Not Near Enough Rain in Austin Maybe things will change soon. May is our wettest month after all. The big drought hole southwest of Austin remains and the lakes are in sorry shape. We were supposed to get some relief from El Nino this winter, but nada, even though some have seen 20 inches east…
Lake Travis at 630.6 feet elevation in 2013. Today, Travis is at 631.2. Lake Travis: Record Low? Despite the rains, Lake Travis’ water elevation of 631.1 feet elevation is only two and a half feet higher than it’s low pf 628.5 feet in October. And this is only 11 feet higher than the low during…
Image: Crayons on a driveway of a friend, 103 degrees. Note how the white crayons hardy melted. How Much Hotter Is It Because of Climate Change? One of the things I tell folks these days about the heat is that the absolute temperature in Austin is not really that much warmer than in the past….
It’s not the heat, it’s the warming beyond evolutionary boundaries. Bruce Melton ClimateDiscovery.org First published as an abridge version on The Rag Blog, as a part of an-in-depth radio interview on the Rag Radio syndicated on Pacifica on 7/21/2023 There’s a quote that has been around forever, variously worded and attributed to many. The origin…
Rag Radio 2023-07-21, Climate Change scholar and activist Bruce Melton is Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio where they discuss the unprecedented heat in the summer of 2023. Among topics Bruce addresses are: What is going on with this increasing frequency of extreme events? Is the heat increasing faster? The additional causes of extreme heat beyond climate…
Austin, Texas: The Blizzard of ’21 – Summary and Photo Tour by Bruce Melton First published in the Austin Sierran on March 9, 2021, updated March 13. By 10 pm on February 14, this map was updated with winter storm warnings (pink) issued for every county in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. They say it will…
From Texas to the Alaskan North Slope via California, 16,000 miles in 46 days with 43 different camps. First presented to the Climate Change Committee of the Austin group of Sierra Club on 4/1/2019. 295 images, 125 mb – Link to the show
Rag Radio 2019-03-15: The Band Climate Change With Bruce Melton by Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer Podcast – https://archive.org/details/RagRadio2019-03-15-BruceMeltonAndClimateChange Against the backdrop of SXSW — and dedicated to the worldwide struggle against global warming — Rag Radio presents The Band Climate Change in performance. Led by Bruce Melton, Rag Radio resident climate guru, other members of the band…
Wow! $0.05 per KwH! Five cents a kilabuck, amazing. The contract Austin City Council recently approved was supposed to be for 50 MW of solar generating capacity, but the price was so good, they bumped the project to 150 Mw making it tied for tenth largest in the world. Why is this happening so much…
Presentation for Sun City Democrats, Saturday May 16, 2014: https://climatediscovery.org/Climate_Change_in_Central_Texas_May_2014.ppt
The details of the temperature record are a lot more extreme than the National Weather Service averages reveal. Their current January average for Camp Mabry is 2.1 degrees above normal, but it’s nearly 5 degrees warmer than the 1980 average. Is this just the normal chaos of weather? The annual average Austin temperature has increased…
The Texas Forest Service has come out with their final numbers on the 2011 tree kill. After counting plots and comparing to before and after satellite photos, 301 million trees were killed by drought and disease related to drought in 2011. this is right in the middle of their 100 to 500 million estimate (see…
We had 2.5 inches at the airport and an inch an a half in Oak Hill! The last time we had more than a nickel’s worth of rain in Oak Hill was the middle of June — four months ago!
The State Climatologist is little different from most climate scientists. I have one thing to say about climate scientists and State Climatologists: They can not say what they see coming, only what their data tell them. The conservative nature of science demands that scientific proclamation be robustly supported by long term data. This makes it…
247 of Texas’ 254 counties are under Texas Forest Service burn bans. In Austin we have only had 50% of our normal annual rainfall (9 inches behind) and we are about 60 percent behind for the last 10 months. We have had 36, 100-degree days so far this year and our normal is 12 days…
