Visualize World Heat The cover image for this story shows the daily high temperature anomalies for the Austin weather station at Camp Mabry for each day of the year 2022; one colored stripe for every day of the year. The anomaly is the difference in the temperature from normal where red colors are warmer than…
Frostweed On A Warming Planet First published by Bruce Melton PE in the Austin Sierran as a part of its cover image description on February 7, 2024 The most common species of frostweed in Central Texas is, Verbesina virginica. These “ice flowers” come from ice exuded by the stem. It takes a good hard freeze…
Busted: The global 1.5 degree C above normal dangerous climate change threshold Climate Emergency Hope for 2024 A Remarkable Jump in Temperature? Bruce Melton PE, ClimateDiscovery.org Happy New Year all, I want to let you all know about what may to some seem like a perverse perception of “hope” with our accelerating climate emergency. In 2024…
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……
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…
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….
It’s not the heat, it’s the warming beyond evolutionary boundaries. Bruce Melton ClimateDiscovery.org First published as an abridge version on The Rag Blog, as a part of an-in-depth radio interview on the Rag Radio syndicated on Pacifica on 7/21/2023 There’s a quote that has been around forever, variously worded and attributed to many. The origin…
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…
Record flooding on Onion Creek, Austin, October 2013 Advanced Rainfall Science in a Warming Climate Hydrology is one of our advanced culture’s most important engineering design areas because so much of our lives depend on not being flooded out, or having our streets flood or roofs collapse from excess rainfall. Hydrology is the study of…
The smoketastrophe in New York City. Image Wikicommons What climate change-caused -tastrophe will be next month? This month’s climate change-caused disaster was the smoketastrophe on the upper east coast. If you have been living under a rock (lucky you), smoke from unprecedented climate change-caused Canadian wildfires was sucked up into a low pressure system that…
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…
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…
Western Wildfires Increase Extremeness of Weather in the Central US by a Third Climate change: Expect the unexpected. How can western wildfires increase the extremeness of weather in the Central US? Well, heat injected into the atmosphere enhances high pressure because heat rises and high pressure is rising air. This increase in high pressure increases…
When Normals Are Not Normal The National Weather Service Is Unwittingly Obscuring the Reality of Global Warming by Bruce Melton PE See the abridged version on Truthout.org, July 17, 2022 In-depth references are below the article. Summary: The National Weather Service has a periodic procedure where they recalculate the “normal” climate data presented to the…
Onion Creek Flood 2013, US 183 bridge, Austin, Texas – new record flood depth. Climate change has returned to the news in full force with the Council of Parties meeting COP26, the 197 nation meeting of the United Federation Convention on Climate Change. What will come from the meeting is hopefully a more aggressive agreement…
“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…
