Climate Discovery Chronicles

Book Summary

 

If this is not climate change, then this is what climate change will be like in a decade or maybe even sooner. This book is about climate change happening now.  It details 40 recent climate science discoveries with 100 color images. Some of the smartest people in the world have been telling us for over twenty years that these things would happen—that is just what this book reports. Entries include things like the great pine beetle pandemic across 64 million acres of the Rocky Mountains where a native pine beetle attack is 10 to 20 times larger than anything ever known. The beetles have been driven berserk by warming. Other discoveries include: icequakes 1,000 times more powerful than anything ever before seen in Greenland; Earth experiencing 321 consecutive months where the temperature was above the 20th century average; plankton production in our oceans decreasing 40 percent since 1950; current global CO2 emissions increasing along the lines of the worst-case computer model scenario; the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsing and sea level rising 10 to 20 feet in 25 to 100 years or less, 121,000 years ago when Earth was one degree warmer than today; Greenland losing six times more ice today than in 1996; Arctic sea ice melting 70 years ahead of schedule; Antarctica losing ice 100 years ahead of schedule, and two massive droughts in the Amazon, a 100-year drought in 2005 and one four times more extreme in 2010, that killed over two billion trees. These droughts are now responsible for the Amazon emitting greenhouse gases (not absorbing like forests are supposed to do), at a rate that is 75 percent that of total annual U.S. emissions.

Brutal?  Yes, but never fear. The same propagandists that bring us the beliefs that climate change is not real, is inconsequential or is only a natural cycle, largely bring us the concept that climate change is too expensive to fix.

 

 

Sample Chapter: Part One

Front Matter, Contents, List of Illustrations

 

Amazon $17.50 Kindle Color $4.99

 

 

About the Author

Bruce Melton is a registered professional engineer, environmental researcher, trained outreach specialist and critical environmental issue filmmaker. His work with climate started in the early 1990s when he was the principal investigator for an EPA / Clean Water Act grant studying stormwater runoff treatment. While this research was not directly involved with climate change, his work did lead him to academic references that showed the media was not faithfully reporting the findings of climate scientists.

Counter intuitively, what Bruce found was that the media was underreporting the science. In other words, the research said that climate change was worse than what the media was reporting. This fundamental disconnection has only increased with time. Over the years it became clear that there were many reasons for this disconnection other than propaganda created by vested interests. These reasons range from religious beliefs to the complicated nature of climate science and fundamental societal behaviors.  

All are responsible in their own ways for the “perceived” debate about climate change. In the mid and late 1990s when ground breaking research from Greenland ice cores began to be published, it was hoped that such definitive findings would ease the controversy around climate change. Unfortunately it did not thanks in a large way to those vested interests and surprisingly, the refusal of the U.S. to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.  

The disparity between the media’s reports and the scientists’ findings was what pushed Bruce into his writing and filmmaking career in 2004. Within a few months he had a publisher for his first book. But this book was not meant to be. He turned down his publisher because they would not do color. Bruce new the value of color imagery because of his outreach specialist training in communicating complicated science. His book was full of color and black and white seemed entirely inappropriate.  

Bruce’s engineering consulting business had been footing the bills for his writing and the time he had devoted to his writing had depleted his funds, so he took on more engineering work. Six months later he looked up and Al Gore had published An Inconvenient Truth, in full color. The Vice President had published a book so similar to Bruce’s that he knew this project was dead.  

Many other books were coming out about climate change and it seemed that further work in this area would not be a good use of time. The great disconnection was still there and he knew he had the skills to communicate the reality of the science – he just needed a “hook.” So he picked up his cameras and went to Greenland, and the Rockies, and Alaska, and deserted barrier islands and the desert.  

What he found along the way, and what climate scientists told him in the field was that indeed, climate change was worse than what was being reported by the media. As Bruce documented the extremes of climate changes happening now with his film work, he realized that there were no books out there that focused solely on these changes. All of the climate books were general works attempting in one way or another to convey the meaning of the basics of the myriad disciplines of climate science.  

So Climate Discovery Chronicles was born. First it was a web page full of notes of individual discoveries. Bruce had realized that his notes were valuable not only to himself, but to the public as well. This page is still on his website at www.meltonengineering.com, and he continues to update it regularly. Today Bruce is working on the second in the series of Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as a book about an epic filming trip he made in 2010 to document the extent of the great pine beetle pandemic in the Rockies. He travelled 7,500 miles in 28 days, making 19 camps, crossing the Continental Divide 14 times and inspecting 17 national forests and 6 national parks. The film will be his second on the beetle. The book will be his first about his personal exploration of our new climate and our rapidly changing planet.