Word: co2
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...jumped 3.4% in 1996 alone. At the same time, evidence of global warming's dangers has continued to mount. When politicians started talking seriously about the problem in the late 1980s, the relationship between the proliferation of carbon dioxide and a warming world was largely theoretical. Scientists knew that CO2 and other gases trap the sun's energy; in fact, without any CO2 at all in the atmosphere, the planet would be frozen solid. The notion that extra, human-generated CO2 might drive temperatures too far the other way was convincing. But if warming...
...effort to draft an agreement on what to do about the climate changes caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases has fared even worse. Blocked by the Bush Administration from setting mandatory limits, the U.N. in 1992 called on nations to voluntarily reduce emissions to 1990 levels. Five years later, it's as if Rio had never happened. A new climate treaty is scheduled to be signed this December in Kyoto, Japan, but governments still cannot agree on limits. Meanwhile, the U.S. produces 7% more CO2 than it did in 1990, and emissions in the developing world have risen even...
Floods. Droughts. Hurricanes. Twisters. Are all the bizarre weather extremes we've been having lately normal fluctuations in the planet's atmospheric systems? Or are they a precursor of the kind of climactic upheavals that can be expected from the global warming caused by the continued buildup of CO2 and the other so-called greenhouse gases? Scientists are still not sure. But one of the effects of the unusual stretch of weather over the past 15 years has been to alert researchers to a new and perhaps even more immediate threat of the warming trend: the rapid spread of disease...
...results didn't mesh with reality; the models said the world should now be warmer than it actually is. The reason is that the computer models had been overlooking an important factor affecting global temperatures: aerosols, the tiny droplets of chemicals like sulfur dioxide that are produced along with CO2 when fossil fuels are burned in cars and power plants. Aerosols actually cool the planet by blocking sunlight and mask the effects of global warming. Says Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a member of the international panel: "We were looking for the needle...
...other words, people in the developed world would have to completely transform their society, and rich countries like the U.S. would have to subsidize poor but fast-developing nations like China. And that's just to roll CO2 emissions back to 1990 levels, the goal most environmentalists endorse. To stave off global warming completely, Lindzen maintains, "you would have to reduce emissions to where they were in 1920." Despite noble proclamations issuing from meetings like the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, that is virtually inconceivable. As economist Henry Jacoby of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management puts...