Word: oceanic
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...climate depends on thousands of things, from Antarctic sea ice to sub-Saharan soil conditions. While the electronic simulations are monuments to the ingenuity and perseverance of their creators, they provide us with, at best, a fuzzy view of the future. They have difficulty handling factors like clouds and ocean currents (two major influences on climate), and if you fed the climate of 1900 into any of them, they couldn't predict the climatic history of the 20th century. Like everything else in this frustrating field, the models' limitations force us to make important decisions in the face of imperfect...
...five years old and weighs 150 lbs., we're killing and eating the teenagers before they can reproduce. And though the U.S. is trying, at last, to lead a campaign to stop the slaughter, the effort is too little, too late. Swordfish, like tuna and the other pelagic (open-ocean) fish, roam far from American jurisdiction. There have been reliable reports of commercial fishermen in the Mediterranean routinely landing swordfish weighing between 10 and 15 lbs.--the babies, less than a year...
Known for the novels and screenplays that have spawned such movies as Jaws and the TV series Peter Benchley's Amazon, the author has narrated dozens of films on ocean conservation. Join TIME.com to talk to Peter Benchley on Thursday, Nov. 4, at 8 p.m. E.T. at chat.yahoo.com/time
...argument hinges on the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that brings warm surface water north and east and heats Europe. As it travels, some of the water evaporates; what's left is saltier and thus denser. Eventually the dense surface water sinks to the sea bottom, where it flows back southward. And then, near the equator, warm, fresh water from tropical rivers and rain dilutes the salt once again, allowing the water to rise to the surface, warm up and begin flowing north again...
...with global warming, melting ice from Greenland and the Arctic Ocean could pump fresh water into the North Atlantic; so could the increased rainfall predicted for northern latitudes in a warmer world. Result: the Gulf Stream's water wouldn't get saltier after all and wouldn't sink so easily. Without adequate resupply, the southerly underwater current would stop, and the Gulf Stream would in turn be shut...