WASHINGTON — Miami would be a memory, Bangkok a soggy shadow of its former self and the Maldive Islands would vanish if melting polar ice keeps fueling a faster-than-expected rise in sea levels, scientists reported on Thursday. In an issue of the journal Science focusing on global warming, climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona reported that if global trends continue, Earth could ultimately see sea levels 20 feet higher than they are now. By the end of this century, Earth would be at least 4 degrees F (2.3 degrees C) warmer than now, or about as hot as it was nearly 130,000 years ago. Back then, significant portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melted, pushing the global sea levels to about 20 feet higher than current levels. A similarly dramatic, and in some cases catastrophic, rise in ocean levels could happen by the year 2500, Overpeck said in a telephone interview, but he noted it could come sooner. ‘We know when the sea level was that high in the past, and we know how much warming is necessary to get that amount of sea level rise from both Greenland and […]
TOKYO — Japan has suspended decisions on new yen loans to China, blaming its increasingly strained ties with its biggest trading partner and former wartime adversary. The move, although largely symbolic, marks a fresh low in relations between Asia’s two biggest powers, which have been dogged by disputes over territory and natural resources. Ties have worsened in recent years because of annual visits by Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s prime minister, to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, where 14 war criminals are honoured alongside millions of war dead. Shinzo Abe, chief cabinet secretary, said on Thursday that Tokyo would ‘put off making a decision on yen loans for this fiscal year to > US senators urge China to revalue the renminbi >Click here > China…because of various situations surrounding Sino-Japanese relations’. However, Mr Abe, the frontrunner to succeed Mr Koizumi as prime minister in September, said the freeze signalled a delay, not a suspension, and that yen loans would continue with the aim of securing ‘future-oriented Sino-Japanese relations’. Japan announced last year that it was winding down aid to China from 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. However, this is the first time that a reduction or freeze […]
Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative. At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn’t going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding. But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings – the investigators were not […]
Global warming is getting hotter both politically and climatically. Key skeptics of global warming among American evangelical Christians have made a 180-degree turn. They now call for immediate action to curb emissions of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas that drives climate warming. Last month, 86 evangelical leaders issued a statement that frames the climate-change debate as a moral issue. Titled ‘Climate Change: an Evangelical Call for Action,’ it states that ‘human-induced climate change is real.’ It adds that global warming will have ‘significant’ consequences that ‘will hit the poor hardest.’ It concludes that ‘Christian moral convictions demand our response to the climate change problem.’ The statement urges individuals and their churches to act locally and nationally to implement – and to urge the national government to implement – measures to reduce human-driven climate change. Theirs will be voices friendly to the Bush administration, urging that administration to rethink its reluctance to take serious action to reduce CO2 emissions. At the same time, another friendly voice urging such action is becoming more insistent. A few weeks ago, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament that Britain is now in a position to meet its CO2 emission reduction targets […]
To the casual human listener, the love song of a humpback whale sounds magnificently free-flowing and improvised. But fresh mathematical analysis of the song shows there are complex grammatical rules. Using syntax, the whales combine sounds into phrases, which they further weave into hours-long melodies packed with information. Although the researchers say these songs don’t meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language, this is the first evidence that animals other than humans use a hierarchical structure of communication. Whales have also been found to sing in dialects. The study is detailed online in the March issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The sound of love Many animals use sight and smell to communicate, but these senses are limited in the ocean. Whales rely on sound, which travels four times faster in water than in air. During mating season, which lasts six months, all humpback males sing the same song to woo the ladies. Over time, the group’s song becomes progressively more complex, although researchers don’t know quite why. Presumably, as one whale finds mating success by tinkering with the song style, the rest of the guys imitate it […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
