Geological Survey researchers published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences of the United States of America this month and found, not only is there ongoing unprecedented forest die-off from warming and, drought, beetles and disease, but these forests are particularly susceptible to eco-regime change: these forests will likely…
