Word: clouds
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...biggest questions in climate sensitivity has been the role of low-level cloud cover. Low-altitude clouds reflect some of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth. It's not yet known whether global warming will dissipate clouds, which would effectively speed up the process of climate change, or increase cloud cover, which would slow it down. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...study published in the July 24 issue of Science is clearing the haze. A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean - both from satellites and from the human eye - over the past 50 years and combined that with climate models. They found that low-level clouds tend to dissipate as the ocean warms - which means a warmer world could well have less cloud cover. "That would create positive feedback, a reinforcing cycle that continues to warm the climate," says Amy Clement, a climate scientist...
Getting data on cloud cover isn't easy. There is reliable information from satellites, but those only go back a few decades - not long enough to provide a reliable forecast for the future. Clement and her colleagues combined recent satellite data with human observations - literally, from sailors scanning the sky - that go back to 1952, and found the two sets were surprisingly in sync. "It's pretty remarkable," says Clement. "We were almost shocked by the degree of concordance...
...data showed that as the Pacific Ocean has warmed over the past several decades - part of the gradual process of global warming - low-level cloud cover has lessened. That might be due to the fact that as the earth's surface warms, the atmosphere becomes more unstable and draws up water vapor from low altitudes to form deep clouds high in the sky. (Those types of high-altitude clouds don't have the same cooling effect.) The Science study also found that as the oceans warmed, the trade winds - the easterly surface winds that blow near the equator - weakened, which...
...orientation within psychiatry. I wanted to offer a couple of clarifications: You state that those who met our criteria for risk of psychosis were 30 times as likely to develop the illness as those in the general population. Something got lost in translation in my interview with John Cloud; in fact, our research shows that such a person is more than 400 times as likely to develop psychosis. Also, the necessary critical mass of controlled, randomized clinical-trial treatment data has yet to be gathered, so it is premature to conclude that "it works." We still have a long...