Sta per arrivare il quarto rapporto dell'IPCC sul riscaldamento globale. Molto semplicemente si rafforza l'opinione che l'intervento umano sia il più rilevante nel riscaldamento del pianeta. Ecco alcuni passi presi dal New York Times:

The main international scientific body assessing causes of climate change is closing in on its strongest statement yet linking emissions from burning fossil fuels to rising global temperatures, according to scientists involved in the process.

In fresh drafts of a summary of its next report, the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that it is more than 90 percent likely that global warming since 1950 has been driven mainly by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that more warming and rising sea levels are on the way.

Some scientists involved in drafting the report confirmed and clarified details but asked not to be identified because it was not finished.

In its last report, published in 2001, the panel concluded that there was a 66 to 90 percent chance that human activities were driving the most recent warming.

The shift in language in the current draft, while subtle, is substantive. If it remains in the final version, scheduled for release in Paris on Feb. 2, it will largely complete a quest that lasted decades to determine if humans are nudging the earth’s thermostat in potentially momentous ways.

Drafts of the report project a most likely warming of 4 to 8 degrees if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises to twice the 280 parts per million that it averaged for many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

The carbon dioxide concentration is now roughly 380 parts per million, and many climate experts say it will be extremely difficult to avoid hitting levels of 450 or 550 parts per million, or higher, later this century, given growth in populations and fuel use and the lack of nonpolluting alternatives that can be exploited at a sufficient scale to replace fossil fuels.

Una macchina incredibile

Un racconto assolutamente meraviglioso. L'ho rubato da un blog australiano (credo):


Somebody gives you an amazing machine. You're not sure exactly what it is ultimately about, why it exists, or why it's the only one like it you've ever seen or had. Everyday it changes - sometimes undetectably, sometimes massively. A variety of colours and textures cloak its surface, and sometimes you find it soothing just to look at, listen to, or even smell. The machine starts to do even more amazing things - it produces food each day, it provides clothing, sometimes it even rains on you and sometimes it keeps you dry when it rains all around you. Truly bizarre.

Although these things are at first stunning to you, after some years you decide you want to see wha else it can do, and sure enough it starts to give you materials to make things you want to make, energy of various sorts, and you even find it's a good way to meet new and interesting people. They're curious and amazed by your machine. Some of them offer you a lot of money for a tiny scraping of it to take home as a souvenir. You think about it, and even though you don't completely understand your machine, you decide it can't hurt. And it doesn't. A little scrape here, it repairs itself, a little scrape there, again it repairs itself. Wow!

One day, you notice a new and incredible colour - just a little patch. You scrape that off, and think nothing more of it. A week later, the food doesn't taste so good and you wonder why. After a month, the building materials that magically flow from it seem more brittle than usual. A year later, the colours aren't so bright, and it's even starting to smell a bit funny. You can't get as much energy out of it either. You get online and put questions all over message boards, write to DIPNR, Boral, Toyota - anybody that you can think of asking what to do.

Finally you get a letter from one of the smartest people in the world saying that they can fix it for a huge fee. Fortunately, you invested your scrapings money wisely in Alliance Resources and Silex shares so you can afford the fee. You send it off for repair and anxiously wait for 6 months. One day a package arrives - how exciting!! Inside is your wonderful machine, but it's in pieces and not doing anything special or colourful or useful at all.

There's a note from the smartest person in the world attached to it saying:

"Wow, I've never seen anything like this before. It was unique and we'd never seen anything like it before, the things it could do were incredible. We thought we knew what we were doing when we took it apart, but it just ended up as a bunch of pieces which didn't quite fit together anymore and produced an effect that was far less wondrous than the sum of its parts. Perhaps you should look at the instructions before you mess with it next time.

PS Thanks for all the money."

Un giorno o l'altro lo traduco e lo diffondo

... sono in grado di percepire questi campi (pipistrelli, squali eccetera). Si rendono conto che il campo magnetico si sta indebolendo e che le conseguenze potrebbero essere non gradevoli, diciamo. Inoltre, proprio per un caso assolutamente straordinario, molti di questi animali hanno subito mutazioni che permettono loro una comunicazione interspecifica che finora non era mai successo. Poiché dovrebbe essere un libro a metà strada tra la fantascienza e la fantasy, ci si può permettere di sorvolare sulle mutazioni stesse (anche se è necessaria un po' di spiegazione sul fenomeno). Insomma, alcune specie, diciamo corvi, procioni, qualche felino e forse cetacei come delfini e orche) possono comunicare con linguaggio e sintassi complessa anche tra le specie. Alcuni si mettono in testa di modificare lo stato delle cose e cercare, magari lontano (c'è sempre un viaggio di mezzo) qualche animale che potrebbe cambiare le cose. Potrebbe essere un pipistrello in Africa, molto grande e quindi in grado d influire sulle grandi forze della natura. Insomma il viaggio è l'occasione per verificare la differenza tra uomini e animali nell'approccio alla risoluzione dei problemi. Alcuni uomini infatti si accorgono della modifica allo stato delle cose in natura, e cercano di mettersi d'accordo con gli animali. Ma l'approccio è completamente diverso. Senza cultura millenaria alle spalle, gli animali sono quanto di più logico possa esistere. E quindi non hanno problemi a superare...