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...melting Arctic so expensive? "The Arctic acts as the planet's air conditioner, and that function is already breaking down," says Goodstein, an economist and Director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. The high price reflects anticipated losses in agriculture and real estate plus the cost of disease outbreaks and natural disasters associated with rising sea levels. The melt, he says, is already adding extra heat at an annual rate of 3 billion tons of CO2 - the equivalent of 500 coal-powered plants, or more than 40% of all U.S. fossil fuel emissions - and this is expected to more...
...Carbon represents the estimate of damages from one more ton of CO2 added to the atmosphere. (One ton of CO2 is what the average family car emits every two-and-a-half months.) The SCC is important because a low number suggests minimal regulation is needed, whereas a high number urges more stringent action (such as efficiency requirements, carbon taxes or alternative energy incentives...
...then $15 per ton is considered an acceptable cost to ameliorate it. If the SCC is $2, spending $15 seems out of line." The other key statistical variable is the "discount rate," which establishes how to account for future costs and benefits in today's currency. A high discount rate implies that what happens years from now should have less bearing on decisions made today. Inherent in this seemingly technical point is the question: what do we, citizens today, owe the people of tomorrow? Particularly since, once released, CO2 stays in the air for at least 100 years. (See TIME...
...ATLAS particle detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside Geneva is 150 ft. long, 82 ft. high, weighs 7,000 tons, and contains enough cable and wiring to wrap around Earth's equator seven times. It's a mammoth machine, designed for the delightful purpose of detecting particles so tiny, you can fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair...
...runs at up to 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) and sends particles through temperatures colder than deep space at velocities approaching the speed of light. (The second most powerful particle accelerator, at Fermilab in Illinois, runs at 1 TeV.) The added juice allows scientists to get closer to the high energy that existed after the Big Bang. And high energies are needed, because the Higgs is thought to be quite heavy. (In Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, C represents the speed of light, which is constant; so in order to find high-mass particles, or M, you need high...