Word: globalizers
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Back in the Pliocene era, between 5 million and 3 million years ago, the average global temperature was about 7°F warmer than it is today, yet atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were about the same. If carbon dioxide were the sole factor in warming, that wouldn't make any sense. It isn't, of course; there are several other contributors, including the brightness of the sun and the location of the continents (whose positions dictate, among other things, where ice caps can form) - but these were all pretty much the same in the Pliocene as well...
...what accounted for the higher global temperature? According to a new paper in Nature, one possible factor is hurricanes. Scientists have long suspected that global warming could make hurricanes more intense somehow, but the new study suggests the effect works both ways: tropical cyclones could help drive up temperatures in response. "We're suggesting that hurricanes could have created a permanent El Niño condition," says Yale's Alexey Fedorov, lead author of the study. (See pictures of the effects of climate change...
...modern world, El Niño is a change in wind patterns and ocean currents that occurs every few years, bringing warmer water to the normally cool eastern Pacific; the result is major changes in storms and other weather effects, along with a temporary spike in global temperature. El Niño happened in 1998, for example, so if you were to take that year as a starting point for tracking global temperatures, you'd find that the following decade didn't see a lot of warming by comparison. (This is the origin of the myth that global warming...
...Andrews is a Spring 2010 Institute of Politics Fellow. She is a former Special Assistant to the President, former White House Director of Global Communications and former Director for Democracy on the National Security Council Staff...
...relations between the U.S. and Israel are also in a fragile phase. During the Cold War, Israel could claim to be safeguarding American interests against the Soviet-backed armies of Syria, Iraq and Egypt, in a global struggle for a free world. The attitude was summed up by a T-shirt that appeared in Israel in the 1980s of an American fighter plane (presumably one sold to Israel) with the slogan, "Don't Worry America, Israel Is Behind...