Word: planet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're doing more than warming the planet and scrambling the climate. We're also conducting what climatologist James Hansen has called a "vast uncontrolled experiment." In effect, we're on our way to engineering a world very different from the one we were handed. Belatedly, we're trying to turn off the carbon spigot, hoping that by incrementally reducing the emissions we've spent a couple of centuries pouring into the air we can stop the climate slide before it's too late...
...small but growing number of researchers are beginning to say yes. If we geoengineered the earth into a mess with our uncontrolled appetite for fossil fuels, maybe we have to geoengineer our way out of it - in effect, directly cooling the planet via a controlled experiment to counteract our uncontrolled one. Indeed, according to a just-published paper for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate - a think tank studying inexpensive solutions to climate change - geoengineering might not only be a good way to bring rising temperatures under short-term control while we wait for the longer-term fix of cutting carbon...
...very things that qualified the men to go to the moon ... disqualified them to describe their journey with any lyricism." Perhaps Swigert has never heard of Antoine de St. Exupéry, the French aviator, explorer and writer, whose internationally loved fictional creation, the Little Prince is from the planet B612. Somehow I believe St. Exupéry would have fulfilled NASA's requirement "for pilots who were made of tough physical stuff" in spite of his many other talents. NASA should broaden its scope. Jeanette F. Huber, KINSALE, IRELAND...
...struggling with apartheid," recalls retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the moral force of South Africa's political change, "we spoke of People Power. You had to be with the people to make change happen." At the dawn of a new century, his words may feel stunningly obvious. Yet to a planet conditioned by colonialism or Confucianism or tyranny to think that the people's obligation is to follow, not lead, Aquino's inspiration was truly transformative...
That is true even of Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more during this recession than anyone else on the planet. The 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Sands Expo and Convention Center and the Venetian Macao, was in 2007 and '08 the third richest person in the world, with - by his estimate - a net worth of $40 billion. By February of this year, he said he had lost $36.5 billion - more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. In the years before that slide, banks were...