Climate Lynx

Do you ever ask yourself what gets you worked up? At the top of my list are premature babies. When flying emergency medical flights to pick up preemies, I had to discipline myself not to look at the kids, or I would get choked up. Next on my list is funding, or lack thereof, for public schools. We are shortchanging our kids, and it angers me. I also have strong feelings formed from my time flying for the Army National Guard. Most Guard aviators are older than the Infantry they carry. The Aviation units spend most of the year practicing different aviation-specific tasks without troops. When we did practice an Air Assault with the “Grunts” on board, it was apparent they were a lot younger than we were. The grunts are the infantry who shoulder the rucksacks, weapons, and ammunition and hump them to the objective. It is grueling hard work. Hence the colloquial term of admiration and respect, Grunt. The soldier in the Infantry is the gauge used to judge if we are winning or losing. ...

I remember my first flight for the Military Sealift Command. We flew out in our French Puma early in the morning over the south shore of Chesapeake Bay. This bay is the United States’ largest estuary. On the nation’s largest estuary is the world’s most extensive naval base, Norfolk. It wasn’t easy to take in its enormity. Norfolk is the home base of 75 ships, 134 aircraft, 14 piers, 11 aircraft hangars, many administrative buildings, and hundreds of civilian contractors who service the fleet.   The base is the nexus for naval operations from the North Pole down the Atlantic to the South Pole and points east. Since this would be my first military ship landing, I concentrated on doing it well, so I missed a lot I would later have the privilege of seeing close up. In the next seven years, I had opportunities to drive around Norfolk and Hampton Roads. It was impossible to ignore how much of the area was at or near sea level. My Norfolk observations were made well before I started ...

One memorable job I had in Alaska was flying to do a cleanup at a deactivated Defense Early Warning (DEW) radar site east of Deadhorse Airport, Alaska. The DEW system was a 3000-mile picket line of 63 massive radar sites built in the 50s to give the US, Canada, and NATO early warning of Russian Bear Bombers or ICBMs. During previous flights in Alaska, I had seen other DEW sites. They are hard to miss with radar antennae looking like a movie screen from a drive-in movie establishment, only much larger and robust. The cleanup site was like others I had seen. In addition to the massive antennae , there were support buildings which had housed machinery, people, and diesel generators. When we first flew in, we could see hundreds of black dots scattered about the tundra. These turned out to be 55-gallon diesel oil drums. They had been emptied and tossed out in every direction. These drums turned out to be our primary focus. The laborers pried the steel drums out of the tundra and f...

  The IPCC is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was formed in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) comprises 193 nations whose scientists are charged with advancing scientific knowledge about anthropogenic (man-caused) climate change .  It is an internationally accepted authority on climate change, and its findings are endorsed by leading climate scientists and all member governments . Thousands of people from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC. For the assessment reports, experts volunteer their time as IPCC authors to assess the thousands of scientific papers published each year to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts, and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks. An open and transparent review by experts and gover...