Instagram Filming Logs: Beetles, Fire and Regeneration Failure, September 2023 – Central Rockies Bruce Melton, ClimateDiscovery.org (Instagram logs with photos and video are below the summary.) Across the Central Rockies from the San Juans to Rocky Mountain National Park, beetle attacks are growing again. The beetles and impacted trees are changing though. Gone are the…
Climate Change Across America An Epic Film Four Years in The Making 16,000 Miles From Texas to the Arctic Ocean Below is a taste of what we were up to in 2018 as an ongoing update to the bigger Climate Change Across America film project. So far we have 43,000 miles of production in the…
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…
Slowly and insidiously, or abruptly and finitely. Forests of all kinds are succumbing to climate change. Mountain forests, city forests, forests in the southeast and the far north. Pine, spruce, fir, oak, maple. Nontraditional forests too; the palms of LA, succulents in the desert. Yes, deserts are at risk too. Deserts as ecosystems are fragile…
We can have a healthy climate — a climate with zero warming — in our lifetimes. The message for the last 20 years has been that we have to reduce emissions drastically to prevent dangerous climate change of more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F). This strategy would have likely worked when it was…
First published on Truthout February 16, 2016 by Bruce Melton. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart of the US Rockies on a 6,000-mile journey of observation. Our film, What Have We Done, the North American Pine Beetle Pandemic, was released in…
Earth has warmed about 0.9 degrees C on average and the Arctic on average has warmed two to three times as much as the average. Daily temperature variation and annual temperature variation make a difference. Climate scientists have been warming us for over a generation that climate change would mean greater insect infestations on a…
First Published on Truthout, March 18, 2014 Today, we are burning fossil carbon one million times faster than it was naturally put in the ground, and carbon dioxide is increasing 14,000 times faster than anytime in the last 610,000 years (1,2). Climate is now changing faster than it has during any other time in 65…
I was chasing down the location of one of my favorite webcams today – Brooks Lake Lodge in the Shoshone National Forest just east of Grand Teton National Park and immediately south of Yellowstone National Park. I was curious as to the elevation of the lodge, they had a good snow year there this year…
Montana red kill up to 5 million acres from 3 in 2008. http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/news/2010/jan/nr-foresthealth-pressconf-1-22-10.pdf Half a million more acres of red kill in Colorado to bring the total to 3.6 million. Spruce beetle has infected an additional half million acres in southern Colorado. hhttp://www.dnr.wa.gov/Publications/rp_fh_2009_forest_health_highlights.pdfp class="style40"> Washington 1.36 million to 1.73 million total kill: 412,000 acres pine…
It was hoped that the last several years of wet and cold in the Rockies would put a damper on the great pine beetle infestation ongoing. In 2008, the infestation increased 18 million acres. The last record breaking pine beetle infestation in North America was three million acres in ten years. This event ended about…
(170 pages) Ecological thresholds occur when external factors, positive feedbacks, or nonlinear instabilities in a system cause changes to propagate in a domino-like fashion that is potentially irreversible. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached levels unprecedented in possibly the last 24 million years. CO2 concentrations have risen by 34%, mostly in the last several decades. Global…
