Word: earth
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...just preposterous. They pontificate; they have all the answers, as often as not the playwright acts like they do have all the answers. They’re insufferable. The level at which they are made to speak seems deeply unintelligent, so then you wonder what on earth do people think academics are if they go to these places and respond warmly to these caricatures. It’s not hostile. Even ones that are meant to be admirable, it’s like they’re always having a ‘Eureka!’ moment or suddenly...
...While the geologic record shows the earth has experienced rapid sea-level rise in the past, during the sharp warm-ups that follow the end of ice ages, those big melts have occurred when the world had much less ice than it does now. Scientists are unsure of how quickly rising temperatures from global warming could destabilize and melt our existing sheets - the working assumption has been that such major melting and subsequent sea-level rise would take centuries, if not longer, even in a warmer world. (See TIME's special report on the environment...
...much as 20 ft. (6 m) higher. And other scientists caution that Blanchon's work should still be viewed as preliminary and in need of independent confirmation at other, similar sites where old coral fossils have been deposited. (One obstacle is that only a few places on the earth - the Yucatan peninsula among them - have been seismically calm enough over the past several hundred thousand years to allow for such measurements.) But in the wake of the surprise breakaway of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica, which won't raise sea levels but will speed the melting of the remaining...
...since living trees suck up CO2 from the atmosphere, massive tree mortality due to warming could produce a feedback effect, further intensifying climate change. In the end, we might need a bigger Biosphere 2, because we're on track to screw up Biosphere 1 - otherwise known as the Earth...
...last week, there had been sunspots on only 11 days this year, and there were only 99 days with visible sunspots last year—the second-lowest total since 1911. Brian F. Farrell, a Harvard meteorology professor, acknowledged a connection between sunspot activity and temperatures on the Earth, but cited other research showing that sunspots only account for an overall temperature change of a tenth of a degree centigrade. Farrell did acknowledge that there could have been larger temperature effects caused by sunspots in the past. “A strong correlation between the amount of radioactive carbon...