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. Saskatchewan Climate Change Primer -- Is Climate Change Natural. While temperatures on earth have always fluctuated, the rate of global warming we are now seeing is greater than any that has occurred in the past 10,000 years. We are Iikely seeing the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations superimposed on a natural warming cycle. Life on earth has always adapted, but the faster the rate of change, the harder it is for life to adjust. |
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Although accurate knowledge of this surface and its changes is vital to numerous Earth science disciplines, remote sensing applications, and natural hazards reduction activities topography is known only imprecisely in most areas of the world. Global change, environmental, and hazard reduction research necessitate the acquisition and analysis of digital topographic data for scientific applications. During the past decade we have seen the development of powerful new techniques to measure changes in the Earth's topography. .. |
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Would they accurately represent the scene if the environment actually existed. In general, the answer is no, although the effects are appealing because the images are believable. For the past decade or more we have been developing a system to test, validate, and improve the fidelity and efficiency of computer graphics algorithms. Our goal is to develop physically based lighting models and perceptually based rendering procedures for computer graphics that will produce synthetic images that are visually and measurably indistinguishable from real-world images. Over the past two years the we have articulated and refined a framework for realistic image synthesis, presented in a special SIGGRAPH session in August of 1997. |
Our economic and social well being are based on the sustainable development of our rich endowment of natural resources. No nation, however large, can adequately confront global change on its own. Over the past two decades, Canada has been at the forefront of an unprecedented international effort on global change. It has contributed significantly to international scientific efforts to improve understanding of the complex processes that drive our global environmental systems. And it has played a leading role in building realistic policy agreements to curb the scale and pace of human-caused changes to our atmosphere, oceans and terrestrial ecosystems.
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further information: http://www.ipcc.ch