Climate Change Now Mission Statement:

Climate change is a very complicated multidisciplinary science. Extraordinary amounts of knowledge about climate have been discovered by scientists in the last decade or two.  Because of the complexity of the science however, little of this knowledge is being spread to society. This lack of detailed climate knowledge will cause humankind to react and plan poorly to mitigate the effects of climate change. The mission of Climate Change Now is to inform as large a number of individuals as possible of this great increase in knowledge, in the shortest amount of time feasible so that significant attempts at mitigation and preparation can be enacted,  minimizing physical, social and economic hardships.

Welcome to Climate Change Now
My name is Bruce Melton. This page contains info on my documentary adventure Climate Change Now. Can you help me fix our climate?  Come along and we'll see:  I don't have funding yet, so send money, and tell your producer and television friends.

My Background
I have been a civil and environmental engineer for 25 years. I have done a fair amount of environmental research, so I understand the academic papers on climate change that I have been reading for nearly a decade now. Click here for my vitae, my resume, list of accomplishments, and other information can be found under the MESA tab at Mesa Engineering, Melton Engineering and Homebuilders, personal info is under the tab Life is Good.

Climate Crisis
What I hear and read in the popular media is not the same thing as what the academics are saying. The sense of urgency is loud and clear in academia, but is relatively absent in the media, and especially absent among our leaders. The immense societal change that will occur on our warming planet - within our lifetimes - are dire without the stabilization of global warming gasses in our atmosphere.

Our climate is changing and once changed, it won't be back... The supercomputer model predictions are scary enough, but the models are conservative.

Climate is changing faster and more aggressively than predicted. It appears as if what the scientists once thought would happen in 100 years could now be happening in decades and in some case as little as years at the most.

Obviously Conservative Supercomputer Models
It is now quite obvious that the supercomputer models are conservative, that the consensus position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is likewise, significantly conservative. The reason for this lack of foresight is knowledge. Without absolutely clear evidence that a given thing is true, the scientific procedure says that this thing cannot be acknowledged as true. If a scientist is wrong, he will lose credibility. If a funding source's scientist is wrong, that funding source will lose credibility. Credibility is the bread on the scientists table that feeds his children. Credibility is the fundamental core of an institute of higher learning. If credibility is questionable, a scientist soon finds himself out of work, and his funding institute suffers similarly.

The risk of being wrong in science is directly comparable to the risk of being wrong about "o-ring" calculation errors with the space shuttle Challenger. Once a rocket ship explodes, it is not coming back. Once our oceans rise, the flood waters will not recede.

Foremost Climate Modeler in the World Says
The director of the U.S. climate modeling program, Dr. James Hansen, arguably the foremost climate modeling expert in the world, said in September 2006 that the earth is approximately as warm as it has been in the last 100,000 years, and it is within one degree C of being as warm as it has been in the last 1.35 million years. (1)

So where's the hullabaloo? The band (and this is my band - Climate Change) doesn't have clue. This info about being 1 degree C from being as warm as it has been in 1.35 million years, as startling, and aggressive as it sounds, just has not made the media. The last thing that most folks heard was that it would be at least a hundred years before things got to be that bad! This is exactly the kind of thing that Climate Change Now attempts to correct.

We Have Likely Crossed A Climate Threshold
In the last 3 to 5 years it appears as if we have crossed a climate threshold. The pace of change is rapidly accelerating. Scientific knowledge has been advancing at least as fast as climate change itself, but the enormous amount of new knowledge is staggering, and even though we still have a lot to learn, the science is clear - it's the communications that are unclear.

Climate change to our society today is as alien as the dark side of the moon. Climate change is not intuitive. We haven't done this before. We don't already know the answers. It's hard enough these days to believe what you can see.  We can't see the future. We can barely see the past, and our climate today has proceeded beyond it's limits from the past making the scientists job that much more difficult.

We Can Make a Difference
All is not lost - the sooner we act, the less we will have to adapt, it's very simple. Scientists are having a tough time communicating the facts of climate change to the public, so let's try letting an "applied scientist" do it for a while (that's what Webster's Dictionary calls an engineer.) Maybe an applied scientist can shed a little light on the topic.

We know more now than we did in the past - and what we know now tells us that we need to act fast to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Like I said before: I don't have funding yet,, so send money. I'm still working hard at my engineering business, and that's what pays the bills until I get funded. In the meantime I will be trying to put together three pilot shows in the best efforts of Les Shroud and the Discovery Channel's Survivor Man, Adam and Jamie at Myth busters, Mike Rowe at Dirty Jobs, James Burke and his series Connections, and a personal hero, Ken Burns. I have been to Greenland and Alaska and spent a week on a deserted Island. Climate change is happening across the globe - I will bring it to you first hand.

Let me be your climate guide. What this planet needs is a good TV show about climate change - one where the science is easy to understand and that has a lively pace and good Austin music: Adventure's with Climate Change or The Climate Change Reality Show - An Island With No Tribal Council or as I have titled my promotional video Climate Change Now.

Thanks - please tell your friends,




References:

(1) Hansen, et. al., Global Temperature Change, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, September 2006.