Word: earth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this season have been feeling in their bones: Baby, it's hot outside. In fact, 1998 will go down as the warmest year on the planet since temperature records have been kept. Worse, 1998 will be recorded as the 20th year in a row that the surface of the earth has been warmer than its recent long-term average. Researchers worry that we may have seen nothing...
...continue, but how abruptly the temperature will rise. "Scientists are not sure whether world temperatures will rise linearly, "says Thompson, "or whether there's a threshold beyond which temperatures will skyrocket." Such dramatic warming periods, over as little as a decade, have already occurred in the history of the Earth. And if one were to occur again now, the ecological and social disruptions could be incendiary...
Clendenning said a constant media focus on Radcliffe has led to inflated public expectations that discussions will result in "earth-shattering" changes...
...that of a tapir, a large, smooth, big-nosed mammal the size of a small cow. An electric blue butterfly flutters by my ear. Mittermeier snags a vine snake, green and camouflaged in its habitat. Everywhere is a sign of life and death. We pass gaping holes in the earth that giant armadillos call home, and the shell of an armadillo that a jaguar called lunch. A microteiid lizard shoots along a palm leaf lying close to where a column of golden ants marches across our trail...
That night in camp, Mittermeier laments the general ignorance of this terrain. The marine biologist Sylvia Earle made the same point to me some months ago about life in the oceans; we yearn for Mars, a planet as good as dead, and know so little of life on Earth. To date we have identified between 1.5 million and 1.7 million species, but the best guesses put the total number of the planet's species at between 5 million and 15 million, and it could be as high as 100 million. "How can we talk about extinction rates," Mittermeier asks, "unless...