Image: Lakeway City Park on Lake Travis, 2011 Drought of Record, elevation approximately 630. The elevation for February 2024 was 631.34. 2023’s Heat Cost Texas $24 Billion First published at the Dallas Federal Reserve by Jayashankar et al., on October 18, 2023 Note: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Billion Dollar Weather Events…
Record flooding on Onion Creek, Austin, October 2013 Advanced Rainfall Science in a Warming Climate Hydrology is one of our advanced culture’s most important engineering design areas because so much of our lives depend on not being flooded out, or having our streets flood or roofs collapse from excess rainfall. Hydrology is the study of…
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…
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…
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…
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 seen it, at least in the news. Most of us have been impacted by it because it is all around us. Extreme weather events have increased in intensity. Our climate has changed and as the modelers said 30 years ago, extremes have increased. In the future, expect further increases to triple what…
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…
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…
In 1834 and 1850, two European scientists (Clausius and Clapeyron) developed scientific principles that told us that warmer air holds more water. In the 1960s and 70s the computer models that first simulated our climate showed that more atmospheric CO2 would increase Earth’s temperature, relative humidity, and total precipitation because of the Clausius–Clapeyron principles. In the…
Increasing extreme storms are a big deal. Our civil infrastructure design is based on our old climate. Meteorologist across the country have been evaluating the historic record to see exactly how much change has already taken place. Climate modeling is still advancing towards being able to robustly understand exactly how much the most extreme storms will increase in the…
An article from the Associated Press (AP) by Bajak and Borenstein on May 18 tells us that: “Extreme downpours have doubled in frequency over the past three decades.” This is a tall statement with serious implications. The alarming nature of this statement is the reason that the Climate Change Now Initiative exists (of which I…
Already, with just a single degree Fahrenheit of warming, the most extreme rain events have increased 40 percent across the Central U.S. including Texas. It’s not just our imaginations; it’s not natural cycles. Interestingly, some of it may be caused, or enhanced by, agricultural practices. Groisman et al. emphasizes that their work did not evaluate…
From the abstract: “A devastating societal and economic toll on the central United States, contributing to dozens of fatalities and causing billions of dollars in damage. As a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture (the Clausius–Clapeyron relation), a pronounced increase in intense rainfall events is included in models of future climate. Therefore, it is crucial to examine whether the magnitude…
The last five years have seen 30 to 60 percent more rain in the Central Texas Highland Lakes watershed than in the worst five years of the drought of the 1950s, and the latest National Weather Service 30-year rainfall averages for the watershed have increased seven to twenty percent. Austin is up nine percent. Opposite…
Globally, rainfall intensity, or the amount of rain in the average rainfall event has already been shown to have increased. But another of the rainfall related projections for a warming world—total rainfall—has not yet seen a similar increase. This can be justified in some places as the length of dry periods is longer and the…
The Texas Forest Service tells us that a half billion trees have died. The first of this series of droughts in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme — the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great…
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…
