Word: speeding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Canada. The ship was well inside a region the satellites said should be choked with thick, multiyear-old ice. "That's pretty much a no-go zone for an icebreaker of the Amundsen's size," says Barber. But the ship kept going, at a brisk 13 knots - its top speed in open water is 13.7 knots - and even when it finally reached thick ice, he says, "we could still penetrate it easily...
That in turn would trigger one of the many positive feedback mechanisms that could speed up the warming effects of greenhouse gases. Open ocean reflects less of the Sun's energy than ice does, so a large-scale summer melt would mean more absorption of heat in the ocean. The warmer ocean would heat the air above it, which would slow the refreezing of ice in winter, which would in turn become even more susceptible to melting in summer...
Exactly when a catastrophic melt might occur, however, is unpredictable. The long-term rise in global temperature as a result of greenhouse-gas emissions is overlaid with natural, year-to-year variability in all sorts of interconnected oceanic and atmospheric cycles that slow down warming down or speed it up temporarily. But because these variations tend to be cyclical, the "perfect storm" of conditions that caused the record 2007 melting - a situation Stroeve calls "unusual, but not unprecedented" - will probably return at some point. If they do, the Arctic could be primed for major, even irreversible, changes...
...Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster, found that despite all the noise, substantial majorities of Americans on both sides of the political divide believe that climate change is real, and that something needs to be done about it. They don't want to know the details - the exact speed of the Himalayan glaciers' melt is not going to motivate the public one way or another...
Misek sees potential for acquisitions that speed the online delivery of software and services. "That's an area they're very keen on," he says. "If you look at where their gaps are and where the competition is going to come from, it's going to be from social aspects of software or social networking. If you're moving and adding content via iPods and iPhones, software has to enable the editing of it. We have a generational change in wireless usage, an inflection point, and they have to be well-positioned for that...