Word: modelers
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...country's immense Amazonian region. It is, however, also one of Brazil's most violent states. In 2008 alone, 13 people were assassinated because of their involvement in land reform issues. It is a disturbing counterindicator to all of the talk of Brazil being a 21st-century economic role model at the forefront of the newly developed coterie of nations. (Why Brazil is the one country that might avoid recession...
Frank Ackerman says that the EPA is basing its SCC calculations on models that minimize the economic risks of climate change. He notes that one model includes the assumption that for the first few decades, climate change will bring economic benefits to the world as a whole...
William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, whose DICE (Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy) is among the three considered in EPA's calculations, points to the difficulty of coming up with accurate figures while climate science is still evolving. "It's a slow process," he says, noting that while there is documentation on rising sea levels, there are little data on such factors as methane release from melting permafrost, the impacts of ocean acidification, and the timing of the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. "We as social scientists can't [offer...
...does exist, the Higgs would help plug a hole in the so-called Standard Model - the far-reaching set of equations that incorporates all that is known about the interaction of subatomic particles and is the closest thing physicists have to a testable "theory of everything." But many theoreticians feel that even if the Higgs boson exists, the Standard Model is unsatisfactory; for instance, it is unable to explain the presence of gravity, or the existence of something called "dark matter," which prevents spiral galaxies like our Milky Way from falling apart. Even the mighty Higgs cannot explain those mysteries...
Given the problems with the Standard Model, some physicists have come up with elaborate alternatives to explain the workings of the cosmos, including the existence of multiple, alternate dimensions, or hidden "supersymmetric partners" to all the universe's particles. To them, failure to find the Higgs - or finding the Higgs among an ensemble of strange and new particles - would be welcome, since it would suggest that more ambitious theories are needed. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...