Grand Teton National Park bark beetle mortality Massive National Forests Logging Threat – Bad Decisions and Bad Math of this Current Illegitimate Administration This illegitimate administration has vowed to increase US National Forest timber production by 59% to 112 million acres. Really? Their USDA Emergency Situation Memorandum (Executive Order (EO) 14225, Immediate Expansion of…
The Dumbest Climate Plan in History Bruce Melton PE First published at the rag Blog on April 18, 2025 Updated here on April 19, 2025 on ClimateDiscovery.org to add more illegitimate actions against NOAA and NASA Podcast forthcoming ~ ~ ~ The title of this article is not solely meant to highlight the level…
Image: Yale Climate Connections The Warming Rate for the Last Two Years Has Been 25 Times the Warming Rate of the Last 150 Years A review of Hansen 2025. In the last two years, Earth has warmed 0.4 degrees C, compared to 1.2 degrees C warming in the previous 100 years. This warming rate is…
Painting by Henry C. Pitz showing John Wesley Powell and his party descending the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, presumably during the historic 1869 expedition. (Image credit: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, via Yale Climate connections) When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down? Intensifying extreme weather events and an…
A Photographic Summary of Climate Change Across America Healthy Planet Action Coalition November 30, 2023 4:40 ET, 3:30 CT, 1:30 PT From Padre Island to the North Slope of Alaska: beach erosion, desert species mortality, fire, debris flow, native insect infestations, forest regeneration failure, extreme cold, epic drought, greening of the Arctic, and permafrost collapse……
Windsor Park Climate Conversation Bruce Melton and Justin Schoof August 23, 2023 – Record droughts in some area, record flooding in others. A polar vortex freezes Texas, then an atmospheric river replaces the waters of California overnight. All of these forces are at play in our daily weather patters and science is trying very hard to…
Rag Radio 2023-07-21, Climate Change scholar and activist Bruce Melton is Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio where they discuss the unprecedented heat in the summer of 2023. Among topics Bruce addresses are: What is going on with this increasing frequency of extreme events? Is the heat increasing faster? The additional causes of extreme heat beyond climate…
Permafrost collapse, Glenn Highway, Alaska. Though permafrost has been thawing slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age, the rate of thaw today is so great that in combination with Amazon collapse and collapse of Canadian forests, natural feedback emissions rival all of transportation globally. Faster than forecast, climate impacts trigger tipping points in…
Ice Storm Mara Debris Pickup Winter Storm Mara Greenhouse Gas Emissions Austin Resource Recovery has picked up enough storm debris to fill Q2 Stadium four times. The Texas A&M Forest Service says 10.5 million trees were damaged in the Austin area by the storm. At just 400 pounds biomass lost per tree, at 50 percent…
Risky Feedbacks – Not In Models; Understated Solutions Feedbacks are best understood by example. Austin’s 2023 ice storm that caused massive tree damage and excessive power outages was caused by a feedback. The ice storm stalled in a classic climate change-caused effect, creating a longer ice accumulation time than in our old climate. This additional…
A few sequoias saved from the KNP fire. 2022 Review – Critical Climate Science Findings Below are some of the scientific findings that made our archives in 2022. These are just a fraction of what made it into the archives, but they represent the most important aspects of climate change impacts happening far ahead…
The Sequoia Burn Giant Sequoias: A Climate Tipping Point by Bruce Melton PE Follow MeltOn in the field on Instagram See the abridged version on Truthout.org: August 9, 2022. Summary: Up to 13,000 mature sequoias were killed by wildfire between 2015 and 2021, with a total known population of only about 75,500 mature trees. Sequoias…
“Where do we move?” Retirees want to know where they can escape climate change impacts. Those seeking to give their kids the best life they can want to know. The folks from where I live in Austin want to get out of this infernal heat that has come to dominate our lives with 100-degree days…
Mayfield Kentucky after the December 2021 tornado outbreak. Image: State Farm Insurance, Wiki Commons Winter Tornadoes Increase 5-Fold because of Climate Change Winter tornadoes have increase 500 percent since 1953 with most of the increase likely being recent. This study looked at 4293 tornadoes reported between 1953 and 2015. Not only did it find tornadoes…
Summary: The Texas winter storm disaster was caused by both climate change and poor planning. Climate change is making extreme weather more extreme, and energy generation planning in Texas did not fully take into consideration cascading feedbacks, simultaneous catastrophes, and the extent to which our climate has already created more extreme weather based on warming…
Austin, Texas: The Blizzard of ’21 – Summary and Photo Tour by Bruce Melton First published in the Austin Sierran on March 9, 2021, updated March 13. By 10 pm on February 14, this map was updated with winter storm warnings (pink) issued for every county in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. They say it will…
Pier Fire 2017, Black Mountain Grove Unburnable Sequoias Burned July 2019, Sequoia National Forest – We had been driving the Pier Fire burn for two days. Two days in the black. We camped at the intersection of two logging roads, parking in the middle of the widest spot, as we had only seen two vehicles….
Covid-19, climate change, and permafrost collapse… …and our new, abruptly evolving culture. By Bruce Melton First Published on The Rag Blog on July 7, 2020 ADDITION, JUNE 11, 2021 — Laboratory Origin — In the original article the citation for the academic review citing the virus was “definitively” not of laboratory origin was not included….
One of the biggest mistakes made in our climate culture today is equating future emissions with impacts from sea level rise. We have enough CO2 in our atmosphere, and likely enough warmth built up already not counting warming in the pipeline, to create unrecoverable economic scenarios. Forced migration differs from migration patterns we have come…
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….
