Brief Report: Climate Tipping, Earth Systems Collapse Initiation, Climate Restoration Reverses Some Sea Level Rise, and the Barrier Island Disintegration Threshold, Limit to Sea Level Rise Adaptation A brief discussion with summarized academic findings. Climate Tipping, Earth Systems Collapse Initiation Greenland and Antarctica have seen their tipping activated. This does not mean they have passed…
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, September 24, 2019 The Ocean and Cryosphere (the icy part of our planet) in a Changing Climate A Summary of Important Findings Overall of course, climate change is astonishingly worse with every new report. This one is no exception. Polar and mountain ice are melting faster, the…
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. …
West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse: The Critical Path Article link Sea level rise estimates of around 10 feet by 2100 are now becoming hard to ignore. This article is about several new findings in 2018 that build on near-10 feet of sea level rise news from NOAA in 2016 and 2017. What is…
Sing Delay, Delay, Delay When serious discussions about global warming gases and fossil fuels began in the 1980s, all that was needed to prevent what would become labeled as dangerous climate change was a reduction of the emissions of global warming gases. Since that time, we have emitted as much CO2 as we emitted in…
NOAA’s new sea level rise report in January 2017 is a dope slap that describes 17 inches of sea level rise in Florida by 2030. You can see the report here, or check out our review that summarizes the important parts here. The continuing publishing of sea level rise research on emissions reductions and resultant…
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…
James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (1981-2013, now retired), has had a new fundamental piece of climate work published. His team looks at the negative emissions required–in addition to various scenarios for emissions reductions–that are needed to achieve “non-dangerous” warming. Under Hansen’s…
Another Big Antarctic Calving From New Underice Melt Ice scientists have been warning us since 2006 that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has begun its collapse. Giant icebergs are a symptom that collapse initiation is underway. The continuing laissez-faire attitude of the press to these events is counter intuitive and even dangerous, and represents…
McClatchy reported on a new NOAA sea level rise impact report and made some very good points. But a lot of the true meaning is left out. I like to use well publicized journalism like this to be able to quickly get to the most important pieces of the science being reported on, that are…
Something that is not clear in the overall climate discussion is that global warming is a radically different beast from abrupt change. We hear abrupt change bandied about, but often it is not well defined. It appears to many that global warming is abrupt change simply because the warming we are experiencing, and that is…
Fifty-two feet of sea level rise occurred in 400 years, 14,500 years ago with ocean and collapse conditions similar to today. We were coming out of the last ice age then, but then, forcing was thousands of times less than today. Our climate’s most meaningful and common changes are classified as abrupt changes in climate…
This New York Times article from May has compiled the best of current Antarctic science images into a huge three-part piece, but some of the most important reporting is completely wrong. And most importantly, the way it is wrong exemplifies the impacts of the Climate change Counter Movement and how they have influenced the media’s…
It’s not the averages that are troublesome. The understating reporting of scientists, journalists and climate science consensus organizations is one of the most confounding parts of climate change today. It’s the extremes that matter, yet extremes are viewed as “uncertainty” in a way almost entirely related to written grammar, rather than the statistical uncertainty of when,…
President Trump it seems, has given us permission to backslide with our thinking about climate change. Until we have rule or law that tells us we must do something about climate pollution, “those that would rather it not be real” have won. This allows the debate to rage encouraging doubt. The Clean Power Plan and…
We have delayed too long and now must urgently reduce the load of warming gases already emitted to our sky. We have been warned this would happen for decades, we just didn’t think it would happen so soon. This is exceedingly bad news, though the good news with climate change is very good indeed. The…
And they also say that Elvis is not dead. But alas… the answer is no, we are not saved. Things are actually getting worse because of the so-called “flattening emissions.” This needs to be said over and over: the only way to treat the vast amount of long-lived warming pollutants already emitted into our sky…
First published on Truthout December 26, 3015, by Bruce Melton. Climate science is way out in front of climate policy. Commitments at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris pale in comparison to those from the Kyoto Protocol with its beginnings in the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The cheap and unambiguous solution of removing CO2…
Our previous understanding of how the Antarctic Ice Sheet responded to warming at the end of the last ice age 10 to 20 thousand years ago was based on only a few ocean sediment cores. From sediment cores in the North Atlantic we have been able to piece together a decent map of how and…
Researchers at UC Cal Irvine and NASA, using four different measurement techniques, have found that West Antarctica’s ice loss has tripled since 1992. The measurements looked at glaciers discharging to a west central location of West Antarctica called the Amundsen Sea Embayment (see Amundsen Sea in the map on the right). This could possibly be…
