Frostweed On A Warming Planet First published by Bruce Melton PE in the Austin Sierran as a part of its cover image description on February 7, 2024 The most common species of frostweed in Central Texas is, Verbesina virginica. These “ice flowers” come from ice exuded by the stem. It takes a good hard freeze…
Image: The “Flats” on the back side of Padre Island in South Texas. Just inches above sea level, these flats are mostly gone today from sea level rise. The Last Year Below 1.5 C – Remarkable Warming Acceleration In 2023 Surpasses the Dangerous Warming Threshold The Global 1.5 °C Climate Change Threshold Was Unexpectedly Exceeded…
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…
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…
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…
Warm Atlantic water is invading the Arctic Ocean in a novel way. It is “Atlantifying” the Polar Sea. The results are that ice loss in the Arctic to the north of Siberia is likely enhanced. This “invasion” has always been a known thing in the Western Arctic, but now it has shifted 1,000 miles east…
The IPCC changed their fundamental philosophy on how they evaluate scenarios of our future climate in their 2013 reporting, but they have yet to acknowledge the most common and meaningful way our climate usually changes, implying negative consequences for traditional climate reform strategies. Popular science however, continues on the path of traditional climate reform strategies…
Whatever it has been that has kept the average global temperature from skyrocketing along with greenhouse gas concentrations is likely being overwhelmed. Of most significance is an unprecedented hot spot in the North Pacific that has probably signaled an end to the current cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Last summer’s global sea surface…
Increasing warming in the Pacific has been difficult to prove because of El Nino and La Nina. ENSO as it is known, or El Nino Southern Oscillation, is the periodic change in south and equatorial Pacific ocean temperatures that can wreak havoc around the globe. El Nino (warming equatorial and south Pacific ocean temperatures) conditions…
University of Georgia forest ecologist Jacqueline Mohan tells us that not only is poison ivy already responding favorably to warming in Georgia, but its poison is getting more poisonous. The reason that poison ivy and other similar woody vines flourish in warmer climates (think Precambrian) is a symbiotic relationship with kind of fungi called arbuscular…
After twenty years of the D & D game climate change is much worse than it would have been if we had of started reducing emissions as the Kyoto Protocol, and nearly every single climate scientist on the planet suggested was prudent. First published on the Rag Blog, August 8, 2012. Before I tell you…
Part One: Warming over land will be twice the global average because of cool ocean water. Why didn’t they tell us this to start with for goodness sakes! An average considers warming over land and water. Warming over land is much greater than it is over water. Anyone who has ever been to the beach…
Methane: so much news. First, methane from the decomposition of recently grown organic stuff is not really a problem. How ’bout that. It’s fossil methane that’s a problem. Recently grown organic material cycles through the growth/decay process rapidly relative to climate change’s semi-geologic timescale. So it’s factored in to the equation. Burning fossil fuels releases…
Five degrees of change—a half zone. Not average temperature; this is based on the average last freeze. I gave a presentation to the Austin Organic Garden Society last month and I remembered USDA had recently come out with new hardiness zone maps. The USDA changes in 2012 are not so much different than the 2006…
March 21, 2012: — Henry David Thoreau, Concord Massechusetts, Walden Pond. Among temperature and non temperature dependent flowering species, climate change has affected and will likely continue to shape the pattern of species loss in Thoreau’s woods. Species that have decreased greatly in abundance include anemones, buttercups, asters, campanulas, bluets, bladderworts, dogwoods, lilies, mints, orchids,…
January 29, 2012, The Wall Street Journal “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” Sixteen Deniers Authorities Delegate Delay – These 16 “scientists,” as the Wall Street Journal calls them, have published a letter that has some news for the readers of the WSJ. They tell us that our planet has not warmed for well…
February 1, 2011 – A paper by Stieg et. al. in 2009, widely accepted as the best in Antarctic temperature analysis in recent history, has recently come under fire from a paper by O’Donnell, et. al. O’Donnell’s paper says that warming in Antarctica is only half of what Stieg says. The denialists are wild with…
May 21, 2010 From Science News: "Earth’s upper ocean warmed substantially between 1993 and 2008, a new analysis reveals. The trend signals growing heat storage in oceans, researchers say, a result of human-caused warming. The new study, reported in the May 20 Nature, combined oceanographic data gathered worldwide between 1993 and 2008, the time period…
We have come to understand an enormous amount about our climate since the turn of the Century. the latest and most accurate super computer models are now predicting climate change far worse than was predicted with the IPCC Fourth Assessment. The MIT News release begins: "The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood…
Preliminary release of information from Copenhagen shows that with the best case scenario of CO2 emissions reductions, where CO2 emission decline by 3% per year by 2015 (this is a very aggressive reduction rate), there is still a 50% chance that the earth will warm 3.6 to 5 degrees F by 2100. A 3.6 degree…
