Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Review. While Richard Nixon backed national health insurance and Ronald Reagan tempered his muscular rhetoric with political flexibility, today's dominant conservatives are little more than "inverse Marxists," clenching an outdated dogma that would sooner see government destroyed than saved. The result is a shrinking movement inhabiting a "fringe orbit" irrelevant to the needs of today's America, an intellectual flatlining confirmed by Barack Obama's victory. Tanenhaus traces conservatism's history with respect and likens its crisis to the funk that bedeviled liberalism after the failures of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (though he glosses over modern...
...record of the Arctic over the past 2,000 years, and found that the region had been cooling for almost all of that time period. Summer temperatures in the Arctic cooled by an average of 0.2 degrees C each thousand years, thanks chiefly to wobbles in the Earth's orbit around the sun that gradually reduced the amount of sunlight hitting the Arctic. Left unchecked, the Arctic would have continued that slow cooling for thousands of more years, until the Earth's orbit wobbled again. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
Other methods include spraying seawater mist from ships toward low-lying clouds, which would then reflect more sunlight. Another more extreme but oft-discussed option would involve putting mirrors into the earth's orbit. If those ideas have the disadvantage of sounding convoluted, they have the real advantage of being cheap - at least in relative terms. According to the new paper by Lane and J. Eric Bickel of the University of Texas, the seawater-mist method could counteract a century's worth of warming for $9 billion. Compare that to the political complexity and the economic unknowns associated with...
...political drift could have other consequences. Another report, by a panel of E.U. experts advising the Bulgarian government, says Bulgaria is spinning out of Brussels' orbit. As yet unpublished, the report by the International Advisory Board for Bulgaria says Russia could regain its historic hold on the country if political forces and civil society fail to spell out a strong European agenda. It warns that Bulgaria, which depends on Russia for 92% of its gas supplies, is uniquely vulnerable to Moscow. (Read "How One Man Plans to Sink the European Union...
Most importantly, perhaps, Russia is incensed about E.U. efforts to draw the countries that lie between the E.U. and Russia closer into its orbit. Russia has traditionally regarded Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and other former Soviet states along its border as its "privileged sphere of influence," in the words of President Dmitry Medvedev. The E.U.'s new "Eastern Partnership" initiative, launched in May, offers these countries economic integration and stronger political ties. Although the E.U. has shied away from talking about the prospect of membership, however distant, it hopes to help its eastern neighbors to become richer, more stable and more...