Healthy Climate Alliance and 300 ppm CO2 by 2050 (300×2050) The Healthy Climate Alliance asks, why aren’t we seeking to restore our climate to its original healthy state? The answer for 30 years has been that limiting emissions was enough. We could decarbonize our infrastructure, limit warming to 2 degrees C and let nature take…
The “moral imperative challenge” is that thing where we feel it is our duty to create a fossil fuel extinction in order address climate change. This is something our climate culture has been striving for since about 1990. It is ingrained in our emissions reductions psyche and emblazoned across our foreheads. For a generation, emissions…
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…
New Climate Culture Our climate culture of the last two or three decades, very bluntly, not working out . Yes, carbon emissions are decreasing, or at least they are not increasing as fast a they were or as fast as projected. Possibly, they are even decreasing. But the bottom line is that current warming…
Observations on Declining U.S. Emissions: It’s a widely held belief that the U.S. has been reducing emissions since the peak 2005-2007 before the recession. This is just barely valid today, but several years back it was not. The last time we reported on this, U.S. emission had not fallen as the EPA had insisted, but…
The greatest climate dude of all time has done it again. James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard institute for Space Studies, published a new fundamental piece of climate work last month. He looks at the additional negative emission on top of Paris reductions that are needed…
McClatchy reported on a new NOAA sea level rise impact report and made some very good points. But a lot of the true meaning is left out. I like to use well publicized journalism like this to be able to quickly get to the most important pieces of the science being reported on, that are…
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…
The IPCC changed their fundamental philosophy on how they evaluate scenarios of our future climate in their 2013 reporting, but they have yet to acknowledge the most common and meaningful way our climate usually changes, implying negative consequences for traditional climate reform strategies. Popular science however, continues on the path of traditional climate reform strategies…
A quick note on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s review of climate pollution reform technologies: Climate Intervention — Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration, June 2017. Theoretical academic publishing on the current state of direct air capture technologies, continues to color academic literature with very dated and inaccurate statements. Part of the challenge…
It’s a widely held misconception that implementation of Paris Climate commitments would tame the climate beast. This has no more been the case in the past than it is today. Our culture of climate policy has always relied on overshoot, or additional increase in temperature as we implement greenhouse gas regulations and reduce the amount…
It’s not the averages that are troublesome. The understating reporting of scientists, journalists and climate science consensus organizations is one of the most confounding parts of climate change today. It’s the extremes that matter, yet extremes are viewed as “uncertainty” in a way almost entirely related to written grammar, rather than the statistical uncertainty of when,…
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 have entered the non-linearly increasing phase of climate change impacts. This is pretty much standard climate science that climate scientists said we would endure if we delayed action. Could they have imagined that we would delay for 20 years? What would they have said 20 years ago about what we should expect if the had…
Scientists have been planning for how to implement a transformation to an alternative energy infrastructure for more than several years now. Jacobson 2013, represents years of effort and others have been doing the same. We know how to evolve our energy infrastructure, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how efficient…
For 24 years we have been attempting to implement climate reform, but because strategies are complex, controversial and inequitable, we have nothing to show for this effort save a near-failing carbon credit program in the EU. By giving ourselves permission to seek zero warming, we go beyond the failed strategies of the past into a…
We have delayed too long and now must urgently reduce the load of warming gases already emitted to our sky. We have been warned this would happen for decades, we just didn’t think it would happen so soon. This is exceedingly bad news, though the good news with climate change is very good indeed. The…
And they also say that Elvis is not dead. But alas… the answer is no, we are not saved. Things are actually getting worse because of the so-called “flattening emissions.” This needs to be said over and over: the only way to treat the vast amount of long-lived warming pollutants already emitted into our sky…
First published on Truthout December 26, 3015, by Bruce Melton. Climate science is way out in front of climate policy. Commitments at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris pale in comparison to those from the Kyoto Protocol with its beginnings in the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The cheap and unambiguous solution of removing CO2…
First Published on Truthout, December 4, 2015 The perceived debate on climate change has discredited traditional climate science communications to such an extent that we are just now implementing policies developed during the Kyoto Protocol era that began in 1992. New climate science knowledge is simply not making it out of academia and into public…
