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…
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…
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…
Something that is not clear in the overall climate discussion is that global warming is a radically different beast from abrupt change. We hear abrupt change bandied about, but often it is not well defined. It appears to many that global warming is abrupt change simply because the warming we are experiencing, and that is…
This New York Times article from May has compiled the best of current Antarctic science images into a huge three-part piece, but some of the most important reporting is completely wrong. And most importantly, the way it is wrong exemplifies the impacts of the Climate change Counter Movement and how they have influenced the media’s…
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,…
Ice Waves — The most fantastic climate science of last week (that crossed my desk): This work evaluates a new discovery of melt waves of increased ice and water discharge in the Greenland melt years of 2010 and 2012. At one glacier (Rinks,) the peak monthly increased ice and water discharge was about equal to…
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…
New research has for the first time defined the tipping point between a stable WAIS and an Antarctica that collapses uncontrollably. Potsdam Institute researchers (Levermann and Feldmann) tell us is that if we do not return our oceans to their preindustrial temperature by 2050, we will see out of control collapse of the WAIS and…
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…
The driver of our climate system has changed in the last two decades from one that is controlled by annual emissions, to one that is controlled by already emitted CO2. This means that previous strategies to control annual emissions are no longer meaningful and we must now turn our attention to the already emitted climate…
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…
The Devil’s Elbow, Padre Island National Seashore. This is that point where the Texas Coast trends from Northeast to south; the big bend of coastal Texas. “The oceans are rising the beaches decree. Gonna get covered up by the sea. Tide gauges say what we can’t see. The oceans are rising the beaches decree.” Beaches…
Our previous understanding of how the Antarctic Ice Sheet responded to warming at the end of the last ice age 10 to 20 thousand years ago was based on only a few ocean sediment cores. From sediment cores in the North Atlantic we have been able to piece together a decent map of how and…
The Gulf Stream may not actually shut down, but it is slowing now and has been for some time (see here) and these researchers have come close—if not having actually solved—the puzzle of why the Gulf Stream slowed or shut down in the past and what the consequences were. From Australia and Hawaii, science workers…
Satellite measurement of sea level rise is very accurate, but we have only had this technology for 20 years or so. Today’s sea level rise of 3.4 mm per year has not changed. The older data though, when evaluated with advanced statistical techniques, was not as much as had been previously assumed. This makes the…
Barrier island make up about ten percent of the world’s coastline and represent one of the most important coastal ecological resources.They also have an extremely fast and efficient way of recovering from what the weather may bring. High tides associated with coastal storms erode the face of dunes and bring sand, blown there by incessant…
Researchers at UC Cal Irvine and NASA, using four different measurement techniques, have found that West Antarctica’s ice loss has tripled since 1992. The measurements looked at glaciers discharging to a west central location of West Antarctica called the Amundsen Sea Embayment (see Amundsen Sea in the map on the right). This could possibly be…
