Word: carbonization
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...atmosphere and the climate will get warmer - that much is well established. But climate change and carbon aren't in a one-to-one relationship. If they were, climate modeling would be a cinch. How much the globe will warm if we put a certain amount of CO2 into the air depends on the sensitivity of the climate. How vulnerable is the polar sea ice; how rapidly might the Amazon dry up; how fast could the Greenland ice cap disintegrate? That's why models like those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spit out a range of predictions...
...then there's the Amazon. Right now, the rain forest is a huge carbon sink, which compensates for the greenhouse gases we release by burning fossil fuels. But if the climate warms so much that the rain forest begins to die off - a distinct possibility - we'll lose that carbon sink, and then warming will again accelerate. Scientists, including the authors of the Science study, are still trying to nail down exactly where these tipping points might be - but it seems that the more we find out, the more the evidence points to an increasingly sensitive climate. And that...
...recently passed by the House of Representatives - and which will soon be taken on by the Senate - includes a provision that would eventually impose trade sanctions on countries that did not accept binding emissions targets. The passage was inserted to appease members of Congress who worried that a carbon cap would lead to the migration of energy-intensive industries from nations with emissions limits to those without them. That restriction seems fair - until you realize that many of the products exported from countries like India and China, with lower environmental standards, are sent to rich countries like the U.S. (Watch...
...tariffs on free trade, and that putting up such barriers would only make a global agreement more elusive. But other provisions could give the U.S. quiet leverage over developing nations. Annie Petsonk, the international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, says that the U.S. could make access to American carbon markets - which could eventually be worth trillions - contingent on how developing nations deal with climate change, for example by agreeing to mandatory reductions in the rate of growth of their emissions. "Carbon-market access is the first and most powerful carrot and stick," she says. "Members of Congress...
...pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emitters per capita, face to actually reduce emissions," Ramesh said to Clinton at a conference on climate change in Gurgaon, near New Delhi, on July 19. "And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours." Clinton defused the situation by asserting that the U.S. would not take any step to limit India's economic growth. (See pictures of Hillary Clinton meeting Michelle Obama...