Melton Engineering’s efforts with climate change have allowed us to move to the leading edge of climate reform. We have 36 years of experience with engineering consulting, 30 years with critical environmental issues, and 15 years with climate science reporting, education, and policy development. Our president is also the director of the oldest independent climate science education organization in the world, the Climate Change Now Initiative. Through Climate Change Now, we have created a robust knowledge base on the most critical new climate science that gives us guidance in our advanced climate change consulting.

In 2018 our accomplishments advanced to international climate policy development through Melton’s volunteer efforts with Sierra Club’s new Climate Resilience, Carbon Dioxide Removal and Geoengineering policy suite to be released in early 2020.

Our mission is to ensure your safety, the safety of your organization and the safety of our world. Our expertise in earth sciences, hydrology, land development, and environmental advocacy, coupled with our deep understanding of climate science and climate policy, can ensure your entity is helping restore the climate our advanced civilization evolved with – not allowed to contimue warming with current 1.5 C policy. Our national stature in climate science education and policy can ensure that you can lead your organization into the future at the forefront of climate reform and restoration.

For 30 years we have attempted to address climate pollution through limiting future emissions. For 30 years we have failed to achieve any limits. In those thirty years, we have emitted as many greenhouse gases as we emitted in the previous 250 years. Now the dystopian climate change nightmares, we have been warned would occur if we did not act, have become a reality. More than half of known tipping points are now active and according to overt 13,000 scientists, not only are we in a climate emergency, but the tipping point activation could, as the scientists quote, “be responsible for making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.” To reverse the unrecoverable tipping point initiations, we must lower the global temperature to something lower than when the tipping points activate. Basically, there is no safe level of warming and all greenhouse gases past and future, must be removed from the sky or prevented from being emitted, energy as well as land use. This is total carbon responsibility.

For the last 30 years we have been responsible for our future carbon footprints. Today we are now responsible for our past carbon emissions as well as our future carbon footprints. Climate plans today know how to deal with the portion of our future footprints that we can reduce or eliminate via energy choices, efficiency, and land use greenhouse gas management strategies. Current climate plans also understand the offsets needed to deal with the portion of our future emissions that we cannot eliminate through low or zero carbon energy and etc. But future emissions are just a small portion of our carbon responsibility. Past emissions mitigation is a substantial undertaking that is simply not addressed in our climate culture today, or any climate plans that have been created under what is now a legacy climate culture.

We can help you identify and mitigate for your past carbon emissions, and plan for reducing and eliminating emissions in the future.

Climate change risk is not like normal risk. We have no experience with climate change. There is no history. No analog. We do not know how to behave. Uncontrolled, climate change results in the end of civilization as we know it. If this challenge were like the nuclear winter/end of civilization scenario, it would be easy and we would know exactly how to deal with it. But it is not. Our climate takes fifty years to come into equilibrium with greenhouse gas emissions. The end of civilization from climate change was caused by greenhouse gas emissions in the 1970s. If we ended all greenhouse gas emissions today, warming in the pipeline would be up to at least 1.5 C, and plausibly 3 C. Our society has no concept of actions from 50 years ago resulting in the end of civilization as we know it. The risks are simply greater than anything known.

Our consulting draws upon the two areas. One is leading edge climate science. It is important to understand that leading edge climate science is not consensus climate science. Statements of consensus organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) take from ten to twenty years to gain enough status to be accepted by the consensus. A single example is Antarctic ice loss. The 2007 IPCC Report said Antarctica would not begin to lose ice until after 2100. The 2013 IPCC Report said that Antarctica was now losing up to half the ice that Greenland was losing. The deal is, first publishing on Antarctic Ice loss was in 1996, with ice loss beginning earlier than 1994. It simply takes a decade or more for enough robustness in multiple lines of research to be developed so that a consensus can be formed,

We use critical recent science and expert judgement to interpret the most meaningful responses to issues related to climate change. One of our specialties is flooding, but this analogy can be made for most issues dealing with climate change. The statistics hydrologists generally use to evaluate trends are very poorly equipped to meaningfully relate the importance and risk of recently and rapidly changing trends. There are advanced statistical techniques that do a better job than traditional statistics, but these are not often used and subsequently, the results of findings using traditional statistics are understated. This is one of the main reasons why climate change impacts continue to be experienced far ahead of projections. The science upon which impacts are based is understated because of challenges in statistical evaluation with rapidly changing trends.

Our understanding of recent findings, and the expert judgement that we can bring to bear, give us confidence that our solutions are strong. they will stand the test of time because we use safety factors. Climate science, science in general, and consensus organization statements especially, DO NOT USE SAFETY FACTORS. This is an extremely important aspect about the climate science conundrum that must be understood.

The second resource area we draw upon is the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)  developed by the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), non-profit organisations that set voluntary financial reporting standards. But these are just the beginning. We also utilize the California Low Carbon fuels standards to understand permanence in sequestration.

Together, our expert knowledge and these new governance standards create climate change counsel that allows your entity to be at the top of their game, to be as responsible as possible in dealing with your climate pollution responsibility, and to help create and restored climate that removes climate pollution from our world so we can all be safe.