Word: ecosystems
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...warm between 2.7 and a mind-boggling 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The projections point to a global sea level rise between 0.3 and 2.9 feet, with the potential to inundate some low-level areas. The report also reviews a host of studies linking climate change to global health impacts, ecosystem changes, and economic effects. It does cite certain positive effects of increasing temperatures, but they are vastly outweighed by enormous negative impacts, particularly to the world's poor...
...urge Congress to reject the energy bill introduced by Senate Republicans last week that would permit exploratory oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The 19-million-acre region is one of the last territories of unspoiled wilderness in the United States, a refuge ecosystem home to hundreds of plant and animal species. Birds from across North America depend on the refuge as a vital migration area, as do caribou herds on which a number of native Alaskan communities rely. There is no reason to threaten this wilderness when we should be working towards energy conservation and efficiency...
...Russia's oil fields are in dire need of rehabilitation; Sakhalin's north and much of Siberia are littered with rusting derricks ringed by porous labyrinths of old pipelines. Local environmentalists, pointing to the recent spill near the Galapagos Islands, worry about the potential damage to Sakhalin's rich ecosystem caused by toxic drilling waste...
...conflicts (e.g., over subsidies for the new monster Airbus that may do in Boeing's 747). These items galvanize the worst fears of the Europeans. They have a single name: American unilateralism. Nor should their alarm be shrugged off as routine babble of the smaller denizens of the international ecosystem. Those who live with an elephant have a right to worry when it starts ambling. More to the point, your allies have marked up all your foreign-policy speeches, including the transcript of your 75-minute TV interview before the Inauguration, and they are not amused...
...rain forest is not good agricultural land, to put it mildly: the very nature of the ecosystem is to recycle organic matter without enriching the underlying soil. Once cleared, the acidic dirt of the forest floor is exhausted after a few harvests. That in turn causes peasant farmers to keep moving and sell their barren holdings to cattle ranchers looking to buy cleared land on the cheap. So the devastation continues to creep forward. All over the Amazon, I saw vast areas of degraded land where before there was a virtually unbroken expanse of trees. In all, the Amazon contains...