Word: low-level
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...Echols serves his 20 years, reformers of drug sentencing laws are closing in on a goal that was unthinkable even a few years ago: scrapping the federal sentencing structure established in 1986 that gives far harsher penalties for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, resulting in prisons packed with low-level, predominantly African American offenders. The mechanism is known as the "100-to-1 drug ratio," which gives crack cocaine 100 times the weight of powder cocaine. Under the ratio, a person convicted of selling five grams of crack - about the weight of a teaspoon of salt - triggers the same...
...make $100,000 or more. Plus, during 2007 and through the first eight months of 2008, Booker signed some 160 executive orders either giving an employee a pay raise or starting a new hire at a salary above the minimum set by civil-service guidelines. Some orders gave low-level workers a more livable wage. Others were a bit gratuitous. For example, one aide went from making $107,225 to $118,607. Isn't 107 grand enough to live on? The fiscal impact of these orders totaled about $1.5 million...
...biggest questions in climate sensitivity has been the role of low-level cloud cover. Low-altitude clouds reflect some of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth. It's not yet known whether global warming will dissipate clouds, which would effectively speed up the process of climate change, or increase cloud cover, which would slow it down. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...clearing the haze. A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean - both from satellites and from the human eye - over the past 50 years and combined that with climate models. They found that low-level clouds tend to dissipate as the ocean warms - which means a warmer world could well have less cloud cover. "That would create positive feedback, a reinforcing cycle that continues to warm the climate," says Amy Clement, a climate scientist at the University of Miami and the lead author...
...data showed that as the Pacific Ocean has warmed over the past several decades - part of the gradual process of global warming - low-level cloud cover has lessened. That might be due to the fact that as the earth's surface warms, the atmosphere becomes more unstable and draws up water vapor from low altitudes to form deep clouds high in the sky. (Those types of high-altitude clouds don't have the same cooling effect.) The Science study also found that as the oceans warmed, the trade winds - the easterly surface winds that blow near the equator - weakened, which...