Word: co2
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...caps." The conference saw global warming differently, perhaps influenced by the Rhode Island-size hunk of shelf ice that broke off Antarctica recently. Jokers outside the conference peddled cans of Official Heisse Luft, or hot air, but the nations gathered wits and courage, and voted to begin negotiating precise CO2 limits...
...burned cleanly and efficiently, it produces large amounts of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. To help ease the threat of global warming, China might use new technology to convert a portion of its coal reserves to natural gas, which delivers much more energy for the amount of CO2 released. The process, though, is expensive. The U.S. Department of Energy asked Congress this year for a $50 million grant that would be earmarked to help China build a demonstration coal-gasification power plant, but the appropriation has not been approved. By contrast, Japan is underwriting an environmental center...
...ominous sign: normal temperatures during the last interglacial epoch were about 4 degreesF warmer than they are this time around, and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were significantly higher. As humans pump more and more CO2 into the air and temperatures rise, the planet will approach the state it was in back then. And if those conditions tend to be inherently unstable -- an idea scientists consider plausible -- people may someday look back on the early 1990s as an idyllic time when the weather was benign...
...reputable scientist will say that what we are experiencing now is the early effects of global warming -- even if a few privately suspect it to be so. The theory that the buildup of CO2, methane and other heat-trapping gases can raise global temperatures -- like the glass in the walls of a greenhouse -- is well established, but no one knows how much warming will occur or how soon. While early computer models suggested that average global temperatures could jump 3 degreesF to 9 degreesF by the middle of the next century, recent studies have cast doubt on those estimates. Even...
...necessarily, it turns out. A study of two artificial rain forests created inside greenhouses at the University of Basel, Switzerland, indicates that too much CO2 can harm plants. One greenhouse had an atmosphere like today's; the second had as much CO2 as is predicted for the middle of the next century. The effects: plants in the second rain forest produced starch deposits that could interfere with photosynthesis, and the soils they lived in showed a rapid loss of nutrients. The scientists are now working with other experimental ecologies, and the preliminary results are the same...