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Hope in a scientific breakthrough. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California shot 192 laser beams at a target smaller than a peppercorn, suspended in a chamber under temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun and twice the pressure at its core. And for the first time, an experiment in nuclear fusion produced more power than

it consumed in making it!

Fusion is one of the most common physics processes in the universe, the core activity of every star, including the sun. But reproducing it has posed one of the greatest scientific challenges. Although there are still formidable hurdles to running the world ‘s energy grids on fusion, “we’re in a position to begin understanding what it will take to make

the next step,” said Kim Budil, director of the Laboratory.

Humanity has been given a new glimpse into the unfolding universe.

The following is from the Washington Post Article Vermont’s dairy farms recede, giving way to shrimp, saffron and new ideas by Laura Reiley and Zoeann Murphy on December 2, 2022.

Here are some of the new foods and agricultural ventures changing the face of Vermont.

In an old milking barn in Charlotte, John Brawley tends to something much tinier than the cows that once lived there. At Vermont’s first shrimp aquaculture outfit, Sweet Sound Aquaculture, he harvests 100 pounds of Pacific white-leg shrimp each week from indoor, aboveground recirculating saltwater pools.

Dairy once accounted for 70 percent of the state’s agricultural economy. But the number of dairy farms in Vermont decreased from more than 4,000 in 1969 to fewer than 600 in 2021, as the state’s small-scale operations lost out to sprawling ventures in California. Higher temperatures also contributed to that shift, causing cows to eat less and produce less milk.

One of the dairy farms that went bankrupt, in 2017, was the 600-acre Nordic Farms on Route 7 in Charlotte. All the cows went to auction that next year. But the land became part of Vermont’s agricultural future. Will Raap, founder of Gardener’s Supply, an organic gardening supply company, bought the property with a vision for making it a model of a “post-dairy agricultural economy in Vermont.”

Raap thought what might work in Nordic Farms’ place was a collective model of farming, leading to the creation of Earthkeep Farmcommon in 2021. More than a dozen agricultural businesses, including Brawley’s, share land, equipment and barn space, and together build consumer interest and brand identity with farmers markets and events.

Brawley’s goal was to produce local shrimp, the second-most popular seafood in the United States, in a landlocked state far from oceans but in an environmentally sustainable way.

“This is efficient, sustainable and healthful and supports the local economy,” Brawley said, scooping nearly translucent mature shrimp out with a net, many leaping free to plop back into the insulated lumber-framed ponds smoothed with rubber liners. For now, Brawley is a one-man outfit, checking the oxygenation and pH of the tanks. It still costs him $6 to $9 to produce a pound of shrimp, the briny smell of crustaceans mixing with the faintly detectable whiff of cows that lingers in the barn.

Vermont’s changing agricultural makeup owes part of its new vigor to an old land-use law. Act 250 took effect in 1970 when the state faced major development pressure and has been instrumental in keeping Vermont looking like Vermont. Its strict review process for new uses of farmland makes it harder for commercial development and prioritizes other viable agricultural businesses.

A warmer climate has meant a longer growing season in Vermont, making it more amenable to grains like wheat. The industry has also grown as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has driven up grain prices globally. Regional grains are now more viable and more competitive, but there are limitations because of scant processing facilities and infrastructure.

Vermont Malthouse at Earthkeep Farmcommon is the only malthouse in the state, providing the state’s brewers and distillers with malted grains sourced regionally and, as general manager Rob Hunter said, it aims to relocalize the grain industry.

“Right now, we source grain from a variety of places regionally,” he said. “We grow as much as we can and work with local farmers, and the rest we source from within 500 miles,” Hunter said. “Many of the state’s 77 breweries want to do at least one beer that is completely from Vermont ingredients.”

One of Nordic Farms’ two primary barns had been converted into a granary before the debut of Earthkeep, becoming a grain co-op that supported grain milling, flaking, roasting, smoking and blending. The malthouse added steep tanks, a heating system, a chiller and a flaker system to double production capacity.

Rye, wheat and barley are the chief grains that are malted. Grain is steeped in huge tanks, where the dormant seeds are soaked and awakened, then allowed to germinate and sprout. After about four days of growth, the sprouted grain is ready to be heated, or “kilned,” before it is cleaned and bagged. Eventually Hunter aims to produce 75 tons per month of finished malt. For now, it’s smaller-scale: “Yesterday I drove 30 50-pound bags over to Foam Brewers’ original brewery on the shores of Lake Champlain. We’re doing an experimental koji malt, the rice malt for sake. We’re figuring it out together,” Hunter said.

In 2020, the co-op the Jones family belonged to required all members to cut milk production to 85 percent of capacity and dump the rest to keep milk prices from tanking. (The reason: Restaurants and schools weren’t buying milk at the beginning of the pandemic.) Meanwhile, feed, hauling prices, even how much it cost to dispose of manure — all costs had skyrocketed in part because of drought- and climate-change-related extreme weather. The prevailing wisdom was that the only way to be profitable was to scale up to 1,000 cows. The Jones family didn’t have the land to accommodate that many.

In April 2020, the Jones family sold their 320 milkers to a farmer in New York. It was a terrible day for the whole family, but sons Brian and Steven Jones, fifth-generation on the land, had a plan.

Their mom, Carolyn, still mists up when she talks about her cows, and the plywood cow head she painted still proudly tops their barn. But peek inside now, and it’s 1,500 goats parkouring over hay bales and each other. Joneslan Farm in Hyde Park is the biggest goat farm in the state, selling its milk to Vermont Creamery to be made into cheese.

Why goats? Their poop is solid, not liquid, and thus not as much of an environmental headache as cow manure. It’s also much easier to turn into usable compost. The Joneses use less diesel because they are no longer spreading 2 million gallons of liquid manure across their farm. Vermont’s climate is better for growing the hay goats eat; when the Joneses had cows, the brothers grew feed crops on 300 of their acres and rented other fields to produce sufficient grain for feed.

“Changes have occurred that have allowed grapes to thrive — and people are betting on it,” said Todd Haire, co-owner of Foam Brewers, which makes craft beer in Burlington. Haire has a side project making natural wines. Historically, the state’s wineries were limited to hardy hybrid grapes that could withstand Vermont’s harsh winters. Climate change is expanding his array of ingredients for beer, too.

“For a while, it was ‘this is the fruit we have, so these are the beers we can produce,’ ” Haire said. “Fifteen years ago, you were hard-pressed to grow a peach in Vermont. And now you see them all over.”

House of Fermentology, also at Earthkeep and one of Vermont Malthouse’s customers, is another side project for Haire. Here he is barrel-aging beers, many containing regional grains and hops and local fruits, as well as honey and botanicals from the farm, fermented by native yeasts from the Vermont countryside.

Higher temperatures are shifting the suitable habitat for sugar maples farther north into Canada. Low temperatures that aren’t as low, higher high temperatures and not enough cold nights have led to shorter seasons, low sap flow rates and reduced sugar content in the syrup. (Low sugar content means it takes more sap to boil into syrup.) These changes also threaten to make Vermont’s soil less hospitable to sugar maples and to allow pests more of the year to flourish.

The state’s agricultural researchers are looking for ways farmers can “hedge their bets,” diversifying crops with high-value items that can also expand the growing season. One of Vermont’s promising newcomers is saffron.

Saffron at the North American Center for Saffron Research & Development in October. The flowers’ red pistils flavor and color foods from bouillabaisse to risotto. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

The United States imports about $16 million of the prized little red crocus pistils each year that flavor and color foods from bouillabaisse to risotto. The world’s most expensive spice is traditionally grown in Iran and Spain, but now roughly 200 farmers are growing it in Vermont. As the climate in Vermont becomes more akin to that in northeastern Iran, Arash Ghalehgolabbehbahani, an agroecologist specializing in sustainable agriculture and crop diversification, and University of Vermont research professor Margaret Skinner started the North American Center for Saffron Research & Development in South Burlington, pioneering the farming of this lucrative crop as a way for small Vermont farmers to expand their options.

Often these low flowering plants are grown around the perimeter of a solar array, tucked under a field of energy-generating panels. It’s a new area of agricultural research called agrovoltaics that uses the same land to harvest solar energy and food, sometimes with the tilting solar panels functioning as shade or rain umbrellas for the plants in a world with increasingly harsh sun, drought and extreme rain events.

The bulblike corms are planted in late summer, and the purple flowers bloom in October and November after most other crops in the state have been harvested. Farmers must work swiftly to hand-harvest the blooms and pluck out the bright red filaments within. These are then dried and stored, about 75,000 flowers yielding a pound of the coveted spice. And because the corms produce more corms underground, farmers can leave them in the ground for three to five years before replanting — minimal tilling and disturbance in the field serves to build healthier soil and to help sequester atmospheric carbon.

“With climate change, the challenge to growers is the extremes and the unpredictability, which is why diversification is important. Saffron fits nicely into that model,” Skinner said Monday. “This week, the saffron flowering is almost done in the Burlington area, and we only had our first hard frost a week ago. I’m not looking at the data, I’m looking at what’s happening around me: If we keep on having falls like we had this year, I’m not sure I’d want to be investing in the state’s ski industry.”

The federal government has called on seven Western states that rely on Colorado River water to cut usage. What are the states?

Arizona, California and the Upper Colorado River Basin: Colorado, Nevada, New

Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Source: Disaster scenarios raise the stakes for Colorado River negotiations by Joshua Partlow, Washington Post 12/17/2022

From How climate change will make atmospheric rivers even worse by Kasha Patel, Washington Post 1/12/2023

Atmospheric Rivers occur regularly in the wintertime. They account for up to 50% of all rain and snow that fall in the western U.S. However, a rapid succession of atmospheric rivers leaves communities more susceptible to flooding and landslides. Coastal California saw wind speeds of 40 – 80 mph and some exceeding 100 mph near Lake Tahoe

when impacted by such rivers.

Warming oceans have intensified this phenomenon, beating heat records for the fourth year in a row. The expanding surface warm water is lighter and more buoyant than colder deeper water. That makes the ocean stratified. Warm and cold layers mix less, trapping heat at the surface, speeding the planet’s warming, while depriving the deeper ocean of oxygen and nutrients that cannot mix downward. The ocean also loses oxygen because warmer water cannot hold as much of it.

The upper sea surface temperatures have serious consequences for any storm that comes along. Heavy rainfall in California is a direct consequence of upper ocean heat, because more heat amounts to more moisture in the air. For every degree Fahrenheit that the air temperature increases, the atmosphere can hold about 4 percent more water. Warmer air provides more energy to drive storms and increases the amount of precipitation that falls as rain instead of snow. When atmospheric rivers move inland and sweep over mountains, the water vapor rises and cools to create heavy precipitation. Atmospheric rivers are approximately 250 to 375 miles wide, impacting huge areas.

California has just experienced over one billion dollars worth of damage from atmospheric rivers this season, but at the same time some of its reservoir levels have risen.

Satellite image taken on October 24, 2021. A powerful storm off the Pacific Northwest coast brought an intense atmospheric river to the San Francisco Bay region of California. NASA MODIS/TERRA satellite image taken from NASA Worldview.

What organization is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels as well as one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet?

U.S. Department of Defense

What vehicle is the biggest gas guzzler?

The airplane, especially the wide-bodied cargo and tanker planes.

Source: Why the Pentagon is serious about reducing its carbon footprint by Anna Mulrine Grobe, Christian Science Monitor

by Ian Willson on Antigravity

Planting Zone 9, which includes New Orleans, occupies a very special space between life and death and the very meaning of those words in the plant universe. Just slightly further south of us, many tropical plants which are deciduous here are evergreen. Just slightly north of us, plants that are perennial here (meaning they live for many years) are annual there (meaning they live for only one year before going to seed and dying). Mirroring New Orleans’ larger historical and cultural truths, we very much exist in the space between traditional assumptions around what defines temperate versus tropical growing knowledge and categorization. In the garden of the Deep South, there is very little death in December. There is not even very much death in January. In February, things slow, and perhaps they die. But mostly nothing ever dies in the floral (as opposed to faunal) world, not if you look at it right. Our preconceptions of what life and death mean are continuously put to the test in the life cycles of plants and trees and soil and roots.

There is a very cute video making the social media rounds of a girl crying about losing all her potential friends because all the trees are losing their leaves and all the leaves are her friends and it’s her fault and she’s so sorry. And her dad tries to console her and tell her it’s just nature and it’s OK. And I am here to be that dad today. Because when you live somewhere as relatively free of deciduous trees as New Orleans, sometimes you forget that a lot of trees drop their leaves annually, and it is a perfectly natural part of their lives. For example, I field multiple questions about fig trees every year. Their leaves get spotty and brown and then they fall off, and this happens every year, and every year a healthy handful of y’all are certain that your tree is unhealthy and it’s your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s natural. The same can be said of plenty of other plants, such as pomegranate, hydrangea, and maypop (passionflower). In the general spirit of liminality which this piece will continue to revel in, all three of the aforementioned plants can be considered evergreen in more tropical climes, throwing our categorical ideals of generality into total whack, as nature is so frequently wont to do.

Our human brains love to categorize everything into black and white, into neat categories. Alive and dead. This has helped us progress as a species in many ways, but it is just a way to try to make sense of things—it’s not the way things are. The universe and all life in it works in gradients and blurry lines, everything is interconnected. Death, while real in how it affects our lives, just like time, is just an abstract idea to help us make sense of the world and get through our days.

We tend to get uneasy as a species about the idea of clones and cloning. We cloned a sheep in the ‘90s, and now we are legally cloning our pets. We are still terrified of cloning humans. And it all feels very spooky. But we’ve been cloning plants for millenia, and plants have been cloning their dang selves since the very beginning of their dang selves. Plant bulbs propagate by cloning themselves more frequently than they do from seed; this includes tulips, garlic, and all sorts of other stuff. Tubers—potatoes, for example—grow clones from their little eyelets. Rhizomatic plants like turmeric, ginger, and bamboo grow almost exclusively through cloning methods. Even trees propagate in nature through cloning on a regular basis, through the process of vegetative reproduction. Often what we consider two or more trees are actually connected to the same root structure, contain the same DNA as each other, and are, effectively, one tree. And were the root system to be sliced up, then the “two trees” would continue to live and thrive in most cases, still carrying matching DNA and being part of the same whole despite being separate. The point being, essentially, that our archaic ideations of where life begins and death begins, or where one life ends and another begins, are insufficient at describing very basic life cycles that surround our everyday lives.

We would likely go insane if our puny brains sincerely tried to view the world through a lens outside of time and death, but observing plants in the world or in our gardens can help us understand that death and individuality are philosophical truths and not facts. The soil food web that a fig tree takes part in every year—dropping its leaves to the earth that they may mix with dead animal and living protozoa to make fresh soil to feed themselves again in future seasons—is testament enough to this fact (if cloning and blurry lines are too much for you to hear right now). A single kale plant left alone in your garden bed will bolt, dropping its seeds, dropping old leaves, and eventually keeling over to protect those seeds from predators, heat, and competitive plants. It slowly melts to provide nutrition for its children, even as they come to life, even before it dies. The bagged compost made of cow manure born of chewed grass dispelled was never dead anywhere along the way, and it won’t die when you add it to your soil. Everything is alive. From dirt to dirt. What is dead may never die.

2022 was a horrific year in terms of extreme weather events. If nothing else, it focused attention on the need to really get to work on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In that regard we can celebrate the passing of the new climate law embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Princeton University ZERO Lab, which models the effects of climate policies, reckons the law will reduce yearly emissions by roughly 1 billion metic tons by 2030. Princeton’s experts predict the country’s emissions will decline by 42% - nearly reaching the Biden administration’s goal of halving emissions by 2030.

So let’s get to work!