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The Unexpected

Microsoft on climate: The game changer

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Climate Policy, climate restoration, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Earth systems, in-depth and Popular Press, Negative emissions, politics, Psycho, Scenarios, Temperature, The Unexpected, What we can do

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…

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Paradise California: 14,000 Simultaneous Climate Change Catastrophes – The Camp Fire 2018

By Abrupt changes, Extreme Weather, Fire, Impacts, Photo Tour, The Unexpected

The depths of the Paradise Fire on November 8, 2018 are yet unknown. 14,000 homes were destroyed in four hours along with another 5,000 businesses and commercial structures. Recovery appears to be strong, debris are about half removed, but reconstruction as yet has little obvious momentum. 14,000 Simultaneous Catastrophes: Climate Change in Paradise California, the…

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New Report Warns Planet May Be Warming Twice as Fast as Expected

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, Impacts, Legacy Policy, modeling, Reports, Sensitivity, Solutions, The Unexpected

  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…

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Master Denier Frank Luntz Flips on Climate and Offers Communications Help

By Climate Reform, Deniers and Delayers, Extreme Weather, Fire, Healthy Climate, Impacts, Messaging, Myths, Psycho, Strategy, The Unexpected, What we can do

Frank Luntz Flips – Original Climate Change Hoax Strategist Offers to Help Fight Climate Change After Nearly Losing His Home to a Firestorm in LA (See YouTube video of the Skirball Fire in Bel Air here.) The strategist that created the Conservative’s climate change playbook in 2002 has flipped. His house almost burned in a…

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Climate Science Compromise Feedback Loop and Unrecoverable Impacts

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Beaches coastal, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Culture, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate restoration, Deniers and Delayers, feedback, global warming psychology, Healthy Climate, ice sheet, Impacts, Legacy Policy, Messaging, modeling, politics, Psycho, Sea Level Rise, The Unexpected, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Why are climate change impacts so much worse than projected? What does it mean? Why don’t we do something? In a nutshell, science is conservative, it’s slow, and the great climate consensus that has evolved to protect our society compounds the understating nature of the industry of science. This creates a vastly understating public facing message. …

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Nearly Two Billion Dollars Spent on Anti-Climate Science Legislative Lobbying 2000 to 2016

By Climate Policy, Deniers and Delayers, politics, The Unexpected

Nearly Two Billion Dollars spent on Anti-Climate Science Legislative Lobbying 2000 to 2016 Robert Brulle at Drexel University reminds us of what makes Congress work, “public opinion is only one, relatively minor input” into decisions made by Congress. (Grossmann 2014) Data for Brulle’s latest work comes from the 1995 Lobbying and Disclosure Act that requires all…

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New Evaluation of Climate Models Reveals Abrupt Changes Ahead of Schedule

By Abrupt changes, Drought, Extreme Weather, forest health, Forest Mortality, Gulf Stream, ice sheets, Impacts, modeling, The Unexpected

  New Evaluation of Climate Models Reveals Abrupt Changes Ahead of Schedule It’s not the averages that will mess up your hair, it’s the gusts. This work on modeling the unmodelable (Drijfhout 2015) is a couple of years old now, but it gives enormous insight into why it is that “ice cube melt climate science” is…

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What’s the Big Deal With Climate Change?

By Abrupt changes, Climate Culture, Climate Reform, Deniers and Delayers, Drought, Emissions Scenarios, Extreme Weather, forest health, Forest Mortality, Impacts, Messaging, Myths, pine beetle, Psycho, Shifting Ecology, Strategy, The Unexpected, What we can do

What’s the Big Deal With Climate Change? We all understand climate change is trouble. Even a really significant percentage of oil and gas professionals understand. Of a recent poll (2014) of 474 oil and gas industry insiders, 85 percent believed global warming was happening, 58 percent were either very sure or extremely sure, and 57 percent…

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Climate Change 2017: What Happened and What It Means

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, Extreme Weather, Fire, Flooding, Impacts, polar vortex, rainfall, Sea Level Rise, The Unexpected, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

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…

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Trump on Global Warming: What’s so Bad About A Little Warming

By Deniers and Delayers, Extreme Weather, Forest Mortality, Impacts, Myths, polar vortex, Shifting Ecology, Temperature, The Unexpected

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…

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2017 Climate Science Special Report for the National Climate Assessment *** Uncensored ***

By Climate Policy, Climate Reform, For Beginners, Impacts, Reports, summary, The Unexpected

The Special Climate Science Report of the National Climate Assessment has been released uncensored. The message from fourteen national agencies, programs, departments and institutes, and the National Science Foundation and Smithsonian Institution: It is warmer than it has been in thousands of years. Carbon dioxide is higher than it has been in million of years….

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What Is the Most Meaningful Way to Increase Climate Action

By Climate Reform, Messaging, Psycho, Solutions, Strategy, The Unexpected, What we can do

What can we do as individual citizens that is the most meaningful of all climate change actions? How can we best use our time to create the biggest difference? This question has a very surprising answer. The 2016 Yale Program on Climate Communications poll Spiral of Silence is a short, simple “must read” for anyone…

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Climate Impacts Happening Now: Westward (?) Migration of Forests

By Drought, Extreme Weather, forest health, Forest Mortality, Impacts, rainfall, Shifting Ecology, The Unexpected, Vegetation Response

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…

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Kiribati (Christmas Island)

By Oceans, The Unexpected

A note to a friend that has a few things that one normally doesn’t see or hear when climate change and vulnerable island nations are discussed: Kiribati (Christmas Island) is a Pacific atoll that is one of the ones that will succumb to sea level rise first.  It was known as Christmas Island in World…

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Expect the Unexpected Say Climate Scientists

By The Unexpected

Just a quick note. One of the continuous warnings from climate scientists is not continuous drought, warming that makes Minnesota like Texas, floods that rival Noah’s, melting permafrost, loss of Arctic sea ice, global economic crippling sea level rise, ocean acidification or any of dozens more; it’s “Expect the unexpected.” One of the biggest examples…

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Climate Change Accelerating Rapidly

By Extreme Weather, Misc, The Unexpected

1,000 scientists at the December 9 -12 International Arctic Change Conference in Quebec City Canada have sobering words for the world. the following is from the Conference Declaration: "Climate change and its impacts are accelerating at unexpected rates with global consequences. Scientific information presented has raised to new levels our concern regarding the changes that…

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