Climate Change

Climate Change – The Band
10/31/10

The boys in the band had been playing covers for years when, on the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Bruce found he could write songs. Bruce relates “Wow - what an experience! Camping out next to the ice sheet was rippin! This place is melting so much faster than the scientists say in their academic journals…”

His film The Ice and the Sea came out of the expedition. The band scored it with original tunes.

Our message is simple. Climate change is real and it is happening now. Bruce Melton is the front man for the band. He is a professional engineer, researcher, filmmaker and internationally published climate change writer.

Melton says “Music is one totally awesome way to get the science across. And images – showing people what is actually happening. It’s not just computer models, it’s real and it’s a lot worse that the scientists have been predicting.”

Bruce is a trained outreach specialist. When he worked for the Environmental Protection Program at the Lower Colorado River Authority, he was trained to teach the public about his research as a requirement from his funder the EPA.

What he has learned is that complicated science should be delivered to the public with color, images, NO JARGON ~ and even music ~ .

It was all coming together. Bruce’s reporting on the impacts of climate change, directly from the scientific discoveries in the academic journals, and directly from the places on this planet where the impacts were the worst, showed this as he filmed. The songs that he and his band were writing added depth to his films that is unique in the industry.

The climate scientists were failing to deliver their message. Very few of them are trained in outreach. The science is just too complicated for the scientists’ to communicate.

Bruce’s next project was a short film about the pine bark beetle in northern Colorado. He pasted together a bunch of clips and stills from his family vacation camping trip and scored it with new original tunes from the band.

These films, including the Greenland film The Ice and the Sea, were a big hit with the environmental community. And they just loved the music. Bruce then started researching and writing about the pine beetle pandemic and dedicated a solo 5,000 mile filming trip across the U.S. Rockies to the project. The film What Have We Done (45 minutes) came out of the work. This is the band’s favorite – they really like the score. It has nine songs.

Bruce’s engineering work took him to the rain forest frontier in Costa Rica to study the adverse impacts of in-stream gravel mining. The film The Fight for the Rio Tigre (16 minutes) came out of this work. It too was scored with a long original Blues tune El Rio Tigre with Spanish lyrics.

Bruce is working on a full length HD film about the dying forests in the Rockies. The band is working on a new score. Bruce continues to write and market. His latest article is here:
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/bruce-melton-climate-sciences-new.html
The Band’s music is here:
http://www.meltonengineering.com/Climate Change the Band/Climate Change the band.htm
Bruce's articles and films are here:
http://meltonengineering.com/