It seems impossible to have an honest conversation about global warming. I say this after diligently perusing the British government’s huge report released last week by Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and now a high civil servant. The report is a masterpiece of misleading public relations. It foresees dire consequences if global warming isn’t curbed: a worldwide depression and flooding of many coastal cities. Meanwhile, the costs of minimizing these awful outcomes are small: only 1 percent of world economic output in 2050.
No sane person could fail to conclude that we should conquer global warming instantly, if not sooner. Who could disagree Well, me. Stem’s headlined conclusions are intellectual fictions. They’re essentially fabrications to justify an aggressive anti-global-warming agenda. The danger of that is that we’d end up with the worst of both worlds: a program that harms the economy without much cutting of greenhouse gases.
Let me throw some messy realities onto Stern’s tidy picture. In the global-warming debate, there’s a big gap between public rhetoric and public behavior. Greenhouse emissions continue to rise despite many earnest pledges to control them. Just last week, the United Nations reported that of the 41 countries it monitors (not including most developing nations), 34 had increased greenhouse emissions from 2000 to 2004. These include most countries committed to reducing emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
Why is this In rich democracies, policies that might curb greenhouse gases require politicians and the public to act in exceptionally "enlightened" ways. They have to accept "pain" now for benefits that won’t materialize for decades, probably after they’re dead. And even if rich countries cut emissions, it won’t make much difference unless poor countries do likewise and so far, they’ve refused because that might jeopardize their economic growth and poverty-reduction efforts.
The notion that there’s only a modest tension between suppressing greenhouse gases and sustaining economic growth is highly dubious. Stern arrives at his trivial costs—that 1 percent of world GDP in 2050—by essentially assuming them. His estimates presume that, with proper policies, technological improvements will automatically reconcile declining emissions with adequate economic growth. This is a heroic leap. To check warming, Stern wants annual emissions 25 percent below current levels by 2050. The IEA projects that economic growth by 2050 would more than double emissions. At present, we can’t bridge that gap.
The other great distortion in Stern’s report involves global warming’s effects. No one knows what these might be, because we don’t know how much warming might occur, when, where, or how easily people might adapt. Stern’s horrific specter distills many of the most terrifying guesses, including some imagined for the 22nd century, and implies they’re imminent. The idea is to scare people while reassuring them that policies to avert calamity, if started now, would be fairly easy and inexpensive.

Most plants can make their own food from sunlight, (1) some have discovered that stealing is an easier way to live. Thousands of plant species get by (2) photosynthesizing, and over 400 of these species seem to live by pilfering sugars from an underground (3) of fungi(真菌). But in (4) a handful of these plants has this modus operandi been traced to a relatively obscure fungus. To find out how (5) are (6) , mycologist Martin Bidartondo of the University of California at Berkeley and his team looked in their roots. What they found were (7) of a common type of fungus, so (8) that it is found in nearly 70 percent of all plants. The presence of this common fungus in these plants not only (9) at how they survive, says Bidartondo, but also suggests that many ordinary plants might prosper from a little looting, too.
Plants have (10) relations to get what they need to survive. Normal, (11) plants can make their own carbohydrates through photosynthesis, but they still need minerals. Most plants have (12) a symbiotic relationship with a (13) network of what are called my corrhizal fungi, which lies beneath the forest (14) . The fungi help green plants absorb minerals through their roots, and (15) , the plants normally (16) the fungi with sugars, or carbon with a number of plants sharing the same fungal web, it was perhaps (17) that a few cheaters—dubbed epiparasites—would evolve to beat the system. (18) , these plants reversed the flow of carbon, (19) it into their roots from the fungi (20) releasing it as "payment.\

Human relations have commanded people’s attention from early times. The ways of people have been recorded in innumerable myths, folktales, novels, poems, plays, and popular or philosophical essays. Although the full significance of a human relationship may not be directly evident, the complexity of feelings and actions that can be understood at a glance is surprisingly great. For this reason psychology holds a unique position among the sciences.
" Intuitive " knowledge may be remarkably penetrating and can significantly help us understand human behavior whereas in the physical sciences such common sense knowledge is relatively primitive. If we erased all knowledge of scientific physics from our world, not only would we not have cars and television sets, we might even find that the ordinary person was unable to cope with the fundamental mechanical problems of pulleys and levers. On the other hand, if we removed all knowledge of scientific psychology from our world, problems in interpersonal relations might easily be coped with and solved much as before. We would still " know " how to avoid doing something asked of us and how to get someone to agree with us: we would still " know " when someone was angry and when someone was pleased. One could even offer sensible explanations for the " whys " of much of the self’s behavior and feelings. In other words, the ordinary person has a great and profound understanding of the self and of other people which though unformulated or only vaguely conceived, enables one to interact with others in more or less adaptive ways. Kohler in referring to the lack of great discoveries in psychology as compared with physics, accounts for this by saying that " people were acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long time before the founding of scientific psychology. "
Paradoxically, with all this natural, intuitive, commonsense capacity to grasp human relations, the science of human relations had been one of the last to develop. Different explanations of this paradox have been suggested. One is that science would destroy the vain and pleasing illusions people have about themselves; but we might ask why people have always loved to read pessimistic, debunking writings, from Ecclesiastes to Freud. It has also been proposed that just because we know so much about people intuitively, there has been less incentive for studying them scientifically: why should one develop a theory, carry out systematic observations, or make predictions about the obvious In any case, the field of human relations, with its vast literary documentation but meager scientific treatment, is in great contrast to the field of physics in which there are relatively few nonscientific books.

Most plants can make their own food from sunlight, (1) some have discovered that stealing is an easier way to live. Thousands of plant species get by (2) photosynthesizing, and over 400 of these species seem to live by pilfering sugars from an underground (3) of fungi(真菌). But in (4) a handful of these plants has this modus operandi been traced to a relatively obscure fungus. To find out how (5) are (6) , mycologist Martin Bidartondo of the University of California at Berkeley and his team looked in their roots. What they found were (7) of a common type of fungus, so (8) that it is found in nearly 70 percent of all plants. The presence of this common fungus in these plants not only (9) at how they survive, says Bidartondo, but also suggests that many ordinary plants might prosper from a little looting, too.
Plants have (10) relations to get what they need to survive. Normal, (11) plants can make their own carbohydrates through photosynthesis, but they still need minerals. Most plants have (12) a symbiotic relationship with a (13) network of what are called my corrhizal fungi, which lies beneath the forest (14) . The fungi help green plants absorb minerals through their roots, and (15) , the plants normally (16) the fungi with sugars, or carbon with a number of plants sharing the same fungal web, it was perhaps (17) that a few cheaters—dubbed epiparasites—would evolve to beat the system. (18) , these plants reversed the flow of carbon, (19) it into their roots from the fungi (20) releasing it as "payment.\

It seems impossible to have an honest conversation about global warming. I say this after diligently perusing the British government’s huge report released last week by Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and now a high civil servant. The report is a masterpiece of misleading public relations. It foresees dire consequences if global warming isn’t curbed: a worldwide depression and flooding of many coastal cities. Meanwhile, the costs of minimizing these awful outcomes are small: only 1 percent of world economic output in 2050.
No sane person could fail to conclude that we should conquer global warming instantly, if not sooner. Who could disagree Well, me. Stem’s headlined conclusions are intellectual fictions. They’re essentially fabrications to justify an aggressive anti-global-warming agenda. The danger of that is that we’d end up with the worst of both worlds: a program that harms the economy without much cutting of greenhouse gases.
Let me throw some messy realities onto Stern’s tidy picture. In the global-warming debate, there’s a big gap between public rhetoric and public behavior. Greenhouse emissions continue to rise despite many earnest pledges to control them. Just last week, the United Nations reported that of the 41 countries it monitors (not including most developing nations), 34 had increased greenhouse emissions from 2000 to 2004. These include most countries committed to reducing emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
Why is this In rich democracies, policies that might curb greenhouse gases require politicians and the public to act in exceptionally "enlightened" ways. They have to accept "pain" now for benefits that won’t materialize for decades, probably after they’re dead. And even if rich countries cut emissions, it won’t make much difference unless poor countries do likewise and so far, they’ve refused because that might jeopardize their economic growth and poverty-reduction efforts.
The notion that there’s only a modest tension between suppressing greenhouse gases and sustaining economic growth is highly dubious. Stern arrives at his trivial costs—that 1 percent of world GDP in 2050—by essentially assuming them. His estimates presume that, with proper policies, technological improvements will automatically reconcile declining emissions with adequate economic growth. This is a heroic leap. To check warming, Stern wants annual emissions 25 percent below current levels by 2050. The IEA projects that economic growth by 2050 would more than double emissions. At present, we can’t bridge that gap.
The other great distortion in Stern’s report involves global warming’s effects. No one knows what these might be, because we don’t know how much warming might occur, when, where, or how easily people might adapt. Stern’s horrific specter distills many of the most terrifying guesses, including some imagined for the 22nd century, and implies they’re imminent. The idea is to scare people while reassuring them that policies to avert calamity, if started now, would be fairly easy and inexpensive.

It’s easy to get the sense these days that you’ve stumbled into a party with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren’t. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They’ve changed into something like their own opposite.
There’s Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy(慈善事业) with him. There’s historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. To flip-flopis human. It can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological(病态的). He’s a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush:" He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday -- no matter what happened on Tuesday."
Over the past three years, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I’ve got it all wrong.
It looked at first like a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that we’re all connected. Everything leans on something, is both dependent and depended on.
"The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago," is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line." The remark prompted the professor to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences between the Western and the Asian mind.
To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it’s solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn’t a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves.
I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.

Researchers at the University of Arizona, led by Teresa Cummins, conducted an exploratory study on the online learning modules, designed to supplement hands-on classes taught by local experts and supported by an overview text, to help users increase their understanding of key concepts in the Arizona Master Watershed Steward program. They also sought to determine whether program participants would use the non-compulsory modules.
Their evaluation revealed that module users increased their understanding of key watershed concepts; participants in the evaluation demonstrated a 30 percent increase in content knowledge following module use. Additionally, 70 percent of participants retained this knowledge through a two-month follow-up test.
A follow-up survey showed that approximately half of the participants returned to the online modules on their own; several of these users returned several times and spent multiple hours per session. Comments from the follow-up survey suggested that the users accessed the site either as they had the time or as they needed the information.
Online usage statistics indicated participants continued to visit the site for many months following the modules’ release and advertisement. Though many visits were very brief (a single pageview; only a couple of seconds), visitors with many returns to the site and/or long visits appeared to be working through the modules.
One participant stated, "My brain can only hold so much information; the modules keep information on-hand." Other participants commented that the modules were "more interesting and interactive" than the text material, and a "very effective tool" and "a great resource to the Master Watershed Steward community."
The Arizona Master Watershed Steward program, sponsored by University of Arizona, prepares adults to serve as volunteers in the conservation of water resources and the protection, restoration, and monitoring of their watersheds. The modules were intended to reinforce concepts covered in classes and further engage participants in the learning process.
One key finding was that the modules were not clearly preferred by users over in-person instruction. One participant stated, "For me, they are just another avenue for learning, a supplement or additional reference. I prefer in person and real hands-on learning." Other participants similarly expressed their desire for hands-on and face-to-face interaction. Several participants noted that the usefulness of in-person lectures—was a function of the presenter.
Overall, the exploratory evaluation indicated that the modules were a welcome supplement to the course and were effective in reinforcing key concepts. Participants retained knowledge for several weeks, although since subjects were self-selected, they may have been self-motivated to pay attention and master the online module materials.
"I am constantly searching for new ways to educate our program’s diverse audiences and reinforce watershed science concepts, " says Candice Rupprecht, state coordinator for the Master Watershed Steward program. "I am excited to know that online learning modules can enhance our program by offering additional independent learning opportunities for our volunteers.

Human relations have commanded people’s attention from early times. The ways of people have been recorded in innumerable myths, folktales, novels, poems, plays, and popular or philosophical essays. Although the full significance of a human relationship may not be directly evident, the complexity of feelings and actions that can be understood at a glance is surprisingly great. For this reason psychology holds a unique position among the sciences.
" Intuitive " knowledge may be remarkably penetrating and can significantly help us understand human behavior whereas in the physical sciences such common sense knowledge is relatively primitive. If we erased all knowledge of scientific physics from our world, not only would we not have cars and television sets, we might even find that the ordinary person was unable to cope with the fundamental mechanical problems of pulleys and levers. On the other hand, if we removed all knowledge of scientific psychology from our world, problems in interpersonal relations might easily be coped with and solved much as before. We would still " know " how to avoid doing something asked of us and how to get someone to agree with us: we would still " know " when someone was angry and when someone was pleased. One could even offer sensible explanations for the " whys " of much of the self’s behavior and feelings. In other words, the ordinary person has a great and profound understanding of the self and of other people which though unformulated or only vaguely conceived, enables one to interact with others in more or less adaptive ways. Kohler in referring to the lack of great discoveries in psychology as compared with physics, accounts for this by saying that " people were acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long time before the founding of scientific psychology. "
Paradoxically, with all this natural, intuitive, commonsense capacity to grasp human relations, the science of human relations had been one of the last to develop. Different explanations of this paradox have been suggested. One is that science would destroy the vain and pleasing illusions people have about themselves; but we might ask why people have always loved to read pessimistic, debunking writings, from Ecclesiastes to Freud. It has also been proposed that just because we know so much about people intuitively, there has been less incentive for studying them scientifically: why should one develop a theory, carry out systematic observations, or make predictions about the obvious In any case, the field of human relations, with its vast literary documentation but meager scientific treatment, is in great contrast to the field of physics in which there are relatively few nonscientific books.