Word: scientist
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...effort to make good on the President's prior commitments. Meanwhile, the President's chief of staff John Sununu has taken to questioning aspects of the greenhouse theory. There is room for debate over the exact magnitude of climate change that will result from CO2 emissions, but no respectable scientist denies that if humanity keeps pouring gases into the atmosphere, the earth will heat up. The U.S. has spent several trillion dollars over the past 40 years buying insurance against a Soviet nuclear attack. Global warming, by contrast, is not just a risk but a certainty. It would...
...named Casaubon hides after closing time in a Paris museum called the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Nearby, an enormous pendulum swings silently in the gathering darkness, mute testimony, as a 19th century French scientist named Foucault first demonstrated, to the rotation of the earth. Casaubon is here because he suspects something terrible will happen before dawn. If he is correct, then he and two friends, playful inventors of a plot to rule the world, do not have long to live. In their machinations, have he and his coconspirators accidentally stumbled across some dangerous truth? Or, % perhaps worse, have their...
...Einstein was visiting the Long Beach campus of the University of California. He and his host from the department of geology walked through the campus, intently discussing the motions of earthquakes. Suddenly they looked up in puzzlement to see people running out of campus buildings. Einstein and the other scientist had been so busy discussing seismology that they did not notice the earthquake occurring under their feet...
...Nature is at its best when McKibben explains the consequences of his "end of nature." Although not a scientist, he writes clearly and perceptively about several reasonably esoteric subjects--from genetic engineering to the recently-discovered hole in the Antarctic ozone layer. Although his explanations of global warming may seem doom-laden, they contain enough hard facts to give even the least environmentally aware person a serious jolt...
...ultimately, McKibben is a sentimentalist, not a scientist, for which The End of Nature suffers. The book's last chapter dissolves into a series of ruminations about what McKibben terms an "anthropocentric" society that values human life above all other forms. In order to forestall the end of nature, he says, humanity needs to begin thinking about the earth as a whole...