Mayfield Kentucky after the December 2021 tornado outbreak. Image: State Farm Insurance, Wiki Commons Winter Tornadoes Increase 5-Fold because of Climate Change Winter tornadoes have increase 500 percent since 1953 with most of the increase likely being recent. This study looked at 4293 tornadoes reported between 1953 and 2015. Not only did it find tornadoes…
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…
Summary: The Texas winter storm disaster was caused by both climate change and poor planning. Climate change is making extreme weather more extreme, and energy generation planning in Texas did not fully take into consideration cascading feedbacks, simultaneous catastrophes, and the extent to which our climate has already created more extreme weather based on warming…
A Climate Emergency Response – Austin Group of Sierra Club, Climate Change Committee, June 7, 2021 A climate emergency is upon us. More than half of tipping points are active, they complete their activations and become irreversible with no further warming, and half have dynamical feedbacks that speed the collapse of other tipping systems. See…
This is a Zoom performance for CCL’s Earth Day celebration where Bruce sings two of the band Climate Change’s new songs and talks about climate change a little. See the performance here. ‘
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…
Four giant sequoias killed or mostly killed by climate change-caused wildfire. Sequoia National Monument, Black Mountain Grove, Pier Fire 2017. Sequoias don’t normal die in wildfire. When our climate has changed enough to cause sequoias to die, from overly extreme fires caused by unprecedented low fuel moisture, it’s caused by climate change, not enhanced. Broad…
The depths of the Paradise Fire on November 8, 2018 are yet unknown. 14,000 homes were destroyed in four hours along with another 5,000 businesses and commercial structures. Recovery appears to be strong, debris are about half removed, but reconstruction as yet has little obvious momentum. 14,000 Simultaneous Catastrophes: Climate Change in Paradise California, the…
Permafrost Melt Photo Tour Climate Change Across America 2018 Field Work Already, Alaska has flipped from a carbon sink to a carbon source from permafrost melt and methane emissions. (Commane 2017, science interpreted) Alaska — the entire state, and likely the rest of the north across the entire world — is now emitting greenhouse gases…
Significant Sunny Day Beach Erosion on South Padre Island, Beyond the King Tide It’s still beautiful, but this is nowhere close to sustainable. It’s catastrophic, but it’s virtually unknown. The beach is nothing like in our past where sea level rise was not an issue. Most of the wilderness beach on almost all of Padre…
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. …
Climate Change 2018 Review: Part 1 – The Bad by Bruce Melton Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3 (Link to Article) So much happened in our climate change world in 2018 that we are printing this article in two parts: The Bad, and The Good. We start with the bad, and as bad as it was…
False Balance in the Media Reduces Climate Science Credibility, Oxford English Dictionary “Journalists have struggled historically to apply the notion of balance to the reporting of climate change science, because even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts agree that human-driven climate change is real and will have major future impacts, a minority of scientists dispute this consensus….
Arctic Sea Ice – More Than Half Gone With Five Times As Much Warming Just what do all the squiggly lines mean? To start with, the way science is shown to us civilians is a bit misleading generally. What we hear much of the time as the “new record sea ice extents” is based on…
How much CO2 reduction, how much does it cost, and what’s it worth? A Detailed Primer We have been moving towards the answers to these questions forever it seems, so here goes: Immediately below is my summary. Further down are thoughts on how I arrived at these numbers. These costs assume that we can do…
The 45Q Carbon Sequestration Tax Credits: First Steps or Moral Hazard? Summary: The new enhancements to Obama’s 45Q carbon dioxide sequestration tax credits are widely seen as a boon to the oil industry. A deeper look reveals they could be the incentive that allows us to actually reverse warming, something that most people understand…
Most of us think a healthy climate will result from emissions reductions. Time and again however, the science says this is not so. The reason? Emissions reduction strategies are about 30 years old and we have emitted as much climate pollution in about the last 30 years as we emitted in the previous 200 years….
What’s the Big Deal With Climate Change? We all understand climate change is trouble. Even a really significant percentage of oil and gas professionals understand. Of a recent poll (2014) of 474 oil and gas industry insiders, 85 percent believed global warming was happening, 58 percent were either very sure or extremely sure, and 57 percent…
We have all heard it before: “What’s so bad about a little warming?” Several things are at play here. First, it’s winter. It’s far colder in winter than the warming we have experienced. So when it’s winter it’s cold, relative to when it’s not winter. But a little warming can’t be that bad, right?Our global…
We have all seen it, at least in the news. Most of us have been impacted by it because it is all around us. Extreme weather events have increased in intensity. Our climate has changed and as the modelers said 30 years ago, extremes have increased. In the future, expect further increases to triple what…
