Word: sky
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...look at fuel, not Fords: institute carbon taxes that raise the price of gas. We already know that higher gas prices discourage driving and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions - total vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. declined 3.6% in 2008 compared with the previous year, thanks largely to the sky-high price of gas for much of 2008. (The recession didn't help, but sharp declines in driving began well before the bottom dropped out of the economy.) As gas prices have fallen in 2009, however, driving has begun to tick back...
...clapped, and sighed with every rogue movement of a cloud or surreptitious inching forward of the moon. It was a show with no language and no tickets. I imagined, across the strip of land that was experiencing total eclipse, people turning in unison as the sky went dark and the sun billowed out at them around a deep black hole. There may be nothing tangible that can unite every person across that strip of land from Varanasi to Shanghai except, perhaps, the fact that for one instant of total eclipse they all lived where the sun chose to hide itself...
...When the last curve of the moon moved out of the sun’s way, everyone clapped. That is, everyone but one. A six-year-old kid, who had sat videotaping the sky for hours, bawled. Maybe he was mourning the fact that everything was going to be the same again. We crave change, but we don’t make it happen: We expect it to happen...
Getting data on cloud cover isn't easy. There is reliable information from satellites, but those only go back a few decades - not long enough to provide a reliable forecast for the future. Clement and her colleagues combined recent satellite data with human observations - literally, from sailors scanning the sky - that go back to 1952, and found the two sets were surprisingly in sync. "It's pretty remarkable," says Clement. "We were almost shocked by the degree of concordance...
...decades - part of the gradual process of global warming - low-level cloud cover has lessened. That might be due to the fact that as the earth's surface warms, the atmosphere becomes more unstable and draws up water vapor from low altitudes to form deep clouds high in the sky. (Those types of high-altitude clouds don't have the same cooling effect.) The Science study also found that as the oceans warmed, the trade winds - the easterly surface winds that blow near the equator - weakened, which further dissipated the low clouds...