But fax machines aren't the only things that have changed the way Pulliam, director of the Institute on Ecology at the University of Georgia, carries out his work on global change. Indeed, his proposal this month to the National Science Foundation marks the emergence of global change as "big science." The equivalent of the human genome project for earth and environmental scientists, the proposal heralds a new era of collaboration, not only among scientists from many disciplines, but also among federal agencies and even among countries.
Worldwide, investigators and policymakers are gearing up to understand and deal with myriad factors that point to a precipitous global increase in temperatures. At stake is humankind's survival, or at least the energy-intensive lifestyle to which we have become so accustomed.
"We're in the middle of a revolution in the way the earth is looked at," says John A. Eddy, who heads the Office ...
