Word: currently
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...China's economic reforms began putting enough money in people's pockets to enable even peasants like Zhenbing's parents to buy coal. Today coal supplies 73% of China's energy, and there is enough beneath the country to last an additional 300 years at current consumption rates. Plainly, that is good news in one respect. Burning coal has made the Chinese people (somewhat) warm in winter for the first time in their history. But multiply Zhenbing's story by China's huge population, and you understand why 9 of the world's 10 most air-polluted cities are found...
...something else is going on, and I think Malthus may have sensed it coming. As long ago as 1679, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (the Dutch inventor of the microscope) speculated that the limit to the human population would be on the order of 13 billion--remarkably close to many current estimates. For our position in the natural world is once again undergoing a sea change. We are not the first nor are we the only species to spread around the globe, but we are the first to do so as an integrated economic entity. Other species maintain tenuous genetic connections...
Unless. We can, I think, find the inner will to wake up to our current situation, to see the grimmer outlook around the corner and to choose to do something about it. We can stabilize our numbers and temper our patterns of consumption. We can work to stem the tide of ecosystem destruction and species loss. We can, in short, see ourselves for what we have become: the first global economic entity, a fascinating state arrived at through no end of cleverness but a state that is ultimately limited by the health and productivity of the natural system in which...
...next century. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. The world is a complex place, and reducing it to the climatologist's tool of choice--the computer model--isn't easy. Around almost every statement in the greenhouse debate is a penumbra of uncertainty that results from our current inability to capture the full complexity of the planet in our models...
...most authoritative predictions about future warming come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a worldwide consortium of more than 2,000 climate scientists. The current forecast is that by 2100 the earth's temperature will go up 1[degree] to 3.5[degrees]C (2[degrees] to 7[degrees]F), with the best guess being an increase of 2[degrees]C (4[degrees...