Word: absorbance
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...back for a progressive emissions policy while blaming global warming for the wacky weather--a connection that is debatable when it comes down to any specific calamity. What experts do agree on is that industrial farming, deforestation and the loss of meadows have reduced the ground's ability to absorb water, which probably contributed to the severity of the floods...
CARBON CREDIT OFFSETS Under the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming, Western Europe and Japan must reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. (The U.S. has refused to ratify the treaty.) One way to reach the target involves paying poorer countries to keep their land under forests, which absorb carbon from the atmosphere. For example, Japan could pay Peru not to log rain forest. The amount of carbon absorbed by those trees would then be counted as a credit on Japan's carbon-emission balance sheet. "This would reverse a trend in human history," says Irvin. "Suddenly land is more valuable...
...results were predictably disastrous. The surrounding countryside lost its ability to absorb water from the Yangtze as it flowed from the Tibetan plateau to Shanghai, passing 400 million people along the way. The government tried building dikes and sluices; its ultimate solution, the Three Gorges Dam, is now under construction upriver in Sichuan province. Yet even that grand ambition?turning the upper Yangtze into the world's biggest reservoir?probably won't stop downstream flooding in Hunan, which has four major rivers of its own that often overflow their banks...
...Giulia region of Italy. The river is 170 km long and up to 2 km wide in places. Although it often floods owing to heavy rainfall, it rarely rises more than 2 m above its average level because it's flanked on either side by meadows and forests that absorb excess water. Problems arise only along a 20-km stretch where the river banks have been built up and the water flow has been regulated by dams. In contrast, the Danube used to be surrounded by 26,000 sq km of meadows that acted as a buffer for flooding waters...
...cause to worry. The snakehead can exceed 3 ft. in length and will eat pretty much anything that can fit into its jaws. What's more, the Patuxent River is only 75 yds. away, and the fish--with an air sac in its digestive system that allows it to absorb oxygen, and the ability to flop its way across small stretches of muddy land--could soon wriggle into the nation's waterways...