Word: air
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cold, dead place, but too much CO2 accelerates the effect and could make the earth too hot to be habitable. The temperature on Venus, for instance, where the atmosphere is 96% CO2, is over 400°C, or 750°F.) By contrast, black carbon in the air actually absorbs sunlight as it comes from space, directly heating up the atmosphere. "The soot particles are like the parts of a blanket, and it's getting thicker," says Ramanathan. "The smoke absorbs sunlight and heats the blanket directly." (Read "COP15: Climate Change Conference...
Unlike CO2, which can hang around in the atmosphere for centuries - CO2 that was emitted by the first coal-powered train is probably still in the air, warming the planet - black carbon has a relatively brief life span. It remains just a few weeks in the air before it falls to earth. That's key, because if the world could reduce black carbon emissions soon, it could help blunt warming almost instantly. "You can wait a week or a month and the totals in the atmosphere can be significantly different," says Eric Wilcox, an atmospheric scientist with NASA. Meanwhile...
...diesel filters in cars can be upgraded, and biomass-burning stoves can be exchanged for technology that uses solar power or natural gas. These changes will cost money, but they should be cheaper than decarbonization. And cutting back on black carbon will also pay immediate health dividends, with less air pollution and fewer deaths from respiratory diseases. We might even be able to see the sky in New Delhi again...
...give scientists an eons-long look at environmental history: any ice lurking in the shadows of lunar craters would have been there for a long, long time - billions of years, even. On Earth, for example, scientists get their best information about the planet's climatic history from ancient air trapped in polar ice, says Greg Delory of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Similarly, the lunar poles are record keepers of conditions over long periods. They are the dusty attic of the solar system, says Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters...
LCROSS scientists still have to figure out how thinly the water ice is spread in the lunar rock and soil and how deeply it's buried. That analysis is pending, and so is the full report on all the other material that was blasted into the air on impact. Stay tuned, says NASA's Wargo. There are plenty of updates to come...