Word: newe
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...those patients in the middle - Medicare patients like Ira and Tony, the younger HMO types doing well but working harder and harder, the aging professionals dealing with their first serious pains - they seem to be of a new mind lately. So do the unemployed who foresee the day their COBRA benefits will end, and the still fully employed whose company plans in 2010 entail higher deductibles, higher copays and reduced benefits. Whatever their situation, these patients are less interested in therapy and anti-inflammatories, or in just waiting to see if the pain stops by itself. (Quite often it does...
There are many units by which to measure the impact of climate change: degrees of increasing temperature, feet of rising sea level, dollars needed to adapt to a warming world. But a group of scientists in California have put forth an intriguing new unit of measurement: kilometers per year...
Until now, ecologists have mostly focused on these factors as they affect individual species, but the new paper takes a more global view. By combining temperature projections on a very fine scale with global topographic maps, researchers have predicted change not for specific species, but for the climatic zones they need to keep up with...
More than intuitive, this new index could also prove very useful, especially to conservationists who work to keep species from extinction. While the average velocity of climate change may be a bit less than a half-kilometer per year worldwide, according to the paper, it can be significantly faster or slower depending on the local topography. In deserts and other flat areas, such as the Amazon basin, climatic zones will move faster, while hilly or mountainous terrain will slow things up. "In the Northern Hemisphere, for example," explains lead author Scott Loarie, "north-facing slopes tend to be cooler...
Nevertheless, while the climate-velocity concept is still crude, it's promising enough that Ackerly is collaborating with an organization called the Bay Area Open Space Council on habitat conservation strategies in central California. The new research informs one of the key challenges conservationists face: having only limited funds to buy up land, and, thus, having to spend wisely. "What we bring," says Ackerly, "is the ability to think about how topography might affect those decisions...