Word: carbonization
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...Carbon dioxide and other gases from the burning of fossil fuels collect in the atmosphere and act like the glass walls of a greenhouse, trapping heat on the earth's surface. Scientists predict that the planet's average temperature could rise as much as 6.3[degrees]F (3.5[degrees]C) over the next century, and we are already seeing heat waves, melting polar ice and rising seas. Local impact remains unpredictable: some areas could suffer stronger storms and other places severe drought. Seven environmental groups--Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Public...
...course, the creative, intelligent computer has done far better in capturing the public imagination than have its unexciting number-crunching counterparts. A world in which computers were as creative as humans would seem to leave the poor carbon-based creatures little room to excel, especially if their silicon rivals continued to increase in speed and capacity for processing information at an exponential rate. What would the humans do in a world where their machines outsmart them...
There is one fact, though, that everyone agrees on: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing steadily. It is near 360 parts per million today, vs. 315 p.p.m. in 1958 (when modern measurements started) and 270 p.p.m. in preindustrial times (as measured by air bubbles trapped in the Greenland ice sheet...
...would be a frigid -20[degrees]C (-4[degrees]F), the oceans would have frozen, and no life would have developed. So the issue we face in the next millennium is not whether there will be a greenhouse effect, but whether humans, by burning fossil fuels, are adding enough carbon dioxide to the atmosphere to change it (and our climate) in significant ways...
...main reason for the spread in the IPCC predictions is uncertainty about how much carbon dioxide will be added to the atmosphere by human activity, because how we will respond to the threat of climate warming is the greatest imponderable of all. We can probably develop technologies to deal with excess carbon--some scientists talk about removing it from smokestacks and stashing it underground--but the most direct way to control carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not to put it there in the first place. This is the point of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol--signed by 84 nations...