Climate Lynx

  Fusion: Now there are Three. What do you get when you funnel 2.05 megajoules of energy through 192 lasers aimed onto a frozen pellet of hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium) on a pea sized gold cylinder? You get 3.15 megajoules of released energy. This is a BIG DEAL. This was FUSION. It happened at our National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California on the 2 nd of December. I’ve read scientists comments on the milestone such as Doctor Karl Krushelnich at the University of Michigan, ““The announcement on Tuesday indicated that, for the first time in any experiment, the amount of energy produced in a fusion experiment exceeded the amount of energy put in. So it exceeded the breakeven criteria—so more energy out than energy in. And that was the first time that has ever been done.” Similarly, Carolyn Kuranz, also a PHD in nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan stated, “The most important takeaway from the recent achievement of the National Ignition F...

Numbers tell a story…sometimes, very well I try to grasp what numbers are trying to tell me by making comparisons. The recent floods in Pakistan are an example. Pakistan is particularly exposed to the ravages of climate change. The Pakistani rivers running down from the Himalaya Ice Fields are fed by over 7,000 glaciers. These are melting faster as the world warms from heat trapped by fossil fuel emissions. Today snow that replenishes these glaciers often comes down instead as rain and runs off into rivers quickly. The monsoon this year came off the warm Indian Ocean with a staggering load of water. The Balochistan and Sindh Pakistani provinces had four times their average rainfall. The resultant floods were epic. Nearly one third of the country was inundated. At one point over six million people were without shelter. Six million homeless people… how many people is six million? Comprehending this number is difficult. I tried to find a meaningful comparison. Here is what I came ...

 The CRAAP Test and other ways to sort out truth from…. One of the shortcomings of my K-12 education was we were taught a lot of facts but we were rarely taught how to think. The exception, though, I remember well. One of my teachers taught us that we needed to “think about” not just absorb what we were being spoon fed in class. He did this in a most profound way. He instructed us for a full week about the glories of Communism. He did this in absolutely serious convincing manner. At the end of the week I went home, and   I am sure a lot of my classmates also went home, thinking Marx and Lenin held the answers to the world’s biggest problems. The next week he shredded communism with the same intensity he had spent preaching its glories. This was when I realized how important a broad education, being skeptical, and using my noodle was going to be the rest of my life. The next big lesson came ten years ago when I started studying global warming. What I found ten years ...

Traditional journalism, the newspapers and periodicals with trained journalists and keen-eyed editors, generally aspire to codes of conduct upholding the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability. Historically editors and newspaper staff were the information gatekeepers.   But traditional journalism has been under assault as citizens have drifted to social media for news and information.   Social media platforms, while free, have no aspirations to journalism’s code of conduct. As we say, “You get what you pay for!”. It is a dangerous time since it is proven people love lies more than truth and social media is the superhighway of lies. Since the American Public is enamored with free news via social media our traditional media Gate Keepers no longer have enough subscribers to keep enough investigative journalists on staff. In the last 15 years one in five newspapers have closed their doors and half of all working jour...