"What matters gets measured" is a maxim familiar to most scientists. It suggests, in turn, that the global environment does not matter. Governments, though concerned about their own patches of the planet, care little about other people's. Although satellites peer down on Earth to monitor parts of its atmosphere, oceans, forests and deserts, and although fixed weather stations and nomadic buoys and balloons provide accurate readings from individual spots, nobody is responsible for joining up the dots to reveal the bigger picture. Where people do not live, the situation is even worse. The ocean's interaction with the atmosphere is critical to understanding how the climate works-but the vast oceans of the southern hemisphere where much of it takes place are woefully understudied. Even so basic a question as whether the sea level is rising cannot be answered properly. There is good reason to think that it is (in part, at least, due to global warming) but there are not enough monitoring stations to be sure.
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