Climate change researcher and Rag Radio environmental reporter Bruce Melton is Thorne Dreyer‘s guest on Rag Radio, joining us live from Yosemite National Park (actually from Fresno, where he could get cell phone service). Melton is on a marathon environmental research expedition that is taking him all the way to the Arctic Ocean. We discuss what he’s learning on his trip, including about unprecedented mudslides in Ventura and Santa Barbara, California, which he says have “canary in a coal mine” implications, and he will report on desert plant mortality and other impacts from climate change in the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts – and a beetle kill leading all the way to Alaska.
We also talk about Bruce’s article posted at The Rag Blog in which he informs us that Alaska has now “flipped from a carbon sink to a carbon source,” because of unprecedented permafrost melt.
Bruce Melton, a longtime contributor to The Rag Blog and guest on Rag Radio, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, author, and CEO of the Climate Change Now Initiative in Austin, Texas — the oldest, independent climate science education organization in the world, founded in 2005. The Climate Change Now Initiative is a nonprofit outreach organization reporting the latest discoveries in climate science in plain English, using global warming psychology to communicate this new science on the right side of the brain. The Initiative’s science reporting, films, music, and images of climate impacts happening now can be found at ClimateDiscovery.org.