Climate Change Across America Filming Report, September/October 2024: East Coast and New England – A Summary
Bruce Melton PE
This season we witnessed 13,000 miles of climate change across the Eastern US from Texas to New England and down to the Outer Banks. We witnessed mostly natural systems degradation from warming effects, where this degradation grows more and more extreme even if we stop all warming this instant. This is because once degradation begins, it is then foregone that the system will collapse so that new species and mechanisms tolerant of the warmer conditions can evolve a new system. The degradation of our Earth systems, creating tipping responses that are already emitting greenhouse gas and no longer sequestering them, are now baked in to our future unless we cool or restore our currently warmed climate back to within the natural variation of our old climate at less than 1 degree C warming above normal, otherwise these tipping collapses feedback emissions will dwarf humankind’s.
These systems collapses: tropical, temperate and boreal forests; polar ice, ice sheets and permafrost; coastal impacts from sea level rise, other ocean processes, soils processes, faltering of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC – of which the Gulf Stream is a part); These systems collapses complete, like any collapse, unless the thing that caused them to begin is removed, or in other words, the boundary conditions of the systems’ evolution is restored. This Earth systems science, or the science behind climate tipping, is the basis for Sierra Club’s new policy on climate restoration (2020), where we cool from today, not allow additional warming to 1.5 degrees C above normal as our common global climate policies state. I played a singular role in convincing the Policy Team at the Club to lower their target from 1.5 degrees C to less than 1 degree C warming above normal, based on this systems collapse or tipping science that is fundamental to environmental conservation. Sierra Club was the first organization of its kind anywhere on Earth to support a climate restoration policy. This link to An Introduction to Advanced Climate Change provides over 600 summarized references for this Earth systems tipping science and the 11 understating biases of our climate culture and climate science that have allowed our global climate policy to advance beyond the tipping point of earth systems collapse and tipping responses.
This filming trip, our second to the East Coast this year, included 22 states in 23 days and 6,500 miles, where we were immersed in the observation and interpretation of climate change effects. We made it all the way from Austin, Texas to the Adirondacks in upstate New York, the Green and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, Acadia National Park in Maine, Cape Cod National Park in Massachusetts, coastal areas in Connecticut and the Chesapeake Bay of Virginia, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore at the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina. The effects of climate change were literally all along our path as usual, almost completely unknown in any reporting, and so very meaningful to life on this planet as we know it.
See our 108 Instagram logs of the trip here
Forest degradation is many times above normal in most places. Mortality is not casually noticeable in most places, but in others it is devastating. It is unfortunate that these impacts to natural systems are so little covered in the media, because they are so wildly more important than things like erosion at Rodanthe, NC on the Outer Banks where a half dozen homes were lost to the sea this season, where news channels far and wide picked up coverage. These natural systems collapses are far more important than the unprecedented distress in Asheville from Hurricane Helene. We were there six days after the storm. Popular reporting led us to believe that Asheville was wiped – it was not. Almost all of the town above the floodway of the French Broad River was relatively unscathed with almost no tree loss, structural damage or flooding. I am certain there is spotty sheet flow damage in the uplands, but there was almost no flood debris on the curb and we traversed the town three times. The arts district on the river sadly, is wiped nearly clean. East and north of Asheville, downed trees are substantial with stream erosion like nothing I have ever laid eyes on as a professional hydrologist. The flooding came from 10 inches of rain the week before from a simple stalled cold front, then 20 inches with Hurricane Helene; in steep mountainous terrain. Eighty miles to the northeast, 200 miles of Blue Ridge Parkway was closed with a near complete blowdown.
Everywhere we went: it’s drier, wetter, warmer, snow doesn’t accumulate near as much, and the warm season is longer. It was 88 degrees north of Albany in the Adirondacks one day when we were there in late September. The locals said that this kind of temperature is just not a thing this time of year. The locals have also noticed the increased forest mortality, so the public is becoming aware. A millennial-age employee of a marina on Lake Champlain said the lake no longer freezes completely and his grandfather once ran his cows across on the ice. Most agree that effects have become much more noticeable recently – many said in the last five years, like the gray-haired lifelong surfer at Cape Cod National Seashore’s Nauset Beach where Pleistocene dune erosion tops 25 feet and red pine scale kill is almost complete.
At Great Smoky Mountain National Park and across Appalachia, the Douglas fir has been almost completely wiped out from balsam wooly adelgid – a pinhead-size sapsucking insect that kills in numbers from repeated annual stress. The red pine in New England is almost extirpated by red pine scale that likewise kills via persistent attack of stressed trees that are no longer growing in the environment where they evolved. Ash across the east are likely gone, completely, at least before long, all from the emerald ash borer capitalizing on that same forest stress from our climate’s excursion beyond normal. Then there’s the hemlock wooly adelgid, cousin to the balsam wooly adelgid, that is doing the same thing to hemlocks across Appalachia, Allegheny, and Acadia as was done to Douglas fir. All of these attacks, versus the forest insect attacks in western North America, are from non-native insects. These non-native insects have been widespread in the North America for generations, but climate change don’t care. Extra stress from changes to forest’s evolutionary boundaries is all that is needed to send non-native and native insects alike into berserkdom, so that the forests can re-evolve with species and mechanisms that can exist in a different climate.
A curious thing we discovered in New England was the mortality of forest species in bogs. Our changing climate has created conditions that are either too dry, too warm, or too wet for the species that originally evolved in those bogs. The result is the forested bogs are converting to unforested bogs as trees fall to different attacks. Curiouser still, these forest mortalities are little covered in scientific literature. Why? Science is slow. It takes years to identify that a forest is transitioning states, then many years to collect data, then more years to evaluate, write and publish. Even the insect attacks in the West have seen a lack of timely publishing because of the same reasons. Though many of these western attacks are quite abrupt and almost complete, it still takes a half dozen or more years just to get the first papers in the journal mill.
On Mount Washington we saw forest kill like we see in the Rockies under moderate mortality conditions. It’s called gray kill because all that remains are scant gray bones of trees sticking up out of the evergreen. These trees were likely the Douglas fir mortality from balsam wooly adelgid and though obvious to a seasoned dead tree chaser, folks at the overlooks we stopped at to shoot were oblivious to the skinny little stick of dead trees sticking up through the alpine verdure across the mountainsides. This is not the shock and awe of red kill in the West, where mountainsides of dead red evergreens are as astonishing as an ocean liner washed ashore during a hurricane. Folks do notice mountainsides and mountain ranges of red trees in conifer-laden mountains in mid-summer. One of the most amusing yet sad things I have ever been asked, as I carry my cameras around our beautiful natural world, was in Rocky Mountain National Park about 15 years ago when the mountain pine beetle attack there was in full swing, “Hey mister, what’d ya call those pretty red pine trees?”
But listen, it’s not all sad. We know what to do, we just have to do it. We are literally done except for finishing up. And really, do you want to know how I sleep at night, after chasing climate mayhem all across North America for nearly 20 years? It’s all natural. It happens every time our climate changes abruptly. Because it’s natural, it is by definition beautiful. And its rarity too, makes it beautiful for the sake of its fantastic uncommonness. The last time it happened was 10,000 years ago when our climate changed after the last ice age pulse. The thing that troubles me though, is impacts to the built environment. I can emotionally deal with natural occurrences like a mountain range of dead trees, or nearly 20 percent of unburnable sequoias burned like never before in their evolution, but seeing the results of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, where over 13,000 homes were burned in 6 hours – that was tough. Still, I take solace in knowing that, “In fire there is rebirth.”
In Acadia National Park, on Mount Washington and on Whiteface Mountain of Olympics fame near Lake Placid New York, we saw forest emergence above treeline, where tall trees were beginning to stick their heads up above the ground-hugging alpine vegetation as our climate at altitude warms far faster than the average. This leads to an albedo feedback, where albedo is whiteness that reflects light energy harmlessly back into space, and once trees start growing up above the snow line, that light is absorbed by those trees and changed into heat. Green trees absorb 900 percent more light than white snow, changing it to heat that is trapped by the greenhouse effect.
At Cape Cod National Seashore, red pine mortality was widespread, and gosh that’s a pretty place even with the mortality. On the Jersey and Maryland shores, the wild beaches were just about gone at high tide, and inland forests maladies were common.
On Chesapeake Bay we toured marinas, one of my favorite pastimes because as an engineer, I have designed and built over 500 slips in Central Texas’ lakes. It was the peak of King Tide season and the marinas were in various stages of inundation, with the tide up to and over the tops of their piers. This is really hard on the piers as their fasteners are inundated with corrosive salt water and the buoyant force of wood trying to float away when submerged is a force not considered with engineering design of marinas in our old climate.
At the Outer Banks we were in for a couple of surprises. Maybe the most important of these, to me at least, is a very personal thing: the sand at the Banks is much softer and deeper than the sand on beaches around my home waters in Texas. As a civil engineer, I have not yet completely understood why this is though. I think it’s because the higher energy of the Atlantic Ocean makes the sand grains rounder and more highly polished. The results were that our custom trail/wilderness filming Chevrolet Suburban rapid climate change assault recreational vehicle we call the “Ice Melter”, became stuck like a tourist’s sedan. I am the one always pulling those tourists’ cars out of the sand, not the other way around… But, nobody came along. As me and my wife revelled in the glorious sunset and continued to watch the horseshoe crabs we had never seen before, I went into self-rescue mode.
I dug out with the handy army shovel I always carry, or so I thought. We moved six feet forward and buried again. The Ice Melter had met her match. So I aired her giant tires down from 50 to 25 pounds to increase the tractive force. I have never had to air down on Texas beaches and have never, ever been stuck on Texas beaches. We moved forward another six feet and Ice Melter buried herself to the running boards again. So I aired down to 15 pounds, dug out again, and rolled right on down the beach, embarrassed, full of new knowledge about tire pressure and beach physics, while continuing to revel in the glorious sunset and horseshoe crabs, and immensely pleased at my self-rescue skills.
Down the coast a bit we found significant erosion on the wild beach, including those washed-away beach houses at Rodanthe. Erosion on the wild beach is a far cry from what the vast, vast majority of beachgoers see when at the coast. Probably 99 percent of beach goers never see a beach that is not nourished and their perception of coastal erosion is, “What erosion? The beach is huge and hasn’t changed since I was a kid.” This is because tourist beaches are almost all nourished now from sand pumped onto the beach from offshore during the off-season. The reason is the billions of dollars tourist bring to popular coastal areas; it’s a simple math problem. But wild beaches aren’t so lucky to have billions of tourist dollars to save them. Drive up or down the beach a few miles from popular tourist beaches and the nourished pedestrian-choked, sun tan lotion soaked masses disappear and one emerges into climate change effects.
At high tide, there is no driving on these wild beaches because there is no beach. The sand is so soft at the Banks, one dares not contemplate taking a vehicle into the surf like one can do in Texas to drive along the swash zone where waves run back and forth. These wild beaches are the beaches we seek in our witnessing because they represent the true course of nature that has been overwhelmed by warming beyond her evolution. Beach erosion is the rule at the Outer Banks, even if one has never seen hide nor hair of it.
Another wild surprise was the forested wetlands on the inland side of the sounds that back the Outer Banks. This is where the great ghost forests can be found, as they have been labelled by who knows who. Sea level rise that is the greatest in the world at 10 mm per year, versus 3.5 mm per year globally, is having its way with forest species in these bogs as salt water poisoning takes its toll. We learned two new things here in these ghost forests that rival those in the Rockies for complete mortality. One was that swamp draining for agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries left canals that are now conduits for rising seas to enter the swamp and hasten salt water poisoning for miles inland. This is well documented at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge just inland from Nags Head, and widespread wherever the sounds meet the mainland. The other thing was that when salt water rises up into the root zone of mature trees and kills them, young trees quickly fill the void like in our old climate when a tree dies another sprouts to take its place. The difference in a world with a changed climate is that though the young trees less than ten feet tall were vigorous, those taller than this with deeper root systems were succumbing to rapidly rising sea level infiltrating into their young root zones and were in various states of degradation which will certainly proceed to mortality.
All of this mayhem, though devastating to the species killed, and to the ecology obliterated, is still as beautiful. The natural bent of nature in any of its moods remains fantastically captivating and even more so because of the rarity of this re-evolution happening before our eyes.
The solutions are beautiful too, as are any solutions that can fix a massive problem. But our climate culture is completely unaware. The sustainable fossil fuel emissions future for humanity is of course job one in our legacy climate culture, but it is now clear that even a complete cessation of warming this instant cannot stop ecological collapse from running its course once degradation is activated. Only restoring our climate back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth systems can do this and halting all emissions still results in additional warming in the pipeline as our cool oceans and ice sheets come into equilibrium with our warmed atmosphere.
For now, as our Earth systems have begun to collapses and there is no returning from collapse unless the thing that caused the collapse to begin is removed, restoring our climate to a temperature cooler than today is required to end the mayhem. To do this, very contrary to our current climate culture, we can use processes that are widespread in industry to remove carbon from the sky and restore our climate back to a safe state where collapsing Earth systems are stabilized and their tipping responses eliminated.
Who do we trust to keep us safe? Our Engineers – the Solutions
A long-standing discussion topic in advanced climate change is the impossibility of a removal infrastructure because of its nascent nature, unparallel size, and costs beyond anything humankind has ever encountered. Maybe so, but coming from an applied scientist background (an engineer) I have a different view of “impossibility,” as this is what I do in my normal engineering career, create solutions for impossible situations.
Processes that are fundamental to beer, submarine safety, baking soda, bats, cement, and vitamines (note the spelling), have been used to remove carbon dioxide from air for over a century (link). There is nothing new about this thing called “carbon dioxide removal or CDR”. We simply need to giga scale these processes to remove tens of gigatons (a billion is a giga) of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the sky every year for twenty years to ensure that we restore our climate back to within its natural variation so the evolutionary changes to our Earth systems will stabilize. The hundred year old carbon removal processes listed below, only need our engineers to gigascale them like they gigascale things across this planet of eight gigapeople every day.
Nobel Prize nominee Carl von Linde was the first to remove carbon dioxide from air in a meaningful way. His technology was developed from his refrigeration discovery that itself was first used in the 1870s to help the brewing industry overcome limitations on summer season brewing and beer storage that was plagued by warm-season bacterial contamination. Literally, brewing beer in the warm season was banned in Bavaria because of this problem. By 1890 Linde had sold 747 of his “ice machines.” In 1892 Guinness contracted with Linde to build a CO2 liquefaction plant to sell excess CO2 from fermentation as a feedstock in the newly industrialized world. See link, link, link, link
The recyclable lime-potash process has been used in various forms to remove CO2 from air since the late 19th Century. It involves two parts – capture with potash and release using lime in the baking soda production process. These two processes have been ubiquitous in industry since the mid- and late-1800s. Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) has been used for thousands of years from its natural mineral deposition from hot springs among other places. French chemist, Nicolas Leblanc discovered the process to make baking soda (known as soda ash too) in 1791. Relatively recently, the lime-potash process was fundamental in preventing CO2 poisoning in submarines during World War II. See link, link, link
In 1930, Robert Bottoms was awarded a patent for removing CO2 from air with amines. The discovery of amines was first published in 1911 by Kazimierz Funk. Funk was inspired by Christiaan Eijkman work that showed eating brown rice reduced vulnerability to beri-beri, compared to those who ate normal milled rice. (Beri-beri is a vitamin B deficiency that causes nerve and heart inflammation.) He was able to isolate the substance responsible and because it contained an amine group (an ammonia chemical) he called it “vitamine”. It was later to be known as vitamin B3 (niacin). Amines have gone on to become one of the most important chemical groups of all time and was a $32 billion industry in 2023. See link,
The Haber-Bosch process was an extremely important piece of chemistry developed just before WWI that allowed nitrogen production for use in explosives and fertilizers, with a key part of the process being the CO2 removal. It was a German invention because the Allies controlled all the bat guano deposits in caves that were the nitrogen source for fertilizers and explosives manufacturing. CO2 is a byproduct of the process produced as waste that must be removed, which is fundamental to the CO2 air capture process. The Haber-Bosch process is responsible for almost all fertilizers on Earth, one of the largest industries yet. See link, link.
The Solvay process in the 1860s first created baking soda in industry and is the most widely used process for baking soda production today, responsible for over 2 million tons per year. The CO2 capture process is simply described by the way baking soda works in cooking. Chemical leavening requires an acidic catalyst in the batter, such as yogurt or buttermilk. On contact with the sodium bicarbonate (baking soda, NaHCO₃), this causes the release of CO2 in a simple acid-base reaction. Baking soda also releases its CO2 when heated above 50 C (122 F). The remaining sodium and carbonates can be re-reacted with CO2 to recreate the baking soda again in a loop. See link, link, link
Right now there are over 200, 1 million ton per year atmospheric CO2 removal units committed under the Internal Revenue Service’s Section 45Q
Carbon Sequestration Incentive. Keith 2018, University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Harvard, describes the scaling of a 1,000 ton per day demonstration unit in Squamish, British Columbia, that is the process being used for many of these units. His costs are far less than what other academics describe because the others make poor process assumptions and use the heat of enthalpy backwards, as a demand rather than an output, all described in rebuttals. See link, link, link, link, link, link. Even more, Keith’s evaluation uses natural gas energy that is far more expensive than renewables, reducing Keith’s costs further. But substantially, if the world’s most important industrial minds did not believe these processes were not profitable with IRS45Q’s incentive, or up to $180 ton, they would not have committed to building over 200, 1-million ton per year units to take advantage of this incentive.
Gigapeople, Gigachickens, Gigashoes, and Gigamoney
Beyond money, our popular climate culture believes capturing carbon from air is too big and too expensive. Besides for not having a choice because even complete emissions reductions cannot cool in time frames that matter to tipping collapses, the giga amounts of CO2 (carbon) we need to remove from our atmosphere is simply another giga problem that will be overcome by our engineers that gigasize so many things across our planet today. We made 48 gigashoes globally in 2019. We eat 50 gigachickens globally every year. We manufactured 1,000 gigacomputer chips in 2021, and 212 gigabatteries. In 2021 we made 600 gigaplastic bottles, and every year we make 5,000 gigaplastic bags , 530 gigadisposable plastic cups, and 107 gigaunits of apparel. We consume 15 gigatons of fuels every year. We mined 52 gigatons of aggregates for concrete and roads globally in 2019. The mining waste market of overburden and processed waste is 234 gigtons per year. In the US alone in 2020, we treated 112 gigatons of water and wastewater.
The costs of our giga world are seemingly phenomenal, yet we spend gigabucks every day on gigathings.
We spent $4.3 trillion on health care in the US alone in 2021. This is 18 percent of the total US GDP. We spend $1.6 trillion annually on marketing across the globe. We spend $500 billion on clothes in the US every year, and $750 billion on durable goods in the US every year. We spend $1.3 trillion every year in the US on nondurable goods (a trillion is 1,000 billion), Americans spend $1.5 trillion on their automobiles annually and $2.1 trillion on food. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts cost $500 billion per year in the US. Agricultural damages in the US are also $500 billion per year not counting climate change impacts. The urban waste market is $205 billion per year globally. The global aggregate market is valued in 2022 at $591 billion annually. Sick days in the US alone cost $576 billion annually. Life Insurance is $2.6 trillion annually globally. Entertainment every year in the US is $479 billion, and $1.7 trillion globally. Fossil fuel subsidies globally are $1.9 trillion. US energy costs in 2022 were $1.7 trillion, and the value of US imported goods was $5.4 trillion in 2018. The US spent $14 trillion on defense 2001 through 2016.
Removing greenhouse gases from our atmosphere so that we can restore our climate back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth system, so that we can stabilize their activated tipping collapses, return the repeatedly unprecedented weather extremes back to their normal rare occurrences, and eliminate warming-caused inequity and injustice, are things we can do and we can do them in our lifetimes. Don’t believe the biased reporting and understating science of the consensus. It’s only pollution. If we treat climate pollution like our culture almost always treats pollution by emitting it, then using our engineers to treat it so we can be safe, our Earth systems and the humanity they support will be saved in no time. Trust our engineers. They are the fundamental reason there are eight gigapeople on this planet and that life expectancy has doubled since we began burning fossil fuels. Treating climate pollution with solutions supplied by engineers can reverse 30 years of climate pollution failure.
Cover image description… King Tide Flooding on Chesapeake Bay. At a normal marina in our old climate, the highest high tide would be 12 to 18 inches below the deck of the pier but the King Tide and rising sea level caused by climate change has submerged this marina’s piers. King Tides are caused when both the moon and the sun combine to pull ocean water around the planet instead of just the moon like in normal tides. King’s happen twice a year in the spring and fall, with several “cycles” in each season with four to five very high tide days per cycle. Old marinas like this one have seen most of the 12 inches of sea level rise on the east coast in the last 30 years. Because of the extra corrosive activity from repeated submersion, the connectors on some of the piers in this marina have rusted away and the deck actually free-floats between the pilings during high tides, until one walks across it causing it to sink back to its original location atop the beams that connect pairs of pilings.