December 7, 2010 - Elected to Austin Region Sierra Club Executive Committee.
December 3, 2010 - General climate change presentation to the City of Austin Environmental, engineering and site plan review teams. This was the first time in something like twenty years that a land development consultant had been invited to attend this weekly meeting.
November 7, 2010 - Climate Change played our fifth year in a row for the Austin Buddhist Society annual picnic at Zilker Park. About 100 attended.
October 15, 2010 Sierra Club film Toxic Coal Ash completed. Public Hearing in Dallas and all day festivities during a tropical storm.
October 8, 2010 Sierra Club and University of Texas film Hook the Vote for voter registration. Filming at voter registration concert, interviewed State Rep Lloyd Doggett.
August 15 to September 8 - Film production for new pine beetle movie - The Sky is a Time Bomb. 7,500 miles in 23 days across the Rocky Mountains to Prince George, British Columbia. Fourteen Continental Divide Crossings, 19 camps and filming in 17 National and Provincial Forests and 6 National Parks.
August 8, 2010 - Sierra Club teaser film for Toxic Coal Ash. Two interviews in Central Texas and Broll You Tube film.
July 20, 2010 Film Screening and Lecture at REI Austin, Lamar Street. The Ice and the Sea, 7 to 9:30 pm.
July 27, 2010 Film Screening and Lecture at REI Austin, Lamar Street. What Have We Done, 7 to 9:30 pm.
June 27, 2010 - Sierra Club film Dirty Tar Sands. You Tube film from Broll and a public hearing in Houston.
June 15, 2010 Co-authored an article on in-stream gravel mining in Costa Rica with Gene Warneke for the new online magazine Neotropica.
May 28, 2010 - I published my essay Bad Planning or Magnificent Deceit on the Austin Bulldog. This essay is about Austin's Metropolitan Transportation Authority's new Transportation Plan.
April 6, 2010 - Screened new reproduced film What Have We Done for the Central Texas Region Sierra Club.
April 1, 2010 - Published Extreme Heat in the Austin Bulldog - cross posted on the Rag Blog. This essay is about impacts from climate change published in a mega-report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The report was published in July 2009. The program was founded by President Reagan.
February 13, 2010 - General climate change lecture at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Austin.
Austin Sierran, Think Traffic is Getting Worse? -
Think Again, November 2009
November 3, 2009 Published an article with Dr. Carol Cespedes about in-stream mining in Costa Rica.
October 29, 2009 KOOP Radio (91.7 FM), The Good News Show with Rosina Newton. I played another new song again, but I was unable to record the interview and can't remember the song...
September 28, 2009 Showed my new film "Fight for the Rio Tigre" to Save Barton Creek Association. This film is about the devastating effects of ongoing in-stream gravel mining of rivers on the Osa peninsula on the frontiera of Costa Rica.
March 9, 2009 Good News Interview KOOP Radio 91.7 FM - played a new song - Long Time Ago. Good News Pledge Drive Koop Radio University of Texas 030909
February 18, 2009 - Austin Central Presbyterian Church presentation.
January 2, 2009 - Radio Interview KVRX Austin, Aired some of the Bands recent climate change songs. In the Know KVRX University of Texas Radio 012809
January 17, 2009 - Jim Paul Miller Bluegrass Festival, Garland, Texas - debuted two new original climate change tunes.
January 15, 2009 - Channel Austin (Time Warner Ch 4). Austin News Real with Pam and Steffan Thompson, interview, film - The Ice and the Sea (second half), also discussed Dr. Katy Walter's work, permafrost specialist, University of Fairbanks. Live music in Austin, Texas: Debuted the songs "We Already Know What To Do" and "Kilimanjaro".
January 8, 2009 - Channel Austin (Time Warner Ch 4). Austin News Real with Pam and Steffan Thompson, interview, film - The Ice and the Sea (first half) The "Big Melt" (as the scientists call it) in Greenland and the relationship of ice loss in polar regions to rapidly accelerating sea level rise. Live music in Austin, Texas - debuted the song "Black Cadillac".
December 4, 2008 - Channel Austin (Time Warner Ch 10). Austin News Real with Pam and Steffan Thompson: Interview, film - What Have We Done? - The Great North American Pine Beetle Pandemic. A discussion often academic finding of the unprecedented and ongoing climate change induced forest die-off in the Rocky Mountains. Live music in Austin, Texas: "A Hundred and Four", "We Got the Climate Change" (debut) and "Ocean of Air" (debut).
November 24, 2008 - Save Barton Creek Association Annual Holiday Dinner: Debuted the film What Have We Done?
November 3, 2008 - KOOP Radio (91.7 FM), The Good News Show with Rosina Newton: Climate change discussion and live music in Austin, Texas: debuted the songs "Beaches Decree" and "What Have We Done?". Good News Scary Halloween Edition Part 2 Koop Radio University of Texas 11/03/08
October 27, 2008 - KOOP Radio
(91.7 FM), The Good News Show with Rosina Newton: Climate change
discussion and live music in Austin, Texas: debuted my song "A Hundred
and Four".
Good News Scary Halloween Edition
Koop
Radio University of Texas 10/27/08
October 17, 2008 - SGI, Austin Area Buddhists Association
Picnic, Zilker Park. This was our 3rd SGI Picnic. May 18, 2008 Climate change presentation to the
Central Texas Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists.
Bruce Melton on Ice, Oak Hill Adventurer Explores
Greenland, December 2007
Heroes of Climate Change, The Good Life July 2007 Abrupt Climate Change And Transpiration Planning Newsletter 2006 and 2007: Fix290.org Throughout this period I was a key leader and the
volunteer engineer and environmental specialist for this Community
advocacy group: www.Fix290.org
Throughout this period and into 2009 I performed hundreds and hundreds
(thousands really) of hours of volunteer work, researching, writing
reports, lobbying local state and federal officials, and playing a
pivotal leadership and technical expert role in a public information
campaign. The goal of the group was not to stop the construction of a
12-lane elevated tollway through the small Austin Suburb of Oak Hill
where I live, but to show that such a tremendous increase in paved area,
beyond our existing four lane road, was entirely unnecessary. I gave
presentations at literally dozens of public meetings and even
participated in a marathon seven session public dispute resolution
committee, sponsored by State Senator Kirk Watson, and mediated by the
University of Texas, LBJ School of Public Affairs, Center for Public
Policy Dispute Resolution. During this period I also published a number
of letters and articles in the Oak Hill Gazette as well as provided even
more comments to their journalism team. The project is ongoing, but the
Texas Department of Transportation has been instructed by the Federal
Highway administration to redo their Environmental Impact Statement, in
part because of work by Fix290.org. SH45 Work: This is another community and environmental advocacy
campaign that I have been pursuing similar to the FIX290.org campaign
only it revolves around another of TxDOT's proposed roads over an
environmentally sensitive area know as the Edwards Aquifer Recharge
Zone. I have worked with the Save Barton Creek Association and the Save
Our Springs Coalition, two long-lived and prominent environmental
organizations in Austin. This work likewise entailed not only research
and report writing, but additional lobbying of Council persons and
County commissioners. This effort also had a marathon committee effort.
I was actually able to retain a small reimbursement fro SOS and SBCA for
a small amount of my efforts with this issue. About the background image: This is an exceptionally tall iceberg in the Ilulissat
Ice Fjord. "Normal" icebergs here are about 200 feet tall.
This one could be 400 feet. Iceberg production in the Jakobshaven Isbrae
(Ilulissat Ice Fjord) has doubled as the "Big Melt" has
progressed. Actually the scientists, in their conservative ways, say
that ice melt, or ice melt and discharge of icebergs, has only doubled.
The most recent papers actually show a tripling or even a quadrupling -
but not long-term statistics are still not robustly identifiable as
such. This is how conservative the science works. It is like the
continued chant from scientists and skeptics, government officials and
contrarians back in the 1980s and 1990s. They said that it would be
twenty or thirty years before there was enough data to say for sure that
our climate is changing. So twenty or thirty years has elapsed and
the scientist now say that our climate is changing even more than the
originally expected. But here's the catch-22. The scientists can not
say, at least in their scholarly publications, what is oh-so obvious
with polar ice melt and oh-so likely to be proven statistically in the
near future (so that it can be published in those peer reviewed
scholarly journals). The "Big Melt" started in the late 1990s. It
has not been twenty or thirty years yet... As a blisteringly frightening
example: I recently talked with one of the scientists that I
interviewed in Greenland in 2007. I had found a previously forgotten
quote that appeared to be from him (in my old notes from my trip) and I
wanted to confirm. The quote was "Climate change is proceeding ten times
faster than we (the climate scientists) had predicted". The scientist
making this quote is Dr. Konrad Steffen, Director of the Cooperative
Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the
University of Colorado Boulder. When he returned my email he said he was
sitting in the same hotel that I had interviewed him (the Hvide Faulk).
He had just completed a month-long field session at Camp Swiss, up on
the ice sheet. Dr. Steffen founded Camp Swiss in 1990 - this is one of
those very important ice stations in Greenland. His email confirmed that
he remembered me and our interview, and that indeed, he had made this
quote to me and climate change was in his opinion progressing ten times
faster than predicted... I have been analyzing academic papers on
climate change that talk about an order of magnitude of change, or even
two or more orders of magnitude in lcimate change papers for a long
time. Our climate is actually changing torders of magnitude faster, or
more, than it has in millions of years. One order of magnitude is twice
as fast, two orders is one-hundred times as fast, three is one-thousand
times, etc. I have been dealing with these big numbers now for over a
decade and I have become jaded as to the significance of the concept of
Ten Times Faster. So to help myself understand the true meaning of Dr.
Steffen's quote, I compared one order of magnitude of change (ten times
faster) to something I was familiar with. This comparison has allowed me
to see the profound nature of what Dr. Steffen said . . . . So how
much faster is ten times faster? It is as if one's average life
expectancy of 77.7 years was condensed down to 8 years and 3 months . .
. In this abbreviated world - this ten times faster world - we would
graduate from high school at the age of 21 months, become middle-aged at
5 years and retire at 6 years and 7 months.
CIRES - Cooperative Institute for
Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado,
Boulder Mankind's CO2 emissions today are happening four
orders of magnitude faster today than they have at any time in the last
65 million years - since the dinosaurs went extinct when the giant
asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. That's 10,000 times faster. The
reason temperature is not changing as fast is the great immensity of the
heat absorption capacity of our oceans. (link,
link)
October 2007
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