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…
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…
California Wildfires: Where Is the Climate Change Outrage? Bruce Melton First published at Truthout.org November 17, 2018 Unprecedented droughts, fires and floods are not the “new normal”: Climate change gets nonlinearly worse from here on out. Like an avalanche, the physics of warming determines that a little more warming doesn’t create a…
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…
We can have a healthy climate — a climate with zero warming — in our lifetimes. The message for the last 20 years has been that we have to reduce emissions drastically to prevent dangerous climate change of more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F). This strategy would have likely worked when it was…
First published on Truthout, August 16, 2015. The EPA’s Clean Power Plan is 12 percent more stringent than the Kyoto Protocol, yet since 1978, the US has emitted as much carbon dioxide as we emitted in the previous 228 years. Globally, since 1984, our civilization has emitted as much carbon dioxide as in the previous…
First Published on Truthout, April 13, 2015. The Gulf Stream plays an immensely important role in moderating the climate of eastern North America and Europe. Moreover, Greenland melt impacts ocean current processes in the North Atlantic. For years, contradictory research has alternately said the Gulf Stream was slowing and that it was not slowing. The…
First published on Truthout, March 5, 2015. Greenland is warmer than it has been in more than 100,000 years and climate disrupting feedback loops have begun. Since 2000, ice loss has increased over 600 500 percent, and liquid water now exists inside the ice sheet year-round, no longer refreezing during winter. Complete Article
First published on Truthout, February 11, 2015. The last time we had this discussion was 2013, remember? Before that it was 2010. Before that it was 2005 and everything started with the Super El Nino in 1998. Statistically, saying that 2014 was the hottest year ever is a very valid thing and if you understand…
First published on Truthout, December 26, 2014. As we move into 2015, the latest climate science continues to diverge from policy. New science tells us that, because of short-lived climate pollutants, current policies dealing with carbon dioxide pollution alone will likely produce more warming than doing nothing at all. Complete Article
First Published on Truthout, August 27, 2014 (link) The fundamental climate change policy question today is not how much we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions by when, but what will currently proposed carbon dioxide emissions reductions do to our climate in the near-term? In addition, what are the ramifications of short-lived climate pollutants that are…
First published on Truthout.org This article reports on a National Research Council literature review of why and how warming in the Arctic and arctic amplification is creating what appears to be more extreme winter weather in the U.S. Northeast and Northern Europe.
(First published on Truthout April 2, 2014) America’s emissions are not falling, as suggested by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). The two main reasons are offshored goods and services and fracked natural gas. The EIA does two things that obscure reality when evaluating emissions. One is that it counts only emissions made in the…
First Published on Truthout, March 18, 2014 Today, we are burning fossil carbon one million times faster than it was naturally put in the ground, and carbon dioxide is increasing 14,000 times faster than anytime in the last 610,000 years (1,2). Climate is now changing faster than it has during any other time in 65…
First Published on Truthout 12/26/2013 : We are in the midst of an era of frightening contradictions, when it comes to public understandings of climate change. While climate changes are occurring more quickly than scientists have ever predicted, most people’s knowledge of these realities remains hazy and clouded by political overtones. Because of both the…
Predictable, the voices are rising as Arctic sea ice melt season peaks. Gore did not say “2013.” He said as soon as 2013. The scientists he quoted were led by sea ice researcher named Wieslaw Maslowski at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California. Their research is funded by the Department of Energy (DOE),…
Published on Truthout.org, Sunday, 26 May 2013 00:00 By Bruce Melton: An in-depth look at Stanford and Cornell’s 100 percent alternative energy road map for New York state- savings of $114 billion by 2030, intricately referenced–astonishing news. (read more)
Published on Truthout.org March 13, 2013: Climate change messaging is changing these days. One only needs to look as far as the Sierra Club’s unprecedented encouragement of civil disobedience with the Keystone Pipeline to see this happening. The polls are telling us that some 70 percent or more of Americans believe the Earth is now…
Published on Truthout.org February 21, 2013: Beginning in just eight years, we could see permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest that are comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. The latest research from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University published in December 2012 has some truly astounding news. The megadroughts referred…
