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…
Worst Drought Ever in the Amazon, Caused By Climate Change The fifth, 100-year drought since 2005 has struck the Amazon in 2023; this one more extreme than any of the previous events. Each of these droughts except one were more extreme than the previous. These were 2010, 2015/2016, the smaller one in 2020, and the…
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…
Hottest on Record – What about the heat island? World daily temperature records have been smashed this week, according to preliminary data. by Lucie Aubourg, Phys.org, July 8, 2023 (Editor’s note: Rarely mentioned in this repeatedly recurring journalism on the topic is the heat island and this Phys.org article is no exception. If weather…
Ocotillo mortality, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Three Dike Hill. The ocotillo in the foreground succumbed to bark beetles last season. Many more are in the frame, just hard to tell! It’s the desert ~ ~ ~ Chihuahuan Desert Walkabout – Desert Mortality from Climate Change By Bruce Melton We just returned from filming more…
A review of Ripple et al., World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022, Bioscience, October 26, 2022. The report opens, “We are now at “code red” on planet Earth. Humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency. The scale of untold human suffering, already immense, is rapidly growing with the escalating number of climate-related disasters….
Climate Change Across America Fall Filming Report Southern and Southwestern Colorado Beetle Attack and Forest Regeneration Failure at Mesa Verde National Park We returned to filming after a long covid. No trouble. On the big drive from Texas to the mountains, New Mexico was grand with their indoor mask mandate. Colorado and Texas were about…
Our Nation’s Timberlands Flip: Mortality Exceeds Growth by 2:1 Because of climate change, our nation’s forests are dying faster than they are regenerating. This was not supposed to happen for a long, long time. It’s really something that is not even projected, except in very vague terms about ecosystem transformation. But today, already, we see…
The list of Amazonian drought records has grown to Amazonian proportions. Three 100-year plus droughts in a decade have taken their toll. Along with continual man-created ecological compromise, climate warming, and forest mortality from drought a very strong El Nino has grown into their strongest drought ever recorded since record keeping began in 1900. The…
It’s all around us but masked by “noise” in the media; enabled by fairness in journalism, driven by myth that has been propagated by experiences that we as a society have never before experienced. When Unprecedented drought in California was replaced by unprecedented flooding, the paper says: “The media, resource management entities, and the scientific…
One of the general quandaries about current climate change impacts and those with our future climate has been: “how do we end up with drying when precipitation increases with warming as we already see happening and is further projected in the future?” This research from Princeton, University of Southampton and the US Geological Survey does…
This is the original long version with much more detail and all of the destinations and forest health descriptions along the 6,000 mile route. The abbreviated 2,000 word version was published on Truthout on February 16, 2016 is here. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart…
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific organization that produces the academic journal Science, has just begun a new open publishing journal; Science Advances (no paywall!). Their first issue includes a paper titled: Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains. Produced by researchers…
This presentation was given to the Texas Chapter of Mensa on August 16, 2014. (link to presentation) Calling it climate change, global warming, climate disruption — these all scare people or mean things to them that are not good for the cause. Call it what it is—Climate Pollution. We know what pollution is and what…
The last five years have seen 30 to 60 percent more rain in the Central Texas Highland Lakes watershed than in the worst five years of the drought of the 1950s, and the latest National Weather Service 30-year rainfall averages for the watershed have increased seven to twenty percent. Austin is up nine percent. Opposite…
Climate scientists said to expect surprises. How can we have a bigger drought than ever before with our rainfall increasing? It’s all about evaporation and it’s not lake evaporation. It is evaporation from plants that use more water in what is now a much warmer world in Central Texas. It is about that warmer world…
AUSTIN, Texas – The Rag Blog August 15, 2013: The science is certain, but the deniers are just as certain that their pseudo science is certain. Getting the last few deniers to agree with 97 percent of climate scientists though — is that a good use of resources? We have the vast majority of the…
Published on Truthout.org February 21, 2013: Beginning in just eight years, we could see permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest that are comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. The latest research from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University published in December 2012 has some truly astounding news. The megadroughts referred…
Original Discussion: https://climatediscovery.org/20-years-of-climate-change-in-my-gardens-in-austin-texas/ Planted tomatoes the first week of February. I was amazed to find plants at Home Depot. Normally we don’t get tomato plants until the first of March. For the last half dozen or so years spring has been coming earlier, requests for transplants rising and the suppliers have been meeting the demand,…
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…
