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…
We have all heard it before: “What’s so bad about a little warming?” Several things are at play here. First, it’s winter. It’s far colder in winter than the warming we have experienced. So when it’s winter it’s cold, relative to when it’s not winter. But a little warming can’t be that bad, right?Our global…
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…
One of the biggest myths about climate change is that emissions reductions cool Earth. This is nowhere close to reality. Even the Paris Commitments of 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050 allow warming to triple by 2050 and quintuple by 2100. We (the royal we) have great challenges as climate reform decision makers. If our…
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…
A recent article in Atlantic implies climate change to be wrongly viewed as something we don’t yet know much about. This article “American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why”, is half correct. The authors in the study reported upon reveal the reasons why trees are shifting west (as well as north), and…
President Trump it seems, has given us permission to backslide with our thinking about climate change. Until we have rule or law that tells us we must do something about climate pollution, “those that would rather it not be real” have won. This allows the debate to rage encouraging doubt. The Clean Power Plan and…
We can have a healthy climate — a climate with zero warming — in our lifetimes. The message for the last 20 years has been that we have to reduce emissions drastically to prevent dangerous climate change of more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F). This strategy would have likely worked when it was…
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…
First published on Truthout February 16, 2016 by Bruce Melton. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart of the US Rockies on a 6,000-mile journey of observation. Our film, What Have We Done, the North American Pine Beetle Pandemic, was released in…
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…
Earth has warmed about 0.9 degrees C on average and the Arctic on average has warmed two to three times as much as the average. Daily temperature variation and annual temperature variation make a difference. Climate scientists have been warming us for over a generation that climate change would mean greater insect infestations on a…
Damage from wind, bark beetles and wildfires have increased in Europe’s forests since 1900. This report quantifies these damages and models then out to 2030 for the purpose of evaluating forest management techniques on limiting damages. There work finds that management techniques will have a difficult time keeping up and relative to the overall European…
Canadian boreal forest mortality is already ten times higher than normal. In a similar study in the Western U.S., five times higher mortality than normal was found. The Canadian boreal forest is that northern area of Canada where almost nobody lives. It extends north through some of the wildest lands ever known to the arctic…
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…
It’s been happening for more than a decade. Drought, insects and disease are recreating the landscape of western North America. A paper out of Oregon State tells the story: “A huge “migration” of trees has begun across much of the West due to global warming, insect attack, diseases and fire, and many tree species are…
“The death of the forests – primarily comprised of conifers, which are distant relatives of today’s pines and firs – was part of the largest extinction of life on Earth, which occurred when today’s continents were part of one supercontinent, Pangaea. The so-called Permian extinction likely was triggered by immense volcanic eruptions in what is…
A broad spectrum of ecological indicators are all headed in a negative direction in the Great North. Warming has been identified as the culprit. The more it warms, the greater the impacts. The forests that have evolved with the climate in the North are not at all adapted to the climate up there now. Widespread…
Abstract: “During this decade, the Amazon region has suffered two severe droughts in the short span of five years – 2005 and 2010. Studies on the 2005 drought present a complex, and sometimes contradictory, picture of how these forests have responded to the drought. Now, on the heels of the 2005 drought, comes an even…
