Word: co2
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's why a paper that came out last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was so alarming. CO2, the scientists concluded, is piling up faster than ever in the air, not only because our emissions continue to rise but also because the ocean and land have quit sopping up as much as they used to. Apparently, they've had enough...
...small ways, we've been trying to mop up our CO2 deluge for a while. It's true enough that if you plant a tree, you clean the air, because trees do take carbon out of the sky--but only a little and not for long. The moment a tree dies, it usually begins to release the carbon it absorbed, and logging and burning only accelerate that process. So scientists are thinking bigger thoughts: Is it possible to increase the oceans' capacity to absorb carbon--without making the water so acidic it dissolves corals? Is it possible to scrub...
...getting is tiny--less than 20 lb. per sq. mi. (3 kg per sq km) by some estimates. If this were pumped as a diluted slurry into the wake of a ship steaming back and forth like a tractor seeding a field, the plankton would bloom and global CO2 levels--in theory--would fall...
That's debatable, to say the least. There's no question that a nuclear plant, once it's up and running, produces comparatively little carbon dioxide - a British government report last year found that a nuclear plant emits just 2% to 6% of the CO2 per kilowatt-hour as natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel - but nuclear energy still seems like the power of yesterday. After a burst of construction between the 1950s and late 1970s, a new nuclear power plant hasn't come on line in the U.S. since 1996, and some nations like Germany are looking to phase...
...forms. The first is the batch of global mechanisms set up under the Kyoto agreement and administered by the U.N., of which the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is the most important. If a country with a Kyoto target finds it too difficult or costly to reduce its CO2 emissions, it can instead buy "certified emission reductions" from developing countries (which have no such targets). "Certified" means the U.N. has to be satisfied that the reduction would not have occurred anyway and that it has not been offset by increased emissions elsewhere (if, say, it has been achieved by a factory...