Significant Sunny Day Beach Erosion on South Padre Island, Beyond the King Tide It’s still beautiful, but this is nowhere close to sustainable. It’s catastrophic, but it’s virtually unknown. The beach is nothing like in our past where sea level rise was not an issue. Most of the wilderness beach on almost all of Padre…
Why are climate change impacts so much worse than projected? What does it mean? Why don’t we do something? In a nutshell, science is conservative, it’s slow, and the great climate consensus that has evolved to protect our society compounds the understating nature of the industry of science. This creates a vastly understating public facing message. …
West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse: The Critical Path Article link Sea level rise estimates of around 10 feet by 2100 are now becoming hard to ignore. This article is about several new findings in 2018 that build on near-10 feet of sea level rise news from NOAA in 2016 and 2017. What is…
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,…
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…
Global Environmental Sustainability and a Healthy Climate: Climate Policy 2.0 We all want a healthy climate and assume that emissions reductions will give us this healthy climate, but emissions reductions alone allow triple to quintuple the warming we have already seen. Today, the public and policy makers –almost completely– believe emissions reductions strategies can…
Sing Delay, Delay, Delay When serious discussions about global warming gases and fossil fuels began in the 1980s, all that was needed to prevent what would become labeled as dangerous climate change was a reduction of the emissions of global warming gases. Since that time, we have emitted as much CO2 as we emitted in…
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…
NOAA’s new sea level rise report in January 2017 is a dope slap that describes 17 inches of sea level rise in Florida by 2030. You can see the report here, or check out our review that summarizes the important parts here. The continuing publishing of sea level rise research on emissions reductions and resultant…
Climate Change 2017: What Happened and What It Means By Bruce Melton First posted on Truthout.org, December 30, 2017 How many more billions of dollars in damages will it take? How many more lives? It’s obvious; all the climate extremes we have been experiencing lately are indeed caused by climate change. Our climate is already…
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…
The Special Climate Science Report of the National Climate Assessment has been released uncensored. The message from fourteen national agencies, programs, departments and institutes, and the National Science Foundation and Smithsonian Institution: It is warmer than it has been in thousands of years. Carbon dioxide is higher than it has been in million of years….
James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (1981-2013, now retired), has had a new fundamental piece of climate work published. His team looks at the negative emissions required–in addition to various scenarios for emissions reductions–that are needed to achieve “non-dangerous” warming. Under Hansen’s…
Hurricane Harvey, 25,000-year Storm: Enhanced, or Caused by Climate Change? It was a 25,000-year storm. Its area of 24-inch rainfall was 50 to 100 times greater than anything previously recorded in the lower 48. Up to a million cars may have been flooded. In Harris County alone, 136,000 homes were flooded. Yet the official word…
Increasing Extremes: Hurricane Harvey and the Jet Stream “We can’t tell if this particular weather event was caused by climate change or not.” This is one of the most dangerous climate science statements in history. Science is based on certainty in statistics. Generally, if there is a 1 in 20 chance, or even a…
