Climate Lynx

While I have known, for a long time, mangrove forests grow along ocean coastlines in brackish waters, I’ve largely remained ignorant of their importance. I should not have allowed myself to be ignorant of these important forests as I have been drawn to them to see the wildlife which flock to them. One forest I visited was south of Naples, Florida. It is a stretch of mangrove forest along the ocean with fine hiking trails which gave my partner and I hours of wildlife viewing. While serving with the Military Sealift Command, we would often pull into port in Singapore.   Singapore is a city, an island, and a country.   It has plenty of impressive manmade attractions and an interesting diverse history. I did not spend much of my free time investigating these points of interest after I discovered the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. The reserve is west and north of the the US Navy base, Sembawang, on the east side of the island where we docked.   When there with a little time...

Wet, Green solutions Autumn is a colorful time of year. It is when my favorite color, green, departs. Fall is when the north woods prepare to rest. What makes it green is chlorophyll and with the loss of chlorophyll the underlying colors are revealed.   With the arrival of autumn, the forest also ceases to pull CO2 from the air. If you search out the “Keeling Curve CO2 graphs” you will see each year the CO2 concentrations go down a bit in the summer and then rise in the winter. It is the “Green Stuff”, chlorophyll, that makes it happen in the process called photosynthesis. We usually associate this with trees. If we plant more trees and manage them well, and gradually cease burning coal, oil, and gas, it is possible for us to bring the concentration of CO2 down. Tree planting and responsible professional management of forests is universally popular. Unfortunately, trees by themselves, may not be up to the task of removing all the CO2. The goal to save us from warming 1.5 C ...

There are two critical problems facing the world today.   The future of humanity depends on both and they are interrelated.   The democratically elected Ukrainian government is fighting for its existence against the Russian oil supported dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.     Simultaneously, the world is in the first stages of transitioning away from oil, coal, and gas.   Recently the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, whose members are predominantly nondemocratic nations and control 80% of the world’s oil reserves, cut production. This action will raise gas and oil prices around the world.   OPEC production reductions mean higher prices at the pump for you and me. In a crime the judge will often ask “Cui bono” which is Latin for “to whom is it a benefit”. The question often reveals who the criminal is.   In this case the beneficiary and the criminal is Putin. The benefit bestowed upon Putin was a 2 million barrel cut in oil...

  If you put a brick or a domino on end you can play with it.   You can push it and sometimes it rocks back and stands upright. Or, if you go a bit too far it will fall over. Or, it may fall onto another brick or domino and you’ve made a mess. Two hundred columns ago I wrote about, “self-perpetuating feedback loops” which is a fancy way of talking about climate tipping points. If a feedback loop is pushed too far, in our case warms too far, it will continue to warm and disintegrate without our help. Scientists tell us we have warmed the earth about 1.1 degree C since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The earth has responded to this. Heat waves are more common, droughts more severe, and forest fires start earlier and last longer. Since water expands as it warms the oceans have risen half a foot and some coral reefs have suffered extensive bleaching, (death).   The once thick multiyear year arctic ice has lost 95% of its mass. In one-decade, extreme rainfall e...