Occidental Chemicals CO2 air capture unit in the Permian Basin about to begin operations. Climate Change Review 2025 – The Science of the Effects of Warming by Bruce Melton PE, first posted at the Rag Blog on December 31, 2025 Podcast – Rag Radio, KOOP Austin, January 2, 2026. The good news is real,…
(The most important carbon capture tax and cash pay incentive in the world has been upheld by the current U.S. administration and in some cases enhanced. Annually 61 million tons of CO2 are captured and safely stored, a drop in the bucket but Rome was not built in a day. The U.S. carbon capture incentive…
Stratos, 500 million ton per year air capture unit by Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin, Texas What’s next for carbon removal? Undue false and widespread pessimism in the popular press. Companies have still drawn down only enough CO2 to cancel out a few hours of US emissions. Here’s what it will take to really…
The Scenario Bias Understates Earth’s Captured Co2 Injection Capacity A review of the Associated Press story, Study: Less carbon storage capacity than thought, by Tammy Webber, based on Gidden et al., A prudent planetary limit for geologic carbon storage, Nature, September 3, 2025. Associated Press, September 3, 2025 – “The world has far fewer places…
Findings since mid-May reveal new and more serious insight into tipping threshold crossing of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets, Antarctic sea ice, ocean acidification, and tropical and boreal forests. The 30 percent warming jump in 2023 and 2024 is crucial to understanding the extreme risks of our current and rapidly accelerating climate trajectory. But…
Image: Yale Climate Connections The Warming Rate for the Last Two Years Has Been 25 Times the Warming Rate of the Last 150 Years A review of Hansen 2025. In the last two years, Earth has warmed 0.4 degrees C, compared to 1.2 degrees C warming in the previous 100 years. This warming rate is…
Painting by Henry C. Pitz showing John Wesley Powell and his party descending the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, presumably during the historic 1869 expedition. (Image credit: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, via Yale Climate connections) When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down? Intensifying extreme weather events and an…
An Introduction to Advanced Climate Change – Two Years in the Making by Bruce Melton PE Climate Change Now Initiative October 2023 (Link to the learning tool) This slide deck is a learning tool with 18,000 words in 52 slides with 70 beautiful images. The notes include about 85,000 words and over 600 references with…
It’s not the heat, it’s the warming beyond evolutionary boundaries. Bruce Melton ClimateDiscovery.org First published as an abridge version on The Rag Blog, as a part of an-in-depth radio interview on the Rag Radio syndicated on Pacifica on 7/21/2023 There’s a quote that has been around forever, variously worded and attributed to many. The origin…
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…
NOAA Research in the Stratosphere is Taking Off March 3, 2023, NOAA (Article updated April 2024: The year 2023 experienced a remarkably unprecedented jump in global temperature that has now exceeded the dangerous 1.5 Degrees C threshold. (See here) Enduring this amount of warming for long, likely no more than a couple to several decades,…
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…
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…
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), Negative Emissions , Atmospheric Carbon Capture, February 2, 2019, Citizens Climate Lobby Third Coast Conference, Houston PowerPoint Presentation: Carbon Dioxide Removal, Citizens Climate Lobby Gulf Coast Conference, Houston, February 9, 2020 — This presentation goes through the reasons why greenhouse gas emissions reductions alone will not result in a safe temperature;…
(Editors Note: April Fools! And Thank You Extinction Rebellion! Though you nailed me and I had to come back to this post and add this prebuttal, good job. We can only hope Google and others like them will take the lead and discredit where discreditation is due!) In an excellent move, Google is ceasing…
The Climate Emergency Has Already Begun as Earth Systems Collapse by Bruce Melton First published on Truthout on December 7, 2019 More than 11,000 scientists across 153 countries are shouting out a new climate change warning. The delay for action has been too long. Addressing our rapidly degrading and already overly dangerous climate is now officially an emergency….
New Report Warns Planet May Be Warming Twice as Fast as Expected By Bruce Melton First Published on Truthout, May 28, 2019 New earthshaking science will be coming out in the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that could nearly double future warming predictions. We have a window into this new science…
How, exactly, are we going to reverse climate change in time to save our soles from frying on the pavement? As a society, we have easily solved global-scale pollution problems before. How deep would it be and how many of us would be alive today, if when there were 1 billion people on Earth and…
Bloomberg NEF – Battery Power’s Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas March 26, 2019 It’s happened, decades ahead of schedule. Lithium-ion batteries are at parity with baseload coal, gas and nuclear. Those new gigabattery factories are responsible. it’s amazing what giga scaling can do to costs. The latest cost plummet was 35 percent since…
Climate Change 2018 Review: Part 2 – The Good! 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 started with the bad. If you missed Part 1, you…
