An Important Tipping Point for Our Total Earth System Has Passed – Natural Sequestration of Atmospheric CO2 Has Begun To Decline Natural sequestration of carbon dioxide is in decline: climate change will accelerate The familiar cover image of the Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2 concentration now reveals what has been coming for decades. Natural sequestration of…
Evidence continues to mount that Earth systems processes have passed tipping points or their tipping is foregone without rapid restoration of our climate to within the evolutionary boundary conditions of our former climate. No amount of warming beyond the maximum of our old climate is now safe and we must cool from today to restore…
An Introduction to Advanced Climate Change – Two Years in the Making by Bruce Melton PE Climate Change Now Initiative October 2023 (Link to the learning tool) This slide deck is a learning tool with 18,000 words in 52 slides with 70 beautiful images. The notes include about 85,000 words and over 600 references with…
January 26, 2024 – The Heat is On – Passing the dangerous 1.5 C threshold… Rag Radio’s Thorne Dryer of Bruce Melton PE on the sudden acceleration of the global warming rate and exceedance of the dangerous 1.5 degree C warming threshold. It’s warming twice as fast as it was 10 years ago, and in…
Ship Tracks captured in September 2009 by NASA imagery. These tracks are caused when sulfate emissions from burning fossil fuels create cloud condensation nuclei that result in the ship tracks seen in this image. These clouds are common and result in extra sunlight being reflected back into space, cooling Earth. No need to ruminate for…
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…
Brief Report: Climate Tipping, Earth Systems Collapse Initiation, Climate Restoration Reverses Some Sea Level Rise, and the Barrier Island Disintegration Threshold, Limit to Sea Level Rise Adaptation A brief discussion with summarized academic findings. Climate Tipping, Earth Systems Collapse Initiation Greenland and Antarctica have seen their tipping activated. This does not mean they have passed…
Permafrost collapse, Glenn Highway, Alaska. Though permafrost has been thawing slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age, the rate of thaw today is so great that in combination with Amazon collapse and collapse of Canadian forests, natural feedback emissions rival all of transportation globally. Faster than forecast, climate impacts trigger tipping points in…
NOAA Research in the Stratosphere is Taking Off March 3, 2023, NOAA (Article updated April 2024: The year 2023 experienced a remarkably unprecedented jump in global temperature that has now exceeded the dangerous 1.5 Degrees C threshold. (See here) Enduring this amount of warming for long, likely no more than a couple to several decades,…
Risky Feedbacks – Not In Models; Understated Solutions Feedbacks are best understood by example. Austin’s 2023 ice storm that caused massive tree damage and excessive power outages was caused by a feedback. The ice storm stalled in a classic climate change-caused effect, creating a longer ice accumulation time than in our old climate. This additional…
Gulf Stream Collapse Under Way – Confirmation of Tipping Activation For nearly 20 years, the collapse or slowdown of the Gulf Stream has been speculated upon as more and more evidence shows it has begun. All the while, very strong response from the general body of consensus climate scientists has been that the Gulf Stream…
Onion Creek Flood 2013, US 183 bridge, Austin, Texas – new record flood depth. Climate change has returned to the news in full force with the Council of Parties meeting COP26, the 197 nation meeting of the United Federation Convention on Climate Change. What will come from the meeting is hopefully a more aggressive agreement…
(cover image: Permafrost thaw, Glenn Highway, Southeastern Alaska) It is nothing short of amazing that scientists consistently find that ecological collapses have been activated, but do not connect that existing warming today, that activated these impacts, allows these collapses to cross the “point of no return” into irreversible collapse. That they believe these ecologies or…
“Where do we move?” Retirees want to know where they can escape climate change impacts. Those seeking to give their kids the best life they can want to know. The folks from where I live in Austin want to get out of this infernal heat that has come to dominate our lives with 100-degree days…
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…
Environmental researcher Bruce Melton joins Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio to discuss responses to a climate emergency. He covers what a climate emergency is and why we have such emergencies, the nature of climate tipping, what “weather mayhem” is, and much more. He also discusses how we can delay these catastrophes and implement a climate energy response. Listen…
Pier Fire 2017, Black Mountain Grove Unburnable Sequoias Burned July 2019, Sequoia National Forest – We had been driving the Pier Fire burn for two days. Two days in the black. We camped at the intersection of two logging roads, parking in the middle of the widest spot, as we had only seen two vehicles….
More than half of known climate tipping points or Earth systems, are currently active. They complete without further warming, 45 percent have dynamic feedbacks that enhance extremeness and speed the collapses of other tipping systems, and most are irreversible upon completion of their activations. We don’t exactly know when their activations will complete, and some…
