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Movie Showtimes, Tickets and Reviews from Yahoo! Movies on 2008-02-21
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SAT The Essay on 2008-01-26
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How the Essay is Scored on 2008-01-26
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demonstrates problems in sentence structure
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weak vocabulary or inappropriate word choice
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limited in its organization or focus
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inconsistently or use inadequate examples, reasons, or other evidence to support its position
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very little or no mastery
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adequate but inconsistent facility in the use of language
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generally organized and focused
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facility in the use of language
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reasonably consistent mastery, although it will have occasional errors or lapses in quality
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variety in sentence structure
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clear coherence and smooth progression of ideas
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develops a point of view on the issue and demonstrates outstanding critical thinking
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skillful use of language, using a varied, accurate, and apt vocabulary
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well organized and clearly focused
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clear and consistent mastery
>, although it may have a few minor errors
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SAT The Essay on 2008-01-26
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take care to develop your point of view, present your ideas logically and clearly, and use language precisely.
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- develop a point of view on an issue presented in an excerpt
- support your point of view using reasoning and examples from your reading, studies, experience, or observations
- follow the conventions of standard written English
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Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center Document on 2008-01-12
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The extremely complex nature of the earth's climate system makes predictions about future climate patterns especially tricky and open to debate. But this does not mean that scientists are confused about global warming. For one thing, it is quite clear that certain gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, play a crucial role in determining the earth's climate by preventing heat from escaping the atmosphere. Researchers have also been able to document that the increased concentration of such gases in the atmosphere results from human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and land degradation, cattle ranching, and rice farming.
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Warmer global temperatures are also expected to produce a more vigorous hydrological cycle, with the inherent prospect of more severe drought and/or floods in geographical areas prone to those types of events. Some sources project an increase in precipitation intensity, that is, more frequent rain- and snowfall of extreme magnitudes. Additional future adverse impacts from projected global warming include the possibilities of coastal flooding; severe stress on forests, wetlands and other ecosystems as plant species' ranges are altered on an accelerated time scale; dislocation of agriculture and commerce for similar reasons; and damage to human health from changes in the dissemination of serious infectious diseases.
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The warming over the next 100 years is expected to raise the average sea level by a best estimate of 19.7 in. (50 cm), with a range of 6 to 37.5 in. (15-95 cm).
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In some higher latitudes, agricultural productivity could actually rise even as farming was devastated in other areas. Small island states and countries such as Bangladesh, with extensive low-lying coastal areas, are especially vulnerable to sea-level rise.
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Scientists predict that sea levels will rise, making coastal groundwater saltier, endangering wetlands, and inundating valuable land and coastal communities. In many places, changes in precipitation patterns could have a greater impact than rising temperatures, with some regions likely to receive additional precipitation and other inland arid and semiarid regions likely to suffer from decreased rainfall. As wild plants and animals experienced changed climate conditions, some of them would be unable to adapt or migrate to new locations.
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However, there has been striking agreement among most scientists about what is most likely to occur. Computer models developed by climatologists suggest that the planet will warm up over the next generations, representing a more rapid climate change than at any time in recorded history. The current best estimate is that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations from preindustrial levels will cause temperatures to rise between 1.8 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.0-3.5°C).
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are being caused in part by human activities
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Even though the vast majority of scientists agree on the basics of climate science, the public portrayal of the issue has left many people with the impression that scientists are so deeply divided that remedial action is premature. Moreover, some anti-environmentalists have used global warming as a symbolic issue to suggest that scientists have such divergent and confused views of global trends that it is pointless to look to science for guidance.
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In considering the indirect historical record, the Intergovernmental Panel concluded that the 20th century was at least as warm as any period since 1400, while a recent study found the mean temperature of 1901-1990 is higher than any 90-year interval since ad 914.
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Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center Document on 2008-01-12
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Global warming scaremongers also claim that climate changes will increase tropical diseases, bringing them into non-tropical areas. But the fact that such diseases are not common in the Western world now has nothing to do with climate. Instead, as Western nations grew wealthier, we developed measures to protect against the disease carrying insects and other vectors. Such measures include the use of tightly enclosed homes with screens and air conditioning (keeping bugs out) and vector control, including the use of pesticides.
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Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center Document on 2008-01-12
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NRDC: Global Warming Basics on 2008-01-12
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Yes. The Bush administration has supported only voluntary reduction programs, but these have failed to stop the growth of emissions.
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Many companies in the automobile and energy industries put pressure on the White House and Congress to halt or delay new laws or regulations -- or even to stop enforcing existing rules -- that would drive such changes. From requiring catalytic converters to improving gas mileage, car companies have fought even the smallest measure to protect public health and the environment. If progress is to be made, the American people will have to demand it.
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The United States. Though Americans make up just 4 percent of the world's population, we produce 25 percent of the carbon dioxide pollution from fossil-fuel burning -- by far the largest share of any country. In fact, the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India and Japan, combined. Clearly America ought to take a leadership role in solving the problem. And as the world's top developer of new technologies, we are well positioned to do so -- we already have the know-how.
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gradual global warming triggers a sudden shift in the earth's climate, causing parts of the world to dramatically heat up or cool down in the span of a few years.
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In February 2004, consultants to the Pentagon released a report laying out the possible impacts of abrupt climate change on national security. In a worst-case scenario, the study concluded, global warming could make large areas of the world uninhabitable and cause massive food and water shortages, sparking widespread migrations and war.
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- Melting glaciers, early snowmelt and severe droughts will cause more dramatic water shortages in the American West.
- Rising sea levels will lead to coastal flooding on the Eastern seaboard, in Florida, and in other areas, such as the Gulf of Mexico.
- Warmer sea surface temperatures will fuel more intense hurricanes in the southeastern Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
- Forests, farms and cities will face troublesome new pests and more mosquito-borne diseases.
- Disruption of habitats such as coral reefs and alpine meadows could drive many plant and animal species to extinction.
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destructive potential of hurricanes has greatly increased along with ocean temperature over the past 35 years.
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but it does make them stronger and more dangerous. Because the ocean is getting warmer, tropical storms can pick up more energy and become more powerful
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In 2003, extreme heat waves caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe and more than 1,500 deaths in India. And in what scientists regard as an alarming sign of events to come, the area of the Arctic's perennial polar ice cap is declining at the rate of 9 percent per decade.
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rought created severe dust storms in Montana, Colorado and Kansas, and floods caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in Texas, Montana and North Dakota.
> Since the early 1950s, snow accumulation has declined 60 percent and winter seasons have shortened in some areas of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington.
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Yes. Although local temperatures fluctuate naturally, over the past 50 years the average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history. And experts think the trend is accelerating: the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Scientists say that unless we curb global warming emissions, average U.S. temperatures could be 3 to 9 degrees higher by the end of the century.
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Here's the good news: technologies exist today to make cars that run cleaner and burn less gas, modernize power plants and generate electricity from nonpolluting sources, and cut our electricity use through energy efficiency. The challenge is to be sure these solutions are put to use.
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Carbon dioxide and other air pollution that is collecting in the atmosphere like a thickening blanket, trapping the sun's heat and causing the planet to warm up. Coal-burning power plants are the largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide pollution -- they produce 2.5 billion tons every year. Automobiles, the second largest source, create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually.
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Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center Document on 2008-01-12
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It is clear, for example, that a planet earth with longer growing seasons, more rainfall, and higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels would be a "plant heaven."
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The increase in CO2 will make forests all over the world healthier and more robust—and allow them to support more wildlife.
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In other words, the smaller the temperature difference between the North Pole and the equator, the milder the weather. Most of the warming, if it occurs, will be toward the poles, with very little increase near the equator. Thus, there would be less of the temperature difference that drives big storms.
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Global warming scaremongers have also claimed that a warmer world would suffer more extreme weather events.
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It may seem paradoxical, but a modest warming in the polar regions will actually mean more arctic ice, not less. The polar ice caps depend on snowfall, and polar air is normally very cold and dry. If polar temperatures warm a few degrees, there will be more moisture in the air—and more snowfall, and more polar ice.
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Most of the trillion-dollar estimates of global warming "costs" headlined in the 1980s were based on forecasts that cities such as New York City and Bangladesh would be drowned under rising seas. In 1980, for example, some activists claimed that global warming would raise sea levels by twenty-five feet. In 1985, a National Research Council panel estimated a three-foot rise in the sea level. Those are frightening scenarios, but completely untrue.
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he Anasazi civilization of the Southwest grew abundant irrigated crops—and then vanished when the Little Optimum ended and the rainfall declined. The Toltecs and Aztecs built marvelous civilizations in Mexican highlands that were plentifully watered.
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Soon after the year 1400, however, the good weather ended. The world dropped into the Little Ice Age, with harsher cold, fiercer storms, severe droughts, more crop failures, and more famines. According to climate historian H. H. Lamb, during this period, "for much of the [European] continent, the poor were reduced to eating dogs, cats, and even children." The cold persisted until the 18th century.
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Prosperity, fostered by the abundant crops and lower death rates, stimulated a huge outpouring of human creativity—in engineering, trade, architecture, religion, art, and practical invention.
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Between 900 ad and 1300 ad, the earth warmed by some 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit—almost exactly what the models now predict for the twenty-first century. History books call it the Little Climate Optimum. Written and oral history tells us that the warming created one of the most favorable periods in human history. Crops were plentiful, death rates diminished, and trade and industry expanded—while art and architecture flourished.
The world's population experienced far less hunger. Food production surged because winters were milder and growing seasons longer. Key growing regions had fewer floods and droughts
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Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center Document on 2008-01-12
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- Vector-borne infectious diseases—such as malaria, dengue, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis and encephalitis—may alter their geographical ranges and seasonality, spreading into new regions and declining in others. But some vector-borne disease experts say too many factors are involved in insect and disease organism life cycles to make projections based primarily on climatic changes.
- Heat-related deaths could rise in response to more frequent and more intense heat-waves, particularly in temperate-zone cities and among the elderly and urban poor who lack adequate air conditioning. But little research has been conducted on heat stress in developing countries, and scientists are only now beginning to examine heat morbidity—illness and disability short of death.
- Cold-related mortality might decline. In at least some temperate-zone countries, this reduction in cold-weather deaths might offset the increase in heat-stress mortality. But Johns Hopkins' Patz suspects that the lives saved wouldn't balance lives lost.
- Air pollution in urban areas would likely rise as air temperatures warm—particularly the concentration of ground-level ozone, which is damaging to respiratory health and is a main component of urban smog. At the same time, if current scientific understanding is correct, warming of the atmosphere at low levels would actually cool the stratosphere, accelerating the destruction of the stratospheric ozone that protects the planet from damaging ultraviolet radiation. Shifts in local weather also could alter regional pollution patterns and the spread of airborne allergens such as pollens and mould spores.
- Extreme weather events could "play a more significant role than even the warming itself in creating conditions conducive to outbreaks of disease," says Dr Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Public Environment at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. In addition to direct injury, and loss of life, violent weather can destroy shelter, contaminate water supplies, cripple food production, foster myriad infectious diseases, and tear apart existing health service infrastructures.
- Population displacement, forced by rising sea levels or extreme weather or agricultural collapse, would complicate the public health challenge. Large numbers of refugees moving into already populated areas, crowded together, hungry and perhaps starving, without shelter or adequate sanitation, is a formula for spreading infectious disease and promoting social conflict. "Personally I think that population displacement will be the iceberg under the tip of this problem," says Patz. "The displaced population issue could be the toughest and largest public health issue of climate change, yet it is without doubt the most difficult to put our arms around."
- Malnutrition risks, and the diseases that accompany malnutrition, would rise as agricultural practices adapt to new patterns of temperature, rainfall and soil-moisture conditions. Improved farm production in some regions, including northern Europe, might balance losses elsewhere. "But the risk of reduced food yields is greatest in developing countries—where 790 million people are estimated to be undernourished at present," the IPCC report says.
- Warming oceans could promote more frequent toxic algal blooms, increase the incidence of diarrhoeal diseases, and spread the risk of poisonings from fish and shellfish toxins that now are mostly limited to tropical waters.
- Emerging infectious diseases—not just known diseases such as Ebola haemorrhagic fever but also new diseases that science has not yet recognized—might be set free by ecosystem changes in response to shifting local weather conditions, providing new niches for non-native micro-organisms. Ecological systems that are upset might also spur the evolution of new strains of disease organisms, according to the US National Academy of Sciences study of linkages between climate, ecosystems and infectious disease in the United States.
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