Running Low On Time

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The Clock is Ticking

The World’s Climate Scientists Issue Yet Another Warning

On Monday, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released it’s most recent report on global warming. The IPCC was formed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to better assess climate change. And assess they did, as thousands of scientists from all over the world spent years analyzing the data and investigating the evidence (The BBC  does a pretty good job of explaining the process).

The take-away is abundantly clear. Due to human activity and the over-use of fossil fuels, the world is in fact warming at an increasingly rapid rate. It’s actually changing faster than was initially anticipated, and we need to respond to the science while we still have time to do something about it.

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Gaining Strength From The Past

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JamesBaldwin

To Learn Is To Be Empowered

Exemplary writer and social analyst James Baldwin urges you to learn as much as you can! Fundamental to this is reading and discovering more about the past. As a proponent of equality and justice, much of what he wrote about had to do with questioning social discriminations and prejudices. Baldwin deeply questioned the status quo and subsequently shared his observations.

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The Year of the Typhoon

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Typhoon Trami

2018 has been a brutal year for typhoons in Japan. Last night Tokyo felt the effects of Typhoon Trami, the 24th typhoon to impact Japan this year. Early reports indicate that although the city took a serious beating, the death toll is miraculously low. Advanced warning, brilliant infrastructure, and strong procedures help keep residents safe even in these times of increasing climate disasters, but the environment certainly appears to be upping its intensity. There have been more storms, with more rainfall than in recent memory, and more storms are predicted. Indeed, Typhoon Kong-Rey (#25!) is scheduled to hit Japan before the end of the week.

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How To Sharpen Your Critical Thinking

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Think Deep

Developing the Mindset

There is so much information coming at us on a daily, that we can easily become saturated. The world has gotten smaller, the news cycle even faster, and it pretty much looks as though this information influx is likely the new normal. All the more reason to hone your mental filter and sharpen your critical thinking to help make sense of what’s going on out there.

That doesn’t mean that you have to live in a state of perpetual doubt and criticize everything all the time! Rather, a well developed critical mindset can help you in retaining only what information you determine to be true and relevant, while discarding much of the noise (see Merchants of Doubt). Taking this approach can also boost your confidence as well as work to diminish some anxieties as you pursue your own path of sustainable motivation.

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What’s Wrong with Bitcoin?

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A Heavy Environmental Toll

Both a technological innovation and an environmental burden, the emergence of crypto-currencies has come to exact a heavy price on energy consumption. Seen as an alternative form of monetary designation, crypto-currencies like Bitcoin have also come to represent an attractive source of investor speculation. As indicated by their recent dramatic valuations (Bloomberg), interested parties are looking to take part in what might be a monetary revolution (see How to Put Bitcoin in Perspective). Whether or not this turns out to be true is up to the future, but in the interim, the drive for expanding and maintaining the Bitcoin network (see Bitcoin mining) is consuming a colossal amount of energy. These extensive energy demands are in turn generating staggering amounts of CO2 emissions.

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