Obama’s Science Report Card. © AFP/Getty Images In the heat of presidential elections, a conscientious electorate hopes that the nation’s most pressing issues bubble to the surface, helping to inform the decision of who is most fit to lead the country for the next 4 years. This time around, jobs, the economy, health care, and foreign policy are taking center stage in the national discussion surrounding the presidential candidates.
But with all that is at stake in this election, America’s scientific research cuts across all of these sectors, and the candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, have voiced different visions for the future of the scientific enterprise. It behooves scientists of all stripes—especially biomedical researchers, whose funding often comes from federal science agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—and members of the public who value scientific research to consider the candidates’ stances on matters of science policy. Credit: © C.J. —Hayley Dunning —Edyta Zielinska —Bob Grant. Climate change: A guide for the perplexed - environment - 16 May 2007. Our planet's climate is anything but simple.
All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors. Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences. Yes, there are still big uncertainties in some predictions, but these swing both ways. For example, the response of clouds could slow the warming or speed it up. With so much at stake, it is right that climate science is subjected to the most intense scrutiny. What does not help is for the real issues to be muddied by discredited arguments or wild theories.
What is happening now? New: Any cooling disproves global warming Global warming stopped in 1998. THE WORLD DREAM BANK: FUTURES: DUBIA, A GREENHOUSE EARTH. World Dream Bank home - add a dream - newest - art gallery - sampler - dreams by title, subject, author, date, places, names A portrait of a possible Earth one thousand years from now by Chris Wayan, 2003 Dubia's premise is simple enough in theory. But like most collisions between politics and nature, it gets very messy in practice. Suppose we avoid war, plague, and famine, and the world goes democratic and capitalist? That appears to be the dream of President George W.
Bush, or, as he's sometimes known, Dubya. But part of Dubya's dream is that oil goes on ruling the world for another generation. So our grandchildren live in a world with C02 levels double ours, 600-700 ppm. That world heats up. But once the catastrophe's happened and the survivors replant, and adjust to redwoods at the poles, and farms in Siberia, and jungles on the prairies, and coral seas where great cities once stood... what if they don't change it back? So... they leave the new world alone, to stabilize. Dubia. The Drought’s Alert for Corn. FROM where I sit on the north end of America’s grain belt, I can almost hear the corn popping to the south of me. The drought threatens to drive up global corn prices beyond their level in 2007-8, when food demonstrations broke out around the world. But such crises often lead to change — and transformation is what is needed to make our food system less vulnerable.
We have become dangerously focused on corn in the Midwest (and soybeans, with which it is cultivated in rotation). This limited diversity of crops restricts our diets, degrades our soils and increases our vulnerability to droughts. Farmers in the central plains used to grow a greater diversity of food and forage crops, including oats, hay, alfalfa and sorghum. But they gradually opted to grow more and more corn thanks to federal agricultural subsidies and expanding markets for corn in animal feed, corn syrup and ethanol. Corn’s weakness is that it is highly susceptible to drought.
Global Warming's Terrifying New Math | Politics News. If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record. " The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Earth in 50,000 Years: Lots More Information" How does global warming affect the scenario of the ice age in our future? In the long term, not much. In the near term, however, global warming could change our world drastically. The full effects of global warming will be felt in the next 200 years, say by 2200. At that time, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be higher than any time during the past 650,000 years [source: Thompson and Than].
The carbon dioxide will prevent solar energy from radiating back into space, warming the planet considerably. As average temperatures rise, even just a couple of degrees, glaciers will melt, sea levels will rise and coastal flooding will occur. The oceans will also be warmer and more acidic, which will cause a widespread collapse of coral reefs. This will be a critical time for our home planet, and it might seem that things couldn't get much worse.
So, what are the chances Homo sapiens will be around to enjoy Earth in 50,000 years? And yet humans have evolved and continue to evolve today.