Word: rains
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...much is a rain forest worth? Until recently the answer was: virtually nothing. A tropical rain forest provides habitat for untold species of animals and varieties of plants; modulates the climate and helps bring precipitation to land thousands of miles away; sequesters billions upon billions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. But the only market value a forest had were the trees within it, cut down. "Forests fall for a simple reason," says Andrew Mitchell, a conservationist and the founder of the London-based Global Canopy Programme, an umbrella group of forest organizations. "They are worth more dead than alive...
...current drivers are not, understandably, sounding quite so cavalier. The end of traction control should suit those with recent experience in other grades of motor racing where the device is banned, and those who are strong in the rain. The first impulse of Räikkönen's Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa, on the other hand, is to max out acceleration, regardless of the conditions, and few were surprised by the Brazilian's involvement in the first-lap mayhem in Melbourne, nor his spinout on lap 31 in Sepang, where he appeared to have second place...
From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit...
...Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands...
...even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. "People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. "But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious...