Films:

These are my films; written, filmed and produced by myself and scored by the band.

The Ice and the Sea (45 minutes)

Come camp with me at the edge of the Greenland Ice sheet and see "The Big Melt" for yourself. The latest discoveries form the new super sensitive gravity satellites show sea level rise acceleration is 0.08 to 0.09 mm per year, every year.  That's 25 times faster than the 20th century, and this acceleration is increasing. I'll tell you more about it when you accompany me in the film down the 62 mile long four wheel drive beach at Padre Island National Seashore. This film shows the rapidly accelerating ice melt and discharge in Greenland and cumulative sea level rise on Padre Island National Seashore - from some of my old historic photos and analysis of coastal process science.  Our beaches are almost gone. If you haven't been in a while, take yourself there soon.  It's amazing how small they have become so quickly.

What Have We Done (46 minutes)

(This is the 46 minute version of the film, I am still working on the full length cut. You can see the original 12-minute 2008 version here.) The astonishing forest die-off hitting the Rockies from warming induced bark beetle infestation has reached a critical level. The attack is 20 times larger than anything ever before experienced. In August 2009 I spent 19 days and 5,000 miles crisscrossing the high Rockies from New Mexico to Montana. Everywhere I went I found dead trees - more than I was expecting. And it is not just the pine beetle that is killing the forests of the Rockies.  Insects and disease are attacking these high altitude forest because, like the Arctic, climate change happens here first. Half the campgrounds I stayed in were clear cut because of falling tree hazards. Fifty two million acres have succumbed in North America by 2008. Eighteen million of the fifty two million acres were attacked in 2007 and 2008. Most of the trees in these forests will die in the next few years. The forest professionals see no reason why the pandemic will not spread continent wide. The US Forest Service says that all of the mature lodgepole forests in the US will be killed by 2013. This is 11% of the forests in the U.S. Rockies. The following report was written to support the short film I produced in 2008. It will be upgraded in the near future. (North America's Mountain Pine Beetle Pandemic)

The Fight For The Rio Tigre (18 minutes)

I have been fortunate enough to get a sponsorship to go to Costa Rica and help with a river mining issue at one of the most fabulous places on the planet.  Yes, river mining. They are taking the gravel out of the river for road and resort development.  This basically removes the river from its bed. This type of activity is extremely difficult to repair by man, and takes decades and even centuries for mother nature herself to repair.  There have been 28 recent applications for this kind of thing - across the entire river bed, for up to two kilometers per application.  The activity that I am focusing on is in SW Costa Rica on 12 different rivers. Now don't forget that Costa Rica packs a powerful ecological punch. Rainfall is extremely high and the mountains rise to 11,000 feet, so ecological diversity could be the highest on the planet. The area in SW Costa Rica where the mining is happening is only the size of the Houston metropolitan area, yet the Smithsonian Institute calls it the "single most important ecological area on the Pacific Coast of Central America".

Rio Tigre Supporting Report: In-stream gravel mining impacts and environmental degradation feedback associated with gravel mining on the Rio Tigre of the OSA Peninsula, Costa Rica, and the proposed ADI Jimenez Gravel Mining Concession An environmental impact summary and hydrographic analysis of the ADI Jimenez Gravel Mining Proposal Environmental Impact Statement link

Protest on the Osa Peninsula - this is becomign a big deal in Costa Rica (Link).

Melton, Cespedes Is Costa Rica Killing Its Rivers?. This is the extended version of the article Dr. Cespedes and I wrote for the Tico Times (below). 

Cespedes and Melton, Is Costa Rica Killing Its Rivers? Published in the Tico Times in Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica.

Jack Ewing, Owner of Hacienda Baru has written this piece for a local Costa Rican publication Domincal News: Has the Time Come to Say Goodbye to an Old Friend? about their endangered river otter threatened by five river mining applications on the Baru river about 30 miles north of the Osa Peninsula.

Warneke, Cespedes and Melton, To Kill, or Not To Kill the Rivers of a Precious Place, April 2010.

Riverbed Mining Destroying the Rivers and Wildlife of Osa Peninsula

Save the Rio Tigre! This is a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the AsCoDoBra RiTi (Associacion Conservacionista de Dos Brazos de Rio Tigre). This presentation has donation information as well as more specific details about the mining concessions.

Rio Tigre Website

New Essays

The Good News About Climate Change A Google Scholar search for "global warming" and or "climate change" for the year 1987 found 88 citations. The same search for the year 2007 found 8,010 citations. Between 1900 and WWII when antibiotics were invented, deaths from infection fell by 80%.  After antibiotic use became widespread during WWII, deaths from infection fell only another 15%.  It was the introduction of common knowledge hygiene practices based on infection prevention techniques that saved so many lives.

North America's Mountain Pine Beetle Pandemic -  Twenty seven million acres of trees have been killed in the Rockies in the last decade in an entirely unprecedented bark beetle attack, and hardly a soul has heard. The US Forest Service Incident Commander for the  beetle infestation says 1.5 million acres and 750 million trees have been killed in Colorado. That equals 13.5 billion trees so far in the pandemic.  In ten years the total will be 25 to 30 billion trees and climbing. This is climate change at it's most startling to date. Even more alarming, there are literally dozens of these insect infestations of lesser, but still astonishing scale, happening around the world as we speak. The film below  - What Have We Done? is a companion to this article.

Hurricanes and Climate Change: On the Ground In Galveston with Ike - a photo essay: I spent three nights in the deserted McDonald's parking lot on the edge of Stewart Beach during the mandatory evacuation...

Films and Videos

What Have We Done by Bruce Melton, P.E., 12 minutes - A short film about the greatest tree pandemic in North America in possibly 10,000 years.  It is happening now. Four hundred million trees are dead in the American Rockies.  Five billion trees are dead in British Columbia - and this is ongoing.  This is what the scientists have been warning us about when they said that insect infestation would increase in a warmer world.

Climate Change Now: Abrupt Climate Change is Here by Bruce Melton, P.E., 26 minutes - This is the sample video for my documentary.  This piece takes the viewer to Greenland to see just how extreme the melt is, from ice cap stability to melt of over 30 vertical feet per year in just one season. At the flick of an imaginary switch, Point 660 and many, many other places in Greenland went from stable ice states to rapidly melting ice places. This happened in 2004. In 2007, over 100 vertical feet had melted, and 2007 saw the greatest melt season recorded in history, shattering the previous record by 12%. This is a new version of the film sample that I completed for the Sundance deadline in early July.  This version has an introduction that includes Dr. Amundson's time motion study of the Jakobshavn Glacier in a very substantial calving event and a final sequence at the coast showing the substantial sea level rise that has taken place there since the Big Melt began.

Time Lapse of accelerated ice discharge from the Ilulissat Ice Fjord, Ilulissat Greenland Courtesy Dr. David Holland, Director of the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science, University of New York

Dr. Holland's Ice Sheet Cam http://efdl.cims.nyu.edu/index.html

Time lapse of the Jakobshavn Glacier calving (extreme), Ilullssat, Greenland: Courtesy Dr. Jason Amundson, Geophysical Institute, University of Fairbanks, Alaska

Extreme Climate Change Montage This is just a quick montage of a number of different videos that I have accumulated from different scientists that I needed to  put together for a television interview. The methane seeps burning on the frozen Alaskan lake are courtesy Dr. Katey Walters, University of Fairbanks, AK. The others are referenced elsewhere on this site.

Notes From Bruce:

January 20, 2010 

McDonald's sells 2.3 billion burgers a year - you think we can't change the world's climate? How do we (the science guys) get it through to the public's and our leader's brains that this is real, it is deadly serious, it is happening now and it is happening faster and with greater consequences than was projected just a few years ago! In three years, seas level rise will cross the barrier island and coastal wetlands disintegration threshold says the EPA, USGS and NOAA. When sea level rise hits 7 mm per year, our barrier islands and coastal wetlands will begin to disappear. This will happen in 2012.

In the Rockies, 52 million acres of trees have been killed by just one of over a dozen major insect infestations and diseases and the pandemic is accelerating. The largest previous infestation like was 3 million acres, it ended just after the turn of the century and it took a decade to kill those 3 million acres. In 2008, 18 million of those 52 million acres were killed. The CO2 emitted from these dead forests, not absorbed like forests are supposed to do, is approximately equal to all of the emissions from Canada's entire transportation fleet and these dead forests will continue to emit these GHGs for 20 years.  The study  that discovered this, done by the Canadian Forest Service, did not take into account the massive carbon stored in the ground in our northern forests. Tropical forests are exactly the opposite. The climate of the north promotes massive storage of organic material underground, many times what is stored in the trees, and in the case of permafrost, often a hundred times more than is stored in the forest. Forest professionals in 2009 started publicly stating that they see no reason why the pandemic would spread continent wide in the not too distant future.

When the forest dies, sunlight reaches the forest floor. The environment of the forest becomes vastly different. The soil dries and carbon is releases. The soil warms and permafrost melts. When a northern forest ecosystem changes like this a significant portion of the carbon in the soils is almost immediately released. The Canadian forests service study did not include this soil carbon in their analysis. The scientists analyzing the soil carbon in late 2009 say that it is likely that the carbon release will likely be at least two to three times greater than expected.

The tree killing pandemics are increasing, the warming will not stop. The scientists projections these days are almost entirely conservative. We have crossed a climate threshold.

We can do something about the climate crisis, but we will have to start spending money on our environment like we have been spending on our institutions that are too big to fail because, our Earth is too big to fail.

January 26, 2009

Nope, sorry, it keeps getting worse. it will take our climate 1,000 years to stabilize. See the entry from Breaking News for today's date. The one most important thing we can do is to start taking some of the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere back out again.

At least we have a start. Obama. Yes we can.

It is unperceivable that we have had, for the last eight years, in the greatest country ever known, a leader who did not believe in science.

The thirty year climate lag has triggered the  feedback mechanisms. But the scientists now know enough to start publishing what they have known were the answers for some time now.

We can do this. It will take a lot of money and a lot heart. A lot more heart than this world has right now.  The risks are not perceived. There is no judgment day.

October 20, 2008

The thing to remember about climate change is that - it doesn't get any better and it keeps getting worse faster. Once we have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions to about the same levels that we had sometimes in the early 20th century - about 1930 - then it will take 30 years for our climate to stabilize. 

The good news is the new knowledge that has come about recently in the field of climate science. In 1987, Google Scholar listed 88 academic citations for the search terms "global warming" and or "climate change". In 2007, they listed 8,010. That's an increase of 25% per year or a total increase of almost 10,000 percent! All of this knowledge is the good news today - it just has to be interpreted from the language of science into English. This is an extraordinarily good thing because, now we know what is broken. We know what to do to fix things -  or at least to keep them from getting worse than they are already going to be.

The key is new knowledge. There is a societal response to new knowledge that is almost overwhelming.  What I mean is - that society, all by itself, goes a long way towards solving problems, towards meeting challenges,- without technical innovations.  All that is needed is the knowledge that something is so, that a reality is true, that a cause and response exists and that the response can be modified for the better.  An example is the discovery of hygiene practices about the turn of the 20th century.  These are ordinary practices that we take for granted today - the benefits of clean water (don't put the privy next to the water well), proper wastewater disposal (don't let it run down the street), appropriate food handling techniques, appropriate food prep and food storage techniques (cleanliness and temperature), the cleaning and proper care of skin wounds, etc. etc.

Between 1900 and 1940, deaths from bacterial infection fell 80% because of the widespread acceptance of proper hygiene practices.  During the early part of WWII, antibiotics were invented. After the invention of antibiotics, deaths from infection fell only another 15% to where they are today. This is a colossal example of how knowledge alone changed the world  through common everyday tasks.

We have the knowledge today to fix our climate. We may have to undergo another 30 years of worsening climate before it starts to get better, but the good news is - it can get better in 30 years if we act now.

What do we do?  We know what to do already. We have been gaining this knowledge since the beginning of the Environmental Revolution in the early 1970s.

The most important things we can do (in this order):

Tell your friends about abrupt climate change.
Vote for the strongest environmentally candidate available - nothing else matters.
Do what we already know to do to be green.
When something or someone is being wasteful, no matter how small or how large, speak up (be nice), and then if you can, try and think of a new solution that is better than the old solution.

Bruce

October 15, 2008

I read back on these notes and think "Gee whiz this seems alarmist! Where#39;s the good news?" I have a radio interview a few days before Halloween at the local college radio station (KOOP Radio). The interview is on a show called "Good News". The great challenge is to communicate the good news, to communicate that we know what the problem is now so we can more intelligently address the issues. I will be working on an essay with the strange title "The Good News About Climate Change", but for now I need to mention a few things. 

The alarmist label placed on climate scientists is conservative.  What should be said about the alarming statements coming from academia is more like "cataclysmic". Take for example my extreme statements below about the great mountain pine beetle pandemic.  What I have not mentioned is that these forests may not grow back.  For many of the same reason that the beetles are attacking trees at higher altitudes and higher latitudes than ever before, what grows back in the place of these forests will quite likely have a different species assemblage - that is: a different kind of ecosystem will replace the one that has been killed.

One of the most important reasons that the beetles are killing all of these trees is because the climate is now warmer and drier than it was a couple of decades ago. The beetles like that, and the trees don't. These forests like the cold. They grew up in a cold world. The trees have to have the cold to survive.

The trees that are being killed by the beetles don't grow at lower altitudes in warmer areas because they can't survive.  As the mountains and the sub Arctic continue to warm at a much faster rate than the rest of the world, many of the forests that can only survive in the ultra cold areas at the tops of the mountains and at the ends of the Earth will not longer have a place to live. It will become too warm.

In some places fir trees and other, lower altitude trees capable of living in warmer environments will take over. Some places may see even warmer climate loving oaks growing where once only the high altitude spruces and pines grew, and in others, especially as time progresses and the mountains and the sub Arctic warm even more, grasslands may become the predominant vegetation type where there were once cold weather forests.

What does this mean?  It means that the news is even more alarming as we come to understand the extent of the problem.  Our Earth has had a very stable climate for thousands of years. Today our climate is as warm as or very nearly as warm as it has been in 100,000 years.

The good news?  I didn't even mention the negative feedback effects of less rainfall because of fewer trees - yes, the rainforest effect.  It works with forests of all kinds - it is just more pronounced in the rain forest.

Tell your friends - we can do something about this before it gets worse - and it can certainly get worse.  And don't forget to vote the environmental ticket - it's the only issue that matters.

Bruce

 September 3, 2008

The note below is to a colleague. She had just viewed What Have We Done? and was depressed, so what did I do - of course I proceeded to depress here wildly beyond her belief...  Climate change is devastating. The death of our northern forests may be the first extreme example of the devastation that climate change is capable of.   This is not alarmism, this is true alarm.  The death of 27 million acres of trees from the mountain pine beetle pandemic in the Rockies is "very likely" and with a "high degree of confidence", as the IPCC puts it, because of climate change.

The good news?  We know now, with ever greater certainty, that the time to act is now and that our actions must be extraordinary.

Dear Ms. ----:

Sad now, astonishingly devastating in a decade.  Next year it gets even worse - and then worse and worse.  It does not get better. This is what is meant by irreversible, unstoppable.  This is our climate change as we know it today.  We - the scientists.  These are the effects of the insect infestations that academia has been warning us about.  Before I became so involved, I always thought they meant more mosquitoes.

We tried to tell the people about it before the forests were killed.  There are still plenty of trees in Colorado, for now.  And the good news is that the trees will grow back.  The beach will not grow back.  Sea level rise has increased too rapidly to sustain significant beaches.  In the future the rise rate will double and then double again until some two or three decades after we reduce CO2 emissions below 1990 levels.  Climate runs behind mankind.  We are changing the atmosphere too rapidly for it to keep up.  I grew up a beach bum.  We have lost 90% of our beaches - those non artificially nourished beaches.  Some of this loss is because of beach erosion caused by man's lakes trapping all the sand before it gets to the sea.  However between 1990 and 2000, sea level rise doubled, and between 2000 and 2006 it doubled again.

In the past, sea level rise has been 2 feet per decade when planetary ice was melting fast.  The good news is that we have a lot less ice on the planet now than at the peak of the ice ages. However, greenhouse gas concentrations and their rate of increase are far, far higher today than at any time in the last 3 to 30 million years.  There is still over 200 feet of sea level rise in Greenland and Antarctic ice. The last time the Earth was as warm (2 to 3 degrees C warmer than today) as the greatest scientific body of all time (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicts it will be in the year 2100, there was no ice on the planet and sea level was 200 feet higher.  The last time it was as warm as the IPCC predicts it will be by 2050, one degree C warmer than today, 1.8 degrees F, sea level was 80 feet higher.  These two things last happened 3 million and 125,000 years ago.

Aye, depressing, but not near as depressing as it is going to be, and whenever I say things like this people just look at me and stare. Yes it is unbelievable, but isn't the death of all those trees in Colorado unbelievable? Is it truly going to take cataclysmic destruction to get society's attention?

GOOD NEWS IS:  We can do something about it.  As bad as it will get, it can always get worse.  There is an enormous amount of information available. Start with my website.  I have 13 or more essays and four chapters to a book.  My 26 minute documentary sample is depressing too.  Then tell your friends.  Research on your own.  Google James Hansen, read the papers on his website - he's an easy to read scientist and the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies: the US climate modeling agency.  And finally - completely ignore the contrarians.  There are so few of them anymore that you could stand them all inside a bathtub.  They are significantly funded by the coal and oil industry, or they are dinosaurs.  It's not even fair to say anymore that the vast majority of scientists believe the numbers are so much bigger... They all do - the naysayers are just so much scientific detritus, they don't matter anymore.

Today the buzz is not about global warming, it is not about climate change, it is about climate crisis. This is the story of our time, the story of the future. The only story that matters. So tell your friends.  Make every effort you can to do everything about it you can because, like the dying forests of the north, it will change the Earth, and the myth that a warmer world is a better world is just that, a myth, a cataclysmic, Earth changing myth.

Bruce.

July 21, 2008

The scientists are saying "surprising and unexpectedly" way too often lately. I have just returned for a scouting trip to the Rockies to look at the pine bark beetle pandemic there and was astonished at how surprising and unexpected the outbreak is.  I have created a short film to show the devastation - it's linked above.

My third generation sample is posted now - much better than the second generation.  I am talking to Sundance about funding, got an application in and they have asked for supplemental material. Wish me luck.

Here's a note I wrote to a friend when asked "Where's the water for this sea level rise going to come from?"

Twenty feet of sea level rise is in Greenland, 180 feet is in Antarctica.  What remains of our mountain glaciers is too little to worry about.  Greenland's ice discharge doubled from 1990 to 2000.  It doubled again from 2000 to about 2005 - the latest data we have (science takes 3 to 5  years to go from grant application to published journal article). Antarctica was considered to be an ice-stable place, or even a slightly gaining ice mass until just recently.  New satellites that are 100 times more accurate than the previous gravimetric satellites and new analytical techniques have now shown us definitively that over the last 10 years, Antarctic has gone for "zero" ice loss to losing as much ice as Greenland does every year. 

So, sea level rise has increased proportionately.  Twenty years ago it was assumed that it would take 10,000 years for Greenland to substantially melt.  Then at the end of the 20th century, after Greenland's ice cap started discharging so rapidly, scientists reevaluated their projections and said that the Greenland Ice Cap could melt within a couple thousand years. Now the really scary part:  Icequakes! A little thought and anyone would say - oh sure, icequakes - big cracks in the ice cap right?  Nope.  Huge icequakes  - relative to the common ice cap cracking type, were recently discovered coming from Greenland.  Previous icequakes have all been below 2.7 Richter magnitude and last for one or two seconds.  Beginning about 1990, huge icequakes registering 4.7 to 5.1 Richter Magnitude and lasting 90 to 150 seconds started to occur.  It is speculated that these quakes are being caused as large areas of the ice cap slip on cushions of water that are a result of surface melt translated to the bottom of the ice cap through cracks and fissures.  These ice quakes have about mirrored Greenland's ice discharge - doubling from 1990 to 2000 and then doubling again by about 2005.  Sure enough, Swiss Camp, about 100 kilometers from the central west coast of Greenland has experience the ice cap there increasing in altitude up to two feet during periods of heavy melt during the summer melt season.  Nineteen years ago, when Swiss Camp was founded, it never melted during the summer - it was always below freezing. So now ice discharging Greenland, between 2000 and 2005, has doubled again (Science is slow - 2005 is the latest we have data for - it takes 3 to 5 years to get from the grant writing phase to the academically published stage).

And then there's Antarctica's West Antarctic Ice Sheet.  It is a marine ice sheet left over after the end of the last ice age. It's the last of it's kind and the only one we have ever seen as humans. We do know that marine ice sheets are inherently unstable.  This one is 10,000 feet thick, extends below sea level for half of that thickness and has a warming ocean current beneath it. It is not an ice shelf because it is held up by mountains that pin it in place.  Like the Wilkin's ice shelf - the WAIS is eroding from beneath.  We don't know when it will collapse, but we do know that like the Wilkin's and the Larson B in 2003 - These kind of shelf disintegration's can be exceedingly massive and abrupt.  The risk of instantaneous multi-meter sea level rise is quite real.

 

June 15, 2008

The North American land temperature has definitely had an effect on Global temps.  May was the 35th coldest in the U.S. Along with the rest of the relatively cold temps last winter and this spring, North America has almost single handedly brought the global temps down to 14th warmest.  But you couldn't tell it here in Austin.  This winter was in the top 4 to 5 warmest we have ever seen.  This summer, which starts here in Austin in April, is on track to be the warmest ever. We have had above normal temps 28 days in a row, the average May temp is running over 8.7 degrees above normal with an average temperature for May of 88.5 degrees.  It's 91 degrees and almost 10 pm as I write.  We have had 11 days with temps at 100 degrees or higher.  An average year in Austin sees 11 days total with the temps 100 degrees or higher and the first day of summer is still 4 days away. 

What's going on? The climate models project this kind of thing. Some areas will have extremely differing climate patterns as the planet warms.  An extreme example of this was just last year in Austin. We saw the wettest January through July ever recorded last year, and with the warm winter and extremely hot summer so far  this year we could certainly be setting some significant records this year.

And despite the cool temps in North America, Arctic sea-ice is poised for a new record and temps across most of the rest of the planet are nowhere near normal.  See more at the Breaking News link above.


May 23, 2008

Padre Island National Seashore trip:  Lots of good footage and self interviews, lots of good stills. Made it to mile 44, no turtles, lots of USFWS cute turtle biologists (endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtle). Camped at Mile 25 at the big sand dune. The tide was very high again (for the third trip in the last 8 months - don't know what it's been between).  Sea level rise is accelerating.  I have decided after the last three trips that I will make a big deal out of accelerating sea level rise in the documentary.  Ice melt has doubled in the decade preceding about 2003 or 2004. Then once we crossed the climate threshold at about the 2003 / 2004 time period, climate change accelerated again, in the case of ice melt:  many, many scientist are concerned that this increase has been an order of magnitude or 10 times faster than before! This is just like what Dr. Fahnstock told me in Ilulissat. These science guys speak more freely in-person.  In their papers, they say what academia will accept, and caveat the rest.

So the dotted line left unconnected is that rapidly accelerating ice melt leads directly and dynamically to rapidly accelerating sea level rise.  The ice melt phenomena is all over academia, the dynamically associated sea level rise phenomena has just barely been touched.  Why?  Beats me.  But science doesn't just happen overnight.  A need must be identified, funding found, data collected, papers written, peers reviewed, and finally 3 to 5 months later, after comments from peer review are complete - the paper is published.  This is a two year minimum process, often a five year process. 

Here on the Texas Coast, everyone is wondering "Where'd the beach go all of the sudden?"   This is not a "natural tidal fluctuation" this time.  This is not long term beach erosion - beaches were much larger than they are now just two years ago.  We have identified the need.  This will be news in a year or two or three, depending on when the latest studies actually were started. 

Sea level change for the 20th century averaged about 1.4 mm per year.  It increased 1990 to 2000 to 2.4 mm per year.  In 2005 it had increased again to 3.5 mm per year. 2003 / 2004 was when we crossed the "abrupt climate change threshold".   Today?  We have to wait till the science is done.

So - go the beach!  What we once new as the beach is gone, but a little piece of it is still there for now.




May 2008

There is an extraordinary amount of new information about climate change being released these days.

• Our carbon emissions are much higher than previously thought,

• Frozen methane on the Arctic ocean floor is starting to melt,

• The Antarctic is melting, not cooling,

• Methane clathrates in the Arctic sea have started to melt,

•  Methane emissions have spiked after being stable for nearly a decade,

• Insect infestations are unprecedented in North American forests,

• 100-year record snows in China have been replaced by all-time record March warmth, Greenland melt continues to accelerate.

Methane clathrates frozen methane on the ocean floor on the shores of the Arctic Ocean: could be released catastrophically, there's a huge reservoir of free gas locked beneath permafrost beneath the ocean, frozen there since the last ice age.  There is about 1,000 gigatons of methane up there; about a third is free gas.  Our 6 billion people produce 5 - 7 gigatons of methane per year.  Methane is 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.