Word: opening
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...aftermath of the e-mails, climate scientists and advocates will need to rethink how they engage with critics. Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech, wrote in a much discussed blog post that researchers need to make climate data much more open and transparent, and that scientists need to be wary of falling into what she calls "climate tribalism." She argues that mainstream climate scientists are now resorting to the same smear tactics that skeptics have long used against climate scientists - something Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the think tank Breakthrough Institute have called "climate McCarthyism...
...climate scientists cannot be expected to debate with a skeptical monolith. While the largely conservative doubters of man-made climate change are a small minority, they remain immovable. What scientists view as healthy debate, critics tend to see as evidence that the scientific case is still open - and the American public, large portions of which are all but scientifically illiterate, are not equipped to make the distinction...
Health care reform legislation cleared an important hurdle on Nov. 21, when the U.S. Senate voted to open full debate on a proposed 10-year, $848 billion overhaul of the industry. Democrats relied on a coalition of centrists and liberals to advance the measure with a filibuster-proof 60-to-39 vote; all the nays came from Republicans. Maintaining the fragile Democratic alliance could mean weeks of legislative haggling and debate: four key moderate Senators oppose the inclusion of a public-insurance option, which some colleagues on the left consider nonnegotiable. A final vote is probably a month or more...
...years, anti-Chinese riots have erupted everywhere from the Solomon Islands and Zambia to Tonga and Lesotho. Tensions are also simmering in India, where the Chinese are involved in several major infrastructure projects. Even high-level officials are speaking up. In Vietnam, plans for a $140 million Chinese-operated open-pit bauxite mine were publicly excoriated by none other than revolutionary hero General Vo Nguyen Giap because, he said, of "the serious risk to the natural and social environment...
...Tensions exploded in the 1990s on the P.N.G. island of Bougainville, where concerns over the environmental and economic effects of an Anglo-Australian-run copper mine sparked a secessionist struggle that claimed 15,000 lives over the course of a decade. (The mine, one of the world's largest open-pit sites, is now closed as a result of the civil war, which officially ended in 2000.) Separately, the national government was forced to declare a state of emergency in Southern Highlands province three years ago when protests over a multinational consortium's proposed gas pipeline reached a crescendo...