Word: impacting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stout, slightly plump (but not obese) women who tended to have more children - "Women with very low body fat don't ovulate," Stearns explains - as did women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Using a sophisticated statistical analysis that controlled for any social or cultural factors that could impact childbearing, researchers determined that these characteristics were passed on genetically from mothers to daughters and granddaughters...
Douglas Ewbank, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who undertook the statistical analysis for the study, which was published Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), says that because cultural factors tend to have a much more prominent impact than natural selection in the shaping of future generations, people tend to write off the effect of evolution. "Those changes we predict for 2409 could be wiped out by something as simple as a new school-lunch program. But whatever happens, it's likely that in 2409, Framingham women will be 2 cm shorter...
Given how limited the impact of the Kyoto Protocol has been, the effects of that error have been modest so far. But if the U.S. adopts a cap-and-trade system with the same mistake, or if the world agrees to a truly global successor to Kyoto, the blowback could be enormous. As long as biofuels are incorrectly treated as 100% carbon neutral, they'll represent an economical way for companies to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions and comply with a tightening carbon cap. One study estimates that if the world were to meet a 50% "cut" in global greenhouse...
There are other side effects as well. Melillo's paper points out that if biofuels scale up rapidly, they could end up displacing cropland and pasture, which would impact global food supplies and increase land-based carbon emissions. Melillo found that if biofuels were linked to a global policy to stabilize carbon concentrations in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million - a modest goal - we would need more land for biofuel production by the end of the 21st century than is currently used for all food crops. Worse, all the fertilizer needed to grow those bioenergy crops would increase emissions...
Sewall agreed, adding that the focus of human rights work should be on impact...