Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
Northern forest soils, unlike tropical forest soils, are immense storehouses of carbon. It has always been understood that a warming planet will dry the forests of most of the world. This dryness will cause the liberation, or oxidation of much of the northern forests soils carbon. This carbon has been placed there over the millennia…
February 5, 2010 I am just going to quote Fred Pearce from the Guardian. "None of the 1,073 emails plus 3,587 files containing documents, raw data and computer code upsets the 200-year-old science behind the "greenhouse effect" of gases like carbon dioxide, which traps solar heat and warm the atmosphere. Nothing changes the fact that…
370 scientists from 27 countries around the world spent last winter on the first ship of its kind (research vessel) ever to remain mobile in the Arctic during the winter season. What they found was that Arctic sea ice is decaying "…much faster than their most pessimistic models predict". ( The Winnipeg Free Press Interview…
Climate models are made out of all of these cells. The are typically about 10 km on edge (62 miles). Temperature analysis is done on a gridded basis. The scientists do not use the obviously heat modified temperatures of urban weather stations unadjusted. That would be unintelligent. The weather stations in each grid are all…
It never ceases to amaze me – the tenacity of the dedicated climate skeptics. Now they are leading a race to see how many people they can convince that climate change is not real because they say we are not setting a global temperature records every single year. They do not understand that the chaos…
This is about complex atmospheric chemistry. Our previously simple understanding of the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere does not do justice to the complex atmospheric chemistry that goes on 24/7. The explanation is not so complex though. Methane reacts differently with different things in the atmosphere at different times. These different reactions tell…
Well, they told us this would happen. Since the early 1980s. scientists have been saying that the weather would get more variable, that storms would get worse in a warmer planet. A new report by the National Wildlife Federation reports that this is just what is happening. The last couple of winters have been peculiarly…
From the Seattle Times, Jan 20, 2010: "If you see these changes across an entire ocean basin, you can be assured it’s happening on a global scale in other ocean basins around the world," said Robert Byrne, a marine chemist at the University of South Florida and lead author of an upcoming paper in Geophysical…
In the U.S., 2009 was 0.3 degrees F above the 20th century average. The solar minimum continues. The two year lag from the Pacific Decadal Oscillation continues. This is why it is not 1.3 degrees above normal or more. I have attached a view of Arctic sea ice extents from the National Snow and ice…
Yes there was a mistake in the 2007 IPCC report, I am sure there were more than one. The biggest mistake is that the report does not go far enough in projecting future climate change. Virtually everything that the report has projected has been proven to be conservative. There are even a number of things…
This study from Yale, the University of Hong Kong and U of C Santa Cruz looked at climate between 3 and 5 million years ago, the point in the past when temperatures were as close to today as they have been since. Their goal was to find a stable warm climate state and evaluate the…
It’s the Laptev Sea again. This is the part of the Arctic Ocean that is just north of Siberia (see here). The springtime air temperature across the region in the period 2000-2007 was an average of 4C higher than during 1970-1999, likely the highest temperature rise on the planet. The estimate of carbon locked up…
Arctic sea ice may disappear by 2013: Arctic sea ice is in trouble and the implications of the global feedback caused by the lack of sea ice are extreme. Open water absorbs eight times more heat than does ice. Ice reflects the heat harmlessly back to space. Water keeps the heat to melt more ice…
The authors make it clear that 2008 was a year that reflected strong cooling across North America but not unusual in the least, at least from a climatological standpoint. Many people out there, including many weather people on television seem to think there is something special about the relatively cold temperatures that we are having….
Remember those new, really fabulous gravity satellites called GRACE? (For more about Grace see the essay Antarctic Paradox on this site http://www.meltonengineering.com/Mythbusters/Antarctic%20Paradox.pdf) Velicogna, Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed b y GRACE, Geophysical Research Letters, October 2009
Abstract: The current observed value of the ratio of daily record high maximum temperatures to record low minimum temperatures averaged across the U.S. is about two to one. This is because records that were declining uniformly earlier in the 20th century following a decay proportional to 1/n (n being the number of years since the…
Irrefutable and unequivocally are two very exact words that have been used by the most authoritative bodies of science to qualify the validity, current impacts and dangerous planetary risks associated with the climate crisis. The debate over causation was over in the 20th Century. What is the deal? There have been an increasing number of…
The latest Pew Center poll shows an extraordinary change in public understanding. It’s like two decades of climate science has been flushed down the toilet. All of a sudden, 14% of Americans have decided that what they understood last spring is now hooey. Those in the U.S. who choose not to believe in science are…
December 6, 2009 . Climate change could be 1 1/2 times worse than previously anticipated The long term warming will likely be about 50% greater than thought. A new study that looks at climate sensitivity three million years ago when CO2 was thought to be in equilibrium across the planet, polar ice was significantly reduced,…
Prime Minister Brown is quite upset at the hysteria being caused by the theft and fraud committed and being committed by and because of the East Anglia University email theft and ensuing fraud. Here is his quote on the subject from the Guardian on the 4th: "With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t…
