EarthX 2026 Presentation – The Secrets of Why and How Sierra Club Adopted a Climate Restoration Policy, and the Witnessing of 150,000 Miles of Warming Effects Across North America
Foundation for Climate Restoration – Founder’s Series, April 29, 2026
A presentation by Bruce Melton PE at EarthX 2026
Summary:
Eleven understating biases in climate science and our climate culture have created a climate action momentum that threatens not only our Earth’s systems, but humanity itself. Our current climate change culture has failed. Elimination of 100 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions cannot stop the collapse of Earth’s systems that is now underway; It’s simply to warm. Degradation of Earth’s systems has begun and will result in their collapse with the release of millennia of stored greenhouse gases unless we cool our climate because, once environmental degradation from climate warming effects begins, it does not stop unless the thing that caused it to begin is removed. The academic literature says we have about until mid-century to remove the excess warming humans have caused. Current and ongoing degradation has already flipped many parts of many systems around the globe to emissions of greenhouse gases. These emissions will rapidly grow to ten times all the greenhouse gases humans have ever emitted, unless we remove the current warming that caused the degradation to begin. This presentation is the story of how and why Sierra Club adopted a less than 1 degree C warming above normal climate restoration policy; the first of its kind in the world. It can help guide humanity to overcome the understating biases in climate science and our climate culture so that we can restore our climate back to safe and stable conditions that are within the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth systems, so as to halt current degradation where collapse is now foregone with current policy. Again, complete greenhouse gas emissions elimination this instant only limits future arming, it cannot remove current warming that has caused Earth systems degradation to begin.
Climate tipping is now active. What climate tipping is, is the degradation of our Earth’s systems like tropical forests, permafrost, ice sheets, ocean currents and many others. The degradation is directly and indirectly caused by the effects of warming that begins when a system’s boundary conditions are exceeded. Boundary conditions define the organisms and mechanisms that make up a system that are directly influenced by the climate present when the system evolved and they include: precipitation amount and frequency, temperature, and duration of wet and drought periods, heat waves, freezing temperatures, and extremeness of precipitation events, drought, storms, and temperature. Organisms and mechanisms include: tree and shrub species, mammals, insects, fungal and bacterial colonies, streambed shape, water clarity, sun/cloud coverage, etc. Change one or more of a systems boundary conditions and it creates an ecological regime shift (tipping) to a new ecology with new species and mechanisms that are tolerant of the changed conditions. Once degradation begins, stored carbon in the original system are released as greenhouse gases where more than ten times all the greenhouse gases humans have ever emitted are at risk of release with these “tipping” responses. The only thing that can halt this collapse (tipping) process is removing the thing that caused the degradation to begin before the system becomes so degraded it cannot self-restore even if the warming effects are removed. The timeline for crossing this point of no return threshold according to the latest academic literature is likely around mid-century for most already degrading Earth systems.
The 11 understating biases of our climate culture and climate science are: scientific reticence, moral hazard, consensus compromise, scenario bias, modeling bias with extremes and tipping, media reporting, Climate Change Counter Movement, cultural feedback into science findings, non-stationarity and frequentist statistics, event attribution science, and slow science. Because of these 11 understating biases, the science of Earth systems responses to warming is significantly different and understated from our current global climate culture of “a little further warming is safe.” This presents challenges to overcome long-held beliefs in our climate culture perceived to be absolutely credible, about the meaning of the effects of warming on our biosphere that directly influence our advanced human civilization. These beliefs are founded in global consensus climate science modelling that is affected by the 11 inherent understating biases.
Our advanced human civilization system is no different than any other system in that exceedance of our civilization’s evolutionary boundaries results in the same systems behaviors of degradation, collapse, and reorganization. This is all why Sierra Club, the world leader in environmental conservation, changed their policy from “a little further warming to 1.5 degrees C above normal” to “restoration to 1 degrees C above normal, back to within the boundaries of our old climate where our Earth systems evolved.” The rest of the story of how Sierra Club changed their climate policy from 1.5 C to less than 1 C is common to the challenges of changing most belief systems. It involves building trust, mutual support, motivation, evidence, framing, and compromise. The steep trail Sierra Club followed to change their climate policy to restoration can guide humanity in developing strategies to change other deeply held beliefs, not only with the effects and solutions to human-caused warming, but with other deeply held beliefs as well.
Presentation (Large 2.2GB, video clips and lots of warming effects photography from across North America)
https://climatediscovery.org/Foundation_for_Cli_Rest_Founders_Series_-EarthX_plus-_Melton_042826.pptx
Podcast of the presentation:
https://earthx.org/videos/?_video-category=climate-restoration-summit-beyond-net-zero#video-1473443-2
Sierra Club Climate Policies March 2020
Climate Resilience, Carbon Dioxide Removal, and Geoengineering Policy
https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/2020-Sierra-Club-Climate-Resilience-Policy.pdf