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…
Sequoias Burn: Ongoing Collapse of the Unburnable By Bruce Melton PE, Director of the Climate Change Now Initiative 2005, ClimateDiscovery.org (Co-published on the Rag Blog for an interview on Rag Radio in Austin, syndicated on Pacifica, September 23, 2022, 2 to 3 pm Central – KOOP 91.7 FM Streaming) The National Park Service says sequoias…
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…
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…
June 11, 2022 – Mark Glover interview Bruce Melton on Chama Valley Radio, The Eagle, KXJR, New Mexico. Watch, listen or download the interview here (Fast forward about five minutes to get to the interview) Let’s talk about carbon dioxide removal, the was it it is done, natural, the recyclable lime-potash process, amines, mature processes…
Gulf Stream Collapse Under Way – Confirmation of Tipping Activation For nearly 20 years, the collapse or slowdown of the Gulf Stream has been speculated upon as more and more evidence shows it has begun. All the while, very strong response from the general body of consensus climate scientists has been that the Gulf Stream…
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…
(cover image: Permafrost thaw, Glenn Highway, Southeastern Alaska) It is nothing short of amazing that scientists consistently find that ecological collapses have been activated, but do not connect that existing warming today, that activated these impacts, allows these collapses to cross the “point of no return” into irreversible collapse. That they believe these ecologies or…
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…
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…
More Accurate Satellite Elevation Data Triples Sea Level Rise Inundation Drs. Kulp and Straus at Climate Central used new tech satellite elevation data to update leading sea level rise projections. Before this work, satellite elevation data looked at the top of plants, trees, buildings, etc. This new satellite techs looks at top of dirt. On…
First Climate Report from EPA in Four Years: No Thanks to Denier in Chief For the first time since the Climate Change Denier in Chief was “elected” in 2016, when he shut down climate science at the US Federal Government, the Environmental Protection Agency has updated their climate change indicator data website. The last four…
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….
I met him in Ilulissat, the largest settlement in Greenland, population 3,000. Ilulissat is what many of the scientists on the Greenland Ice Sheet call a safe base for their research. He was presenting to a community gathering on his work at Swiss Camp, the longest continually operating research facility on the ice sheet that…
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…
