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…
Visualize World Heat The cover image for this story shows the daily high temperature anomalies for the Austin weather station at Camp Mabry for each day of the year 2022; one colored stripe for every day of the year. The anomaly is the difference in the temperature from normal where red colors are warmer than…
Frostweed On A Warming Planet First published by Bruce Melton PE in the Austin Sierran as a part of its cover image description on February 7, 2024 The most common species of frostweed in Central Texas is, Verbesina virginica. These “ice flowers” come from ice exuded by the stem. It takes a good hard freeze…
Image: The “Flats” on the back side of Padre Island in South Texas. Just inches above sea level, these flats are mostly gone today from sea level rise. The Last Year Below 1.5 C – Remarkable Warming Acceleration In 2023 Surpasses the Dangerous Warming Threshold The Global 1.5 °C Climate Change Threshold Was Unexpectedly Exceeded…
Busted: The global 1.5 degree C above normal dangerous climate change threshold Climate Emergency Hope for 2024 A Remarkable Jump in Temperature? Bruce Melton PE, ClimateDiscovery.org Happy New Year all, I want to let you all know about what may to some seem like a perverse perception of “hope” with our accelerating climate emergency. In 2024…
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…
Image: Crayons on a driveway of a friend, 103 degrees. Note how the white crayons hardy melted. How Much Hotter Is It Because of Climate Change? One of the things I tell folks these days about the heat is that the absolute temperature in Austin is not really that much warmer than in the past….
With magical zero emissions tomorrow, equilibrium warming in the pipeline is now 10 degrees C (18 F) in several centuries and 6 to 7 C (11 to 13 F) in 100 years. 10 Degrees C Equilibrium Warming James Hansen is the former 32 year director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the de…
When Normals Are Not Normal The National Weather Service Is Unwittingly Obscuring the Reality of Global Warming by Bruce Melton PE See the abridged version on Truthout.org, July 17, 2022 In-depth references are below the article. Summary: The National Weather Service has a periodic procedure where they recalculate the “normal” climate data presented to the…
Extreme Heat Increased 22,100 Percent in Last 40 Years James Hansen has a new post out to his big list where he shows heat extremes across Northern Hemisphere land areas have increased a mind bending 22,000 percent. Breaking down Hansen’s work, in the classic 3-standard deviation bell curve colored red, white, blue and burnt sienna with…
Microsoft on climate: The game changer Historic climate pollution emissions almost everyone missed. By Bruce Melton First published on the RagBlog.org, February 3, 2020 Microsoft going net zero by 2030 is a tremendously insightful action, but what’s truly groundbreaking and ever so much more important today, 30 years after we began trying to solve the…
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…
NASA: The Last 5 Years Hottest on Record? Yes, the last five years have been the hottest five years recorded since 1880. This is a big deal. But what we hear in the media portends bigger things. One of the biggest is the meaning of the yearly average temperature and its relationship to our old…
Feedbacks kick in: 2017 is second warmest without El Niño influence by Bruce Melton First published on The Rag Blog, February 1, 2018 NOAA, the UK Met, and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have all stated that 2017 was third warmest. But these three organizations use data that only averages temperature in the Arctic out to…
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 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…
It’s all around us but masked by “noise” in the media; enabled by fairness in journalism, driven by myth that has been propagated by experiences that we as a society have never before experienced. When Unprecedented drought in California was replaced by unprecedented flooding, the paper says: “The media, resource management entities, and the scientific…
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…
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…