Word: carbonated
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...decade ago, the idea that the planet was warming up as a result of human activity was largely theoretical. We knew that since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, factories and power plants and automobiles and farms have been loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. But evidence that the climate was actually getting hotter was still murky...
Faced with these hard facts, scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible. Nor are the changes over. Already, humans have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide, the most abundant heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, to 30% above pre-industrial levels--and each year the rate of increase gets faster. The obvious conclusion: temperatures will keep going...
...next century. To do that, IPCC scientists fed a wide range of scenarios involving varying estimates of population and economic growth, changes in technology and other factors into computers. That process gave them about 35 estimates, ranging from 6 billion to 35 billion tons, of how much excess carbon dioxide will enter the atmosphere...
...short run, there's not much chance of halting global warming, not even if every nation in the world ratifies the Kyoto Protocol tomorrow. The treaty doesn't require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions until 2008. By that time, a great deal of damage will already have been done. But we can slow things down. If action today can keep the climate from eventually reaching an unstable tipping point or can finally begin to reverse the warming trend a century from now, the effort would hardly be futile. Humanity embarked unknowingly on the dangerous experiment of tinkering with the climate...
With the U.S. still skeptical about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to cut carbon dioxide emissions and curb global warming and the 83 other signatory nations still wrestling over the details, the E.U. was growing concerned that the pact might fall apart. In February, Environmental Protection Agency Director Christine Todd Whitman reassured E.U. leaders that global warming remained high on the new Administration's worry list. But in March, President George W. Bush announced he was abandoning his campaign pledge to curb CO2 emissions from power plants, having concluded that the gas shouldn't be regulated as a pollutant, particularly during...