Assessment of Historic and Future Trends of Extreme Weather in Texas, 1900-2036 Texas A&M University Report by the Office of the Texas State Climatologist Update 2024 (Link to full report) (Commentary by Editor MeltOn) Large thanks to State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon and his team. Texas is a big place and this report was a lot…
Not Near Enough Rain in Austin Maybe things will change soon. May is our wettest month after all. The big drought hole southwest of Austin remains and the lakes are in sorry shape. We were supposed to get some relief from El Nino this winter, but nada, even though some have seen 20 inches east…
An Introduction to Advanced Climate Change – Two Years in the Making by Bruce Melton PE Climate Change Now Initiative October 2023 (Link to the learning tool) This slide deck is a learning tool with 18,000 words in 52 slides with 70 beautiful images. The notes include about 85,000 words and over 600 references with…
Healthy Planet Action Coalition November 30, 2024 Climate Change Across America Slide Show (Download the slideshow here https://climatediscovery.org/climate-change-across-america-photographic-review-powerpoint-342-slides/ or click on the image above to see the presentation given by Melton. A 342 slide photojournal of climate impacts across North America. Join Bruce Melton PE as he tells the story of impacts from Padre Island…
Worst Drought Ever in the Amazon, Caused By Climate Change The fifth, 100-year drought since 2005 has struck the Amazon in 2023; this one more extreme than any of the previous events. Each of these droughts except one were more extreme than the previous. These were 2010, 2015/2016, the smaller one in 2020, and the…
Lake Travis at 630.6 feet elevation in 2013. Today, Travis is at 631.2. Lake Travis: Record Low? Despite the rains, Lake Travis’ water elevation of 631.1 feet elevation is only two and a half feet higher than it’s low pf 628.5 feet in October. And this is only 11 feet higher than the low during…
Image: Lakeway City Park on Lake Travis, 2011 Drought of Record, elevation approximately 630. The elevation for February 2024 was 631.34. 2023’s Heat Cost Texas $24 Billion First published at the Dallas Federal Reserve by Jayashankar et al., on October 18, 2023 Note: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Billion Dollar Weather Events…
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……
Image: Crayons on a driveway of a friend, 103 degrees. Note how the white crayons hardy melted. How Much Hotter Is It Because of Climate Change? One of the things I tell folks these days about the heat is that the absolute temperature in Austin is not really that much warmer than in the past….
Ocotillo mortality, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Three Dike Hill. The ocotillo in the foreground succumbed to bark beetles last season. Many more are in the frame, just hard to tell! It’s the desert ~ ~ ~ Chihuahuan Desert Walkabout – Desert Mortality from Climate Change By Bruce Melton We just returned from filming more…
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…
Climate Change Across America Fall Filming Report Southern and Southwestern Colorado Beetle Attack and Forest Regeneration Failure at Mesa Verde National Park We returned to filming after a long covid. No trouble. On the big drive from Texas to the mountains, New Mexico was grand with their indoor mask mandate. Colorado and Texas were about…
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 – 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,…
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…
What’s the Big Deal With Climate Change? We all understand climate change is trouble. Even a really significant percentage of oil and gas professionals understand. Of a recent poll (2014) of 474 oil and gas industry insiders, 85 percent believed global warming was happening, 58 percent were either very sure or extremely sure, and 57 percent…
Slowly and insidiously, or abruptly and finitely. Forests of all kinds are succumbing to climate change. Mountain forests, city forests, forests in the southeast and the far north. Pine, spruce, fir, oak, maple. Nontraditional forests too; the palms of LA, succulents in the desert. Yes, deserts are at risk too. Deserts as ecosystems are fragile…
The list of Amazonian drought records has grown to Amazonian proportions. Three 100-year plus droughts in a decade have taken their toll. Along with continual man-created ecological compromise, climate warming, and forest mortality from drought a very strong El Nino has grown into their strongest drought ever recorded since record keeping began in 1900. The…
It’s all around us but masked by “noise” in the media; enabled by fairness in journalism, driven by myth that has been propagated by experiences that we as a society have never before experienced. When Unprecedented drought in California was replaced by unprecedented flooding, the paper says: “The media, resource management entities, and the scientific…
One of the general quandaries about current climate change impacts and those with our future climate has been: “how do we end up with drying when precipitation increases with warming as we already see happening and is further projected in the future?” This research from Princeton, University of Southampton and the US Geological Survey does…
