My Story

Studying climate papers in the academic journals was one of those professional bonuses that fell into my lap when I was doing stormwater treatment research for the EPA Clean Water Act in the early 1990s. I have always been fascinated by climate science and the advent of ice core work during this period was really changing our fundamental knowledge about Earth’s climate history. Very little of this knowledge was making it out into the public realm and the disconnection between climate science and the public was just as embarrassing then as it is today. It was not long before I decided to make climate science my life’s work.  

As a principal investigator for a million dollars in EPA Clean Water Act research in the early 1990s I was trained in science outreach. Photography and the emerging field of computer graphics were a key part of the training. It was clear that the greatest way to communicate complicated science was with images, color, and non-specialist language.  

Shortly after the turn of the century I began to really develop my expertise in climate science. By 2005 I was ready to write. My first book Earth at Risk: Abrupt Climate Change was a full color book about the latest findings in climate science. I landed Chelsea Green Publishing on my fifth query. They told me they really wanted to do the book and they wanted to do it in black and white because they had never done color before.  My vision remained steadfast;  my training in outreach had seemed so profound that I turned them down.  

There should have been no problem securing another publisher, or so I thought. Into the mail went another couple dozen queries and then my consulting business intervened to refill the bank account. About six months later I was rudely interrupted when the former Vice President published my book!  Al Gore had just published his “full color” An Inconvenient Truth. My model was confirmed, but my project was shattered. Of course he did not publish my book, but the former Vice President’s Oscar winning, Grammy winning, Nobel Peace Prize winning “full color” book (and film) were so similar to mine that I knew my project was simply obliterated.  

Ever the optimists, I turned to my photographic skills for a new hook. I picked up my cameras and went to Greenland, then Alaska and the Rockies, the desert and deserted barrier islands. The results were two full length documentaries. The Ice and the Sea is about sea level rise, Greenland, and the deserted barrier islands of the Texas Gulf Coast. What Have We Done is about the subcontinental scale pine beetle pandemic in the Rockies.  

But the tide had turned. A Conservative backlash followed Al’s success. A tsunami of anti-climate science rhetoric and authoritarianism was encouraged by the Bush Administration’s permission for American citizens to disregard climate science. Still my querying continued and my platform grew. My articles began to be picked up on investigative journals on the Internet—not only in the United States, but in languages that I could not even identify much less understand.  

Another wave was making itself apparent about this time.  Researchers I met in Greenland told me it started there in 2004. They called it “The Big Melt.“ Changes had begun to happen more rapidly and far ahead of projections. Not long after I returned from Greenland I became immensely overwhelmed at the incredible number of Oh-My-Goodness papers being published about these new changes taking place. I simply could not keep up. I started writing short summaries about each of these new papers that I discovered. They landed in journal format on my computer. Four or five months later, when I realized that this journal was an excellent resource for others, I put it on my website. Today it is called Climate Discovery Chronicles Breaking News and it has grown to over 135,000 words and about 120 topics.  

I was pushing my new hook: “climate changes happening now, far more extreme and far ahead of the consensus.” It was based on my Chronicles Breaking News Page. The scientific reasoning was simple. We were told that it was very important to start reducing emissions nearly twenty years ago or climate change impacts would happen sooner with more severity. We did not and they did.   

But the graffiti was already on the wall. The Bush Administration had given America permission to ignore climate science. We were the only country in the world except for Afghanistan and South Sudan to not sign Kyoto. The recession was in high gear and Conservatives were taking up all the headlines with other issues. Climate change had been no less important to Americans in decades. I was not going to get a publisher or an agent. Maybe 100 queries later, with only one or two fleeting nibbles, I discovered the 21st century technology of on-demand publishing.  

Once the domain of pricey “vanity” publishing agencies, a new powerhouse had emerged. A partnership between the biggest traditional publishing house in the world (Ingram) and an emerging player in the digital printing industry was taking book publishing beyond the 19th century. Half of the books sold on Amazon had been digitally printed, one at a time, by this new partnership called Lightning Source.

Lightning Source was no “vanity” publisher. Their clients were required to have a publishing business. Their technical standards were complex and exacting; their costumer support was nearly nonexistent. Revisions were expensive. But I did my due diligence, started another business, bought editing software and committed a hundreds of hours to yet another learning curve.  

The book is beautiful. It’s not like Al’s. It shows the reader the actual changes happening today; far greater than previously assumed, far faster than originally projected.  

Thousands and thousands of academic articles have submitted themselves to my scrutiny. Hundreds of emails to the publishing scientists have clarified my understanding of the esoteric details. Nearly a decade has gone into my academic evaluation of climate science for this Initiative and throughout, a pattern has emerged. This pattern is fundamental to the basic message that needs to be communicated about climate change:

Authoritative voices tell us climate change is not real, that it is a scientific conspiracy, that it is a natural cycle soon to end and that it will be good for society. These same voices, that are telling us all of these things at the same time, also tell us that the solutions to climate change will ruin our economies.                      

Climate scientists say nothing of the sort. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, one of the lead authors of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Report, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and one of the pivotal international researchers in climate science tells us in his book Earth the Operators Manual; about 100 reports have been published concerning the economic impacts of the solutions to climate change and they are focusing in on one thing.   

The solutions to fixing our climate will cost about one percent of global gross domestic product every year for 100 years. This may seem like a lot of money ($540 billion a year), but it needs to be taken in context. Professor Alley tells us that the cost and effort required to fix our climate will be no more than what has been spent across this planet in the last 100 years providing clean water across the planet.

It's no more than the U.S. Alone spends every year on it's military--not including wars. It is no more tha we spend across the globe everty year on advertising. It is no more than we lose every year in the U.S. to normal weather problems. It is no more than 25 percent of the average yearly cost of health care in the U.S. every year based on the average from 2000 to 2010.

Astoundingly, have any of these things really “cost” us that much? What economic benefits have arisen from each of these things? It's only pollution. Help us get on with it by taking a vocal and aggressive stance.

You see how bad it is in what I have to report from the research findings of some the smartest people in the world. You aslo see that the voices' propaganda is enourmously influential and dangerously risky. The message is real, the solutions are easy, and the science is sound. Tell your friends.  

My outreach can be found at: www.meltonengineering.com  

Bruce Melton PE
Austin, Texas

bmelton@earthlink.net