Policy Language: Forest carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is a function of forest health. Current academic work on forest CDR does not consider all forest health effects of current or future warming. Specifically, extreme acute events such as drought, fire, insect attack, and disease, are not modeled sufficiently to understand the permanence of forest CDR. With…
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 1 – The Bad 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 start with the bad, and as bad as it was…
Woe… In winter, way up in the arctic stratosphere, something hardly known before is happening. It’s called sudden stratospheric warming where the wintertime upper atmosphere in the Arctic can suddenly warm up by up to 80 C. When something this big happens, it triggers other equally big things. Typical of Earth’s weather, when it warms…
False Balance in the Media Reduces Climate Science Credibility, Oxford English Dictionary “Journalists have struggled historically to apply the notion of balance to the reporting of climate change science, because even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts agree that human-driven climate change is real and will have major future impacts, a minority of scientists dispute this consensus….
Atlas 14: Texas – The 100-year Storm is Now the 25-year Storm, Already In Houston, the 100-year storm in our old climate was 12.5 inches in 24 hours. The new rainfall data analysis just released by NOAA shows the 25-year storm total is now 12.1 inches. The 100-year storm total has increased to 17.9…
The “moral imperative challenge” is that thing where we feel it is our duty to create a fossil fuel extinction in order address climate change. This is something our climate culture has been striving for since about 1990. It is ingrained in our emissions reductions psyche and emblazoned across our foreheads. For a generation, emissions…
First published on Truthout, April 15, 2017. In about the last 100,000 years, there have been 23 abrupt temperature changes in Greenland ice cores. In those moments, the temperature abruptly jumped or fell 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit across the planet and 25 to 35 degrees Fahrenheit in Greenland. The changes typically took decades to…
First published on Truthout, December 29, 2016. Our planet’s systems have a tremendous capacity to absorb punishment before they begin to show signs of degradation. Earth’s ecology self-heals like a cut on a finger. It assimilates pollution by chemical, physical and biological means — it changes pollutants into non-hazardous materials and proceeds upon its merry…
First published on Truthout: December 20, 2016 With president-elect Donald Trump and his army of climate deniers preparing to take office, it could be a hard battle to get the US to adhere to any sort of climate policy anytime soon. This is hard news because today’s suggested but nowhere-implemented climate policy was already much…
An article from the Associated Press (AP) by Bajak and Borenstein on May 18 tells us that: “Extreme downpours have doubled in frequency over the past three decades.” This is a tall statement with serious implications. The alarming nature of this statement is the reason that the Climate Change Now Initiative exists (of which I…
First published on Truthout February 16, 2016 by Bruce Melton. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart of the US Rockies on a 6,000-mile journey of observation. Our film, What Have We Done, the North American Pine Beetle Pandemic, was released in…
In the run up to the Paris climate talks, current policy is far behind. Virtually unknown is science stating that the solutions to treating climate pollution are simple, cheap and radically change a generation of policy we are currently trying to implement. Legacy climate policy being enacted today, and proposed at the Paris climate talks is…
First published on Truthout: October 4, 2015. Over 20 years after a global consensus of earth scientists at the Rio Earth Summit first suggested we control carbon dioxide emissions to prevent dangerous climate change, the United States has finally acted. This is excellent news for 20 years ago but today, Kyoto V2 (the EPA’s Clean…
Welcome to the 21st Century as the band’s song says, only this is about a new website for Climate Change Now and Climate Discovery. We have migrated to Climate Discovery.org, so your old links may be funky, hopefully not. We still own the .com and have it redirected it to .org. It’s been a busy…
A gigaton per year in the Marcellus Shale alone? Findings from the University of Virginia show we can permanently and safely dispose of much larger amounts of CO2 than previously understood using played out fracked wells. Once pumped in, most of it the CO2 does not come back out. It is captured by kerogens in shale….
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has completed a new study that accounts fro global fossil fuel subsidies. Highlights of the study are listed below (from the report introduction): Post-tax energy subsidies are dramatically higher than previously estimated—$4.9 trillion (6.5 percent of global GDP) in 2013, and projected to reach $5.3 trillion (6.5 percent of global…
Princeton researchers have been testing abandoned oil wells in Pennsylvania and have revealed some surprising results. What do these findings mean? Stanford estimates that there are three million abandoned wells in the U.S. but this is just a guess. Some of the drilling goes back to the 19th century. Also a guess is how many…
Work from Leeds, Durham University, the Byrd Polar Research Center and University of California, Irvine, have taken a deeper look into melt lakes forming on the Greenland Ice Sheet. There modeling was for melt lake formation in the melt zone. The “melt zone” is that area around the edge of the ice sheet that melts…
Itzcuauhtli (Eat-Squat-Lee) is an 11 year old indigenous eco hip-hop activist who went on a 45 day silence strike to draw awareness to climate change. http://www.climatesilencenow.org/ This child’s action is extraordinarily selfless and I have something important to relate that is highly relevant. One of my climate science colleagues and I were talking about how…
