Word: planetable
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...have already made flooding a fact of life in many cities. Now urban Asia must brace for sea-level rises, tidal surges, extreme weather and other climatic horrors. From ports in China and India to delta populations in Vietnam and Burma, this fast-developing region has most of our planet's urban dwellers - and its most vulnerable cities. Asia is not alone, however. From Mombasa to Miami, climate change imperils 3,351 cities lying in low-elevation coastal zones, says UN-HABITAT, the U.N. agency for human settlements. Places that once thrived because of their proximity to rivers and oceans...
European astronomers hailed a landmark discovery: a planet outside our solar system that's solid and rocky like Earth. After months of observation, scientists confirmed Corot-7b is not a giant gas ball like Jupiter--a finding that heartened experts who believe potential alien life would require a firm surface. The planet, some 500 light-years away, is similar in size to Earth. One key difference: Corot-7b's proximity to its sun raises its daytime surface temperature to a balmy 3600?...
...world attempts to break the carbon addiction that already has it well on the way to climate catastrophe, more clearly defined limits will be useful. But climate diplomats should remember that while they can negotiate with one another, ultimately, they can't negotiate with the planet. Unless we manage our presence on Earth better, we may soon be in the last days of our Long Summer...
...planetary boundaries that Rockstrom identifies in the paper. Other boundaries involve freshwater overuse, the global agricultural cycle and ozone loss. In each case, he scans the state of science to find ecological limits that we can't violate, lest we risk passing a tipping point that could throw the planet out of whack for human beings. It's based on a theory that ecological change occurs not so much cumulatively, but suddenly, after invisible thresholds have been reached. Stay within the lines, and we might just be all right...
...felt the full effects, Rockstrom says, because carbon acts gradually on the climate - but once warming starts, it may prove hard to stop unless we reduce emissions sharply. Ditto for the nitrogen cycle, where industrialized agriculture already has humanity pouring more chemicals into the land and oceans than the planet can process, and for wildlife loss, where we risk biological collapse. "We can say with some confidence that Earth cannot sustain the current rate of loss without significant erosion of ecosystem resilience," says Rockstrom...