Word: warmed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...until this academic crisis. At a personal level, the strange experience of making a case for my own sadness robbed my mental health of its dignity. As a result, the eventual decision to allow me to remain at school felt like a hollow victory of persuasion rather than a warm gesture of understanding. My experience may have been unique but I am by no means alone. Whether we can point to a reason or not, we can all understand the difficulty of being depressed at Harvard. In the National Health Assessment survey of Harvard students, 40 percent of participating Harvard...
...turns out, the situation is far more complex. In a paper published in next Tuesday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, a team of climate researchers reports that worldwide tree growth would actually warm the atmosphere, despite the corresponding decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide...
...main reason has to do with the Arctic and Antarctic. As polar climates warm enough for trees to move in, the color of that part of the earth will change, as viewed from above. Green trees, which absorb more light, will replace whiter snow and ice, which reflect more rays back to space. Like a dark-colored car hood on a hot day, a dark-colored earth will warm. The group’s computer modeling experiments show that the localized warming due to the change in the earth’s surface reflectivity (called its “albedo?...
...situation is a little different in the tropical regions. Tropical soils are much darker than polar snows, so replacing open land with trees makes little difference as to how much light the land reflects. In fact, planting trees in the tropics actually cools the earth. Warm-weather trees help to draw water out of the ground and into the atmosphere, creating clouds that reflect light and keep the atmosphere cool...
There’s a larger lesson here, however, than where not to plant trees: Optimism alone will not slow climate change. The Gaia hypothesis, taken to an extreme, implies that humans can sit back and watch the Earth warm, and eventually the earth will respond and restore itself. The view is characteristic of many individuals’ (and nations’) attitudes today. True, the earth will respond, but when it’s finished responding, it won’t look anything like the earth we have now. By now, you’ve probably heard the litany...