About

Climate Change Photography

This site is a part of the Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3; the oldest independent climate science education organization in the world. Our base camp website is ClimateDiscovery.org.

ClimateChangePhoto.org is:

1. An outreach mechanism where stories and images are used to educate and create motivation for action.
2. Art photography sales for revenue generation for the nonprofit Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3.

The images on this site are of climate change-caused impacts happening now. They are almost always in far-away places where few go, and they are also almost always confused for something they are not.

We say “caused by” for very good reason. Everything we shoot –all the impacts on this website– are related to warming thresholds where they either happen or they don’t. Permafrost collapse is an easy example. Without the warming, permafrost would not melt. Without the warming, drought would not have caused over a hundred million acres of western North American forest to have been attacked by a native beetle gone berserk. Without the warming, fuels would not have record dry moisture content and wildfire would not be burning 400 degrees hotter. Without the warming, sea level rise would not be putting normal high tides into the dunes. Without the warming, desert plants would not have acclimatized to the warm temperatures and then been killed by a polar vortex freezing them to death.

Fundamentally, our climate is out of control. Tipping, or Earth systems collapses are now active and becomes irreversible with no further warming. Nearly half of tipping systems feedback into other systems creating faster and more extreme tipping systems collapse. Current policy of net zero emissions allows further warming causing tipping to complete. As William Ripple and 14,000 scientists tell us in the Journal Bioscience, “These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

In 2019 and 2020, our director was personally responsible himself, for convincing Sierra Club to lower their warming limit from 1.5 degrees C above normal to less than 1.0 degrees C above normal because of the premature activation of tipping, 100 years ahead of projections, when it was not supposed to begin until 5 C warming (Lenton 2019). This was a first anywhere in the world. Thanks to the policy team and the deputy executive director for listening.

Please consider purchasing a high resolution fine art photograph to help support our efforts. You can also support us with a simple donation here.

Bruce Melton, Photographer
Applied Climate Science Engineer