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…
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…
Extreme Heat Increased 22,100 Percent in Last 40 Years James Hansen has a new post out to his big list where he shows heat extremes across Northern Hemisphere land areas have increased a mind bending 22,000 percent. Breaking down Hansen’s work, in the classic 3-standard deviation bell curve colored red, white, blue and burnt sienna with…
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…
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…
Frank Luntz Flips – Original Climate Change Hoax Strategist Offers to Help Fight Climate Change After Nearly Losing His Home to a Firestorm in LA (See YouTube video of the Skirball Fire in Bel Air here.) The strategist that created the Conservative’s climate change playbook in 2002 has flipped. His house almost burned in a…
Texas A&M and the Army Corp of Engineers have completed their economic justification for the Ike Dike hurricane flood surge protection plan that is destined to fail because of sea level rise — unless we reverse warming. Failure aside, the plan offers economic insight into the long-term economic impacts of a hurricane strike in a…
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…
False Balance in the Media Reduces Climate Science Credibility, Oxford English Dictionary “Journalists have struggled historically to apply the notion of balance to the reporting of climate change science, because even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts agree that human-driven climate change is real and will have major future impacts, a minority of scientists dispute this consensus….
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,…
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…
