Word: planetful
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...satisfying to his eco-apocalyptic politics. After all, if El Nino is the cause of a biblical plague of calamitous weather, and if global warming is the cause of El Nino, then you have a most beautiful link: human sin--burning carbon and, more generally, prideful exploitation of the planet for man's pleasure and greater glory--makes hail and floods and fire and brimstone fall upon us from heaven. Angry skies are no mere Act of God; they are provoked by man. It is a theology the Aztecs and the Hittites would have recognized at once...
...House, has been overtaken and outdated by contemporary events. "That was the era of Linus Pauling and vitamin C and the common cold," says Marion Nestle, chairman of the department of nutrition at New York University and a Joy contributor. "Frances Moore Lappe's book Diet for a Small Planet had just come out, emphasizing the importance of balanced protein. So the nutrition content of the book in 1975 really emphasized protein, beyond all other nutritional information. Today, issues of calories and fat and caloric balance and exercise and moderation are much more important...
...politicians started talking seriously about the problem in the late 1980s, the relationship between the proliferation of carbon dioxide and a warming world was largely theoretical. Scientists knew that CO2 and other gases trap the sun's energy; in fact, without any CO2 at all in the atmosphere, the planet would be frozen solid. The notion that extra, human-generated CO2 might drive temperatures too far the other way was convincing. But if warming was on the way, it was too gradual to be detected...
Flora and fauna are showing the impact of a hotter planet too. Animals that thrive in warmer climates, like the Edith's checkerspot butterfly in the American West, have begun to extend their range northward, while cold-loving creatures such as brook trout have vanished in some areas. Plants are pushing to higher latitudes and higher altitudes. Tropical diseases, including malaria and dengue fever, have begun to move into regions that were once too cold for their insect carriers...
...codes, PIN codes, tracking numbers and confirmation codes: we live in a sea of irrational numbers. The artist formerly known as Prince now goes by a cryptic glyph, and the most famous shoe company on the planet advertises itself with a swoosh. And even as we pride ourselves on our exfoliating identities, our names seem ever more beside the point. The handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, for example, was perhaps most significant as the disappearance of a culture of zany hybrids--Sir Run Run Shaw, Philemon Choi and Freedom Leung--into one where there are 4,000 Zheng...