Bruce Melton is a registered professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker, front man for the band Climate Change, slammin harp player and climate science outreach specialist. He’s also a naturalist, professional photographer and climate change adventurer.
Melton founded the Climate Change Now Initiative in 2005–the year that former vice President Al Gore stole his first book (he did not). Melton had a publisher for his book (Chelsea Green) who had never done color before. It was a full color book on the most recent climate science, written in plain English, but most importantly, it was the first full color book on climate change. When Chelsea Green wouldn’t do color, Melton turned them down. He had learned from his EPA stormwater treatment research that complicated science outreach must be presented with color, or the learning experience is greatly encumbered.
He had to do some engineering to make money to pay for the climate science reporting while more publishers reviewed his book query. A couple of months later Al Gore published An Inconvenient Truth–a full color book on the latest climate science. The two books were so similar that Melton knew his project was finished, but at least the former Vice President had proven the concept. Bruce needed a new hook. So he picked up his cameras and went to Greenland, the Rockies, Alaska and deserted barrier islands on the Gulf of Mexico.
Another of the important things that he had learned from his outreach training was that reality rocks. His new hook was to bring images of climate changes happening now to the people and show them with their own eyes what was real.
He has now written over 400 reports on the latest discoveries in climate science from the scholarly literature for his nonprofit www.ClimateDiscovery.com. He has also published a book about climate changes happening now, written about 50 popular articles on climate and filmed and produced two documentaries.
The Initiative went nonprofit in July 2013. A large part of its focus is the new field of global warming psychology. This field is so important that the Initiative’s first forum was based on the communications disconnection between climate scientists and the public.
Texas A&M is where he earned his bachelors and the engineering work that Melton has done has focused on normal land development projects with critical environmental issues, marinas, water and wasetewater infrastructure and transportation. He has permitted too many projects to recall and worked for the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) writing permits for land development as well.
The LCRA is where he did his research—a million dollars’ worth of EPA Clean Water Act and Texas Water Development Board stormwater pollution treatment research.
*** He spent three weeks reviewing a Spanish Environmental Impact Statement for in-stream gravel mining proposal, three river crossings beyond the end of the road on the frontier in Costa Rica.
*** His most outrageous trip was a 7,500 mile 23 day scouting expedition for his pine beetle documentary that went from Austin to Prince George, British Columbia and back that included crossing the continental divide 14 times, 21 camps, and the inspection of 19 national forests and 6 national parks. Greenland was intense, but this was beyond intense! This trip averaged about 350 miles per day in his modified four-wheel drive suburban his environmental colleagues rightfully call “The Ice Melter.”
*** He climbed for years and windsurfed too. His favorite leisure pastimes include crawl caves in the Edwards Aquifer in Austin on a scorching summer days, camping on deserted barrier islands for a week at a time from his homemade wooden flats boat, sight fishing for reds from the poling platform atop that same little boat lovingly called “Woody,” or tying flies and wrapping rods to fish for rare trout in the Rockies, and of course, four-wheeling whenever and wherever he can find a trail.
***He’s camped in the Rockies in winter, stopped counting trips to the Rockies after 50, stopped counting climbing trips after 100 and never attempted to count trips to the beach.
Melton’s band (called Climate Change of course) meets every Friday night for what they try and call rehearsal but they only play a few gigs a year for worthwhile causes; and they score Melton’s films of course. Practice starts at seven. The band usually shows by 7:30. Drop by if you are in the area.
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An underground river emerges from beneath the dirty ice sheet at Point 660 near Kangerlussuaq on the west coast of Greenland. The dirtiest ice, the lower part of the ice sheet closest to the ground, represents ice that did not melt during the interglacial before-last, 100,000 years ago, or even earlier interglacials. The cleaner ice above has accumulated in the last 100,000 years, or since the ice last melted to where the dirtiest ice is today. It is also enlightening to note that the medial moraine (the giant pile of rocks and gravel in the middle ground) is sitting on top of the dirtiest ice–meaning that this massive pile of glacial debris was deposited since the ice sheet melted to it’s greatest extents hundreds of thousands of years ago. The last “Big Melt” was about 450,000 years ago.