Word: globalizing
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...looking back about 125,000 years, to a time when global temperatures were as high as they are expected to be by 2100, a team of scientists from Princeton and Harvard universities has calculated that the oceans were probably at least 26 ft. higher than they are now, maybe as much as 31 ft. higher. That's significantly higher than the 13-ft.-to-19-ft. range scientists have been counting on, and it is, write Peter Huybers of Harvard and Peter Clark of Oregon State University in an accompanying commentary in Nature, "a disconcerting message...
...reason for the higher estimate is simply that scientists had more data to work with. Most studies of ancient sea level focus on a specific area of the globe. But local sea levels, then and now, do not give a true picture of the global average sea level, which is what really matters. Lots of factors can affect regional sea-level variability, including winds and local currents that push water consistently toward or away from a particular shore. "One of the biggest effects," says the study's lead author, Robert Kopp, who did his research during a postdoctoral fellowship...
Evidently not, though. To get a true picture of worldwide sea levels, Kopp and his colleagues gathered data from a wide range of individual studies to put together a global picture. "We reviewed data from 40 sites," he says, including evidence from ancient coral reefs, eroded beaches and telltale sediments laid down in the ebb and flow of 125,000-year-old tides. The bottom line: local effects and faulty assumptions may have led to an underestimate. "It's unclear," says Kopp, "why the Southern Hemisphere would have been warmer than we thought." It may have to do with changes...
...outside the law, trafficking to rogue states and African dictatorships under U.N. sanctions while at the same time supplying arms on behalf of some of America's biggest companies, such as General Dynamics and Kellogg, Brown and Root," the UNDP report states. (See "The Arms Trade Booms Amid Global Economic Woes...
...more about global crime in "The New Gangsterism...