Microsoft on climate: The game changer Historic climate pollution emissions almost everyone missed. By Bruce Melton First published on the RagBlog.org, February 3, 2020 Microsoft going net zero by 2030 is a tremendously insightful action, but what’s truly groundbreaking and ever so much more important today, 30 years after we began trying to solve the…
The Climate Emergency Has Already Begun as Earth Systems Collapse by Bruce Melton First published on Truthout on December 7, 2019 More than 11,000 scientists across 153 countries are shouting out a new climate change warning. The delay for action has been too long. Addressing our rapidly degrading and already overly dangerous climate is now officially an emergency….
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, September 24, 2019 The Ocean and Cryosphere (the icy part of our planet) in a Changing Climate A Summary of Important Findings Overall of course, climate change is astonishingly worse with every new report. This one is no exception. Polar and mountain ice are melting faster, the…
The depths of the Paradise Fire on November 8, 2018 are yet unknown. 14,000 homes were destroyed in four hours along with another 5,000 businesses and commercial structures. Recovery appears to be strong, debris are about half removed, but reconstruction as yet has little obvious momentum. 14,000 Simultaneous Catastrophes: Climate Change in Paradise California, the…
New Report Warns Planet May Be Warming Twice as Fast as Expected By Bruce Melton First Published on Truthout, May 28, 2019 New earthshaking science will be coming out in the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that could nearly double future warming predictions. We have a window into this new science…
State of the Climate Report 2018, American Meteorological Society Unsurprisingly, we have roundly exceeded climate norms in our old climate. Records continue to be broken and climate statistics broadly show we are exceeding or near the leading edge of warming in recent years, as would be expected from a climate that continues to warm, that…
Permafrost Melt Photo Tour Climate Change Across America 2018 Field Work Already, Alaska has flipped from a carbon sink to a carbon source from permafrost melt and methane emissions. (Commane 2017, science interpreted) Alaska — the entire state, and likely the rest of the north across the entire world — is now emitting greenhouse gases…
Why are climate change impacts so much worse than projected? What does it mean? Why don’t we do something? In a nutshell, science is conservative, it’s slow, and the great climate consensus that has evolved to protect our society compounds the understating nature of the industry of science. This creates a vastly understating public facing message. …
West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse: The Critical Path Article link Sea level rise estimates of around 10 feet by 2100 are now becoming hard to ignore. This article is about several new findings in 2018 that build on near-10 feet of sea level rise news from NOAA in 2016 and 2017. What is…
Climate Change 2018 Review: Part 1 – The Bad by Bruce Melton Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3 (Link to Article) So much happened in our climate change world in 2018 that we are printing this article in two parts: The Bad, and The Good. We start with the bad, and as bad as it was…
California Wildfires: Where Is the Climate Change Outrage? Bruce Melton First published at Truthout.org November 17, 2018 Unprecedented droughts, fires and floods are not the “new normal”: Climate change gets nonlinearly worse from here on out. Like an avalanche, the physics of warming determines that a little more warming doesn’t create a…
In an Age of Climate Change, Even Titanic II Is Not Safe From Icebergs Bruce Melton First Published on Truthout November 13, 2018 Titanic II is set to sail in 2022. It’s a $500 million replica of the doomed Titanic that hit a North Atlantic iceberg in 1912. A local news report about the new ship postulated…
Climate Change Across America: Summary of Summer Filming Season 2018 (Our trip log with photos and videos can be found here.) This year was year four of filming with 43,000 total miles of observation to date. In the summer filming season in 2018, for 16,000 miles from Austin to the Arctic via California, we literally…
Climate Change Across America – Instagram Trip Logs Full Trip Log, Summer Filming Season 2018: June 27 through August 11 – Austin to the Arctic Circle via California. The expedition was 16,199 miles, 46 days, 42 different camps, 2 motels – Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Yukon Territory, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Utah,…
Our Nation’s Timberlands Flip: Mortality Exceeds Growth by 2:1 Because of climate change, our nation’s forests are dying faster than they are regenerating. This was not supposed to happen for a long, long time. It’s really something that is not even projected, except in very vague terms about ecosystem transformation. But today, already, we see…
Arctic Sea Ice – More Than Half Gone With Five Times As Much Warming Just what do all the squiggly lines mean? To start with, the way science is shown to us civilians is a bit misleading generally. What we hear much of the time as the “new record sea ice extents” is based on…
How much CO2 reduction, how much does it cost, and what’s it worth? A Detailed Primer We have been moving towards the answers to these questions forever it seems, so here goes: Immediately below is my summary. Further down are thoughts on how I arrived at these numbers. These costs assume that we can do…
The 45Q Carbon Sequestration Tax Credits: First Steps or Moral Hazard? Summary: The new enhancements to Obama’s 45Q carbon dioxide sequestration tax credits are widely seen as a boon to the oil industry. A deeper look reveals they could be the incentive that allows us to actually reverse warming, something that most people understand…
New Evaluation of Climate Models Reveals Abrupt Changes Ahead of Schedule It’s not the averages that will mess up your hair, it’s the gusts. This work on modeling the unmodelable (Drijfhout 2015) is a couple of years old now, but it gives enormous insight into why it is that “ice cube melt climate science” is…
Beach Report: King Tide October 2017 October 20, 2017 The King Tide was on. King tides, spring tides, perigean spring tides (all different names for the same thing) happen in October and April when the sun and moon both align to raise the normal high tide by several feet sometimes. The extra high tides come in…
