Excerpt
Increasingly, the expression “global warming” is being replaced in the news media by the much more ominous one of “runaway global warming” (e.g., Hileman 2005; Brown 2006), auguring more or less explicitly the possible extinction of the human race in the not too distant future. Often, no real justification is offered for the added “runaway” qualifier, other than the fact that things are rapidly getting worse. This perception is reinforced daily, for example by reports of ever more abnormal weather patterns all over the world or by shocking images of huge chunks of the ice cap in Antarctica collapsing into the ocean at a rate far more rapid than was expected even a couple of years ago. Yet, with few exceptions, newspapers and news programs on radio and television rarely delve into in-depth analyses of the situation. One has to turn to specialized scholarly journals to find detailed (but technical and therefore not widely accessible) accounts of the processes that seem to make global warming accelerate at an alarming pace.
In these accounts, soil-related processes are more and more in the spotlight (e.g., Smith et al. 1998; Kirschbaum 2006; Å …
Footnotes
Philippe c. Bavey in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell university in Ithaca, New York, at the time this feature article was written. He is currently the chair of soil ecosystem modeling at the University of Abertay, Dundee, Scotland, as part of the SIMBIOS team, a multidisciplinary group of scientists working at the bio-physical interfaces related to environmental and ecological challenges.
- Copyright 2007 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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