Two degrees C was first suggested as an upper limit to where we should allow our climate to warm by Nordhaus (Yale) in the American Economic Review in 1977 with the justification that this amount of change would exceed the temperature envelope where our mature civilization has developed. Nordhaus cites Sellers 1974 and NCAR 1974…
Scientists have been planning for how to implement a transformation to an alternative energy infrastructure for more than several years now. Jacobson 2013, represents years of effort and others have been doing the same. We know how to evolve our energy infrastructure, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how efficient…
The driver of our climate system has changed in the last two decades from one that is controlled by annual emissions, to one that is controlled by already emitted CO2. This means that previous strategies to control annual emissions are no longer meaningful and we must now turn our attention to the already emitted climate…
For 24 years we have been attempting to implement climate reform, but because strategies are complex, controversial and inequitable, we have nothing to show for this effort save a near-failing carbon credit program in the EU. By giving ourselves permission to seek zero warming, we go beyond the failed strategies of the past into a…
We have delayed too long and now must urgently reduce the load of warming gases already emitted to our sky. We have been warned this would happen for decades, we just didn’t think it would happen so soon. This is exceedingly bad news, though the good news with climate change is very good indeed. The…
The Devil’s Elbow, Padre Island National Seashore. This is that point where the Texas Coast trends from Northeast to south; the big bend of coastal Texas. “The oceans are rising the beaches decree. Gonna get covered up by the sea. Tide gauges say what we can’t see. The oceans are rising the beaches decree.” Beaches…
This is the original long version with much more detail and all of the destinations and forest health descriptions along the 6,000 mile route. The abbreviated 2,000 word version was published on Truthout on February 16, 2016 is here. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart…
Dansgaard Oeschger climate variability, more easily remembered as abrupt climate change, has been known from across the world through numerous lines of investigation since the early 1990s. This research greatly increases the robustness of the theory that a freshwater cap in the far North Atlantic from melting ice plays a significant role in abrupt change….
First Published on Truthout, December 4, 2015 The perceived debate on climate change has discredited traditional climate science communications to such an extent that we are just now implementing policies developed during the Kyoto Protocol era that began in 1992. New climate science knowledge is simply not making it out of academia and into public…
Our previous understanding of how the Antarctic Ice Sheet responded to warming at the end of the last ice age 10 to 20 thousand years ago was based on only a few ocean sediment cores. From sediment cores in the North Atlantic we have been able to piece together a decent map of how and…
The Gulf Stream may not actually shut down, but it is slowing now and has been for some time (see here) and these researchers have come close—if not having actually solved—the puzzle of why the Gulf Stream slowed or shut down in the past and what the consequences were. From Australia and Hawaii, science workers…
First Published on Truthout, April 13, 2015. The Gulf Stream plays an immensely important role in moderating the climate of eastern North America and Europe. Moreover, Greenland melt impacts ocean current processes in the North Atlantic. For years, contradictory research has alternately said the Gulf Stream was slowing and that it was not slowing. The…
First published on Truthout, March 5, 2015. Greenland is warmer than it has been in more than 100,000 years and climate disrupting feedback loops have begun. Since 2000, ice loss has increased over 600 500 percent, and liquid water now exists inside the ice sheet year-round, no longer refreezing during winter. Complete Article
First published on Truthout, December 26, 2014. As we move into 2015, the latest climate science continues to diverge from policy. New science tells us that, because of short-lived climate pollutants, current policies dealing with carbon dioxide pollution alone will likely produce more warming than doing nothing at all. Complete Article
The news is not new in scientific circles, but new research has somehow piqued the interest of the media and the word is out. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is in the initial stages of irreversible collapse. This will ultimately lead to 13 to 20 feet of sea level rise in time frames between…
First Published on Truthout, August 27, 2014 (link) The fundamental climate change policy question today is not how much we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions by when, but what will currently proposed carbon dioxide emissions reductions do to our climate in the near-term? In addition, what are the ramifications of short-lived climate pollutants that are…
First Published on Truthout, March 18, 2014 Today, we are burning fossil carbon one million times faster than it was naturally put in the ground, and carbon dioxide is increasing 14,000 times faster than anytime in the last 610,000 years (1,2). Climate is now changing faster than it has during any other time in 65…
Methane (and natural gas), and black carbon (soot) are short-lived greenhouse gases relative to carbon dioxide, N20 (nitrous oxide) and CFC (chlorofluorocarbons). Limiting these short-lived greenhouse gases have obvious benefits in reducing warming. Focusing emissions reductions on these gasses also gives the benefit of delaying warming in the short-term, but really only in a world…
(This article is an expansion of and provides technical backup for Bruce Melton’s three-part series, “Welcome to Climate Change in Texas,” published in December 2011 and January 2012 on The Rag Blog.) Read More — Extra: Welcome to Climate Change Texas: The Worst-Case Scenario is Happening (expansion and backup) Part…
As I have been saying in the first two installments of this series, climate change is already much more extreme than most scientists have been predicting. This is mainly because the majority of predictions are based on the “most likely” emissions scenario and because we have not reduced our emissions like climate scientists told us…
