Word: carbonization
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...Mars are in their once-every-26-months alignment, the plan envisions launching a four-person spacecraft to Mars--but launching it with its tanks empty of fuel and its cabin empty of crew. Landing on the surface, the craft would begin pumping Martian atmosphere--which is 95% carbon dioxide--into a reaction chamber, where it would be exposed to hydrogen and broken down into methane, water and oxygen. Methane and oxygen make a first-rate rocket fuel; water and oxygen are necessary human fuels. All these consumables could be pumped into tanks inside the ship and stored there...
Consider the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that are emitted every year in the course of our daily life. Driving a car, switching on a light, working in a factory, fertilizing a field all contribute to the atmosphere's growing burden of heat-trapping gases. Unless we start to control emissions of CO2 and similar compounds, global mean temperatures will probably rise somewhere between 2[degrees]F and 7[degrees]F by the end of the next century; even the low end of that spectrum could set the stage for a lot of meteorological mischief. Among other things...
...last longer, providing a shiny white surface that bounces sunlight out to space. Indeed, one reason the earth has not yet warmed up as much as many anticipated may be due to the tug-of-war between industrial aerosols like sulfuric acid (which reflect heat) and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (which trap it). Ironically, then, the cost of reducing one kind of pollution may come at the price of intensifying the effects of the other...
Deforestation has a similarly broad range of impact. One thing trees do is lock up a lot of carbon in their woody tissues, thereby preventing it from escaping into the atmosphere. Trees are also important recyclers of moisture to the atmosphere. In some parts of the Amazon basin, deforestation has reached the point where it is altering precipitation patterns. This is because so much of the moisture entrained by clouds comes from the canopy of the forest below; as large tracts of trees disappear, so do portions of the aqueous reservoir that feeds the local rainmaking machine...
...Citizens should be attracted to [the Reform Party] especially in times like these where the two governing political parties are basically carbon copies of each other," writes National Reform Party Vice Chair Gerry Moan in an e-mail message...