Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deputy director Arthur Hochstein, who designed the layouts for the entire package, faced a difficult problem: how to create a strikingly original cover image. Their solution was to approach Christo, the famed Bulgarian-born environmental sculptor. In earlier works Christo had draped in plastic large sections of the earth -- a stretch of Australian coast, a canyon in Colorado -- but never the whole planet. This time Christo bundled a 16-in. globe in polyethylene and rag rope and drove more than 350 miles up and down New York's Long Island in search of the perfect combination of light...
...more than a decade, many scientists have warned that cars and factories are spewing enough gases into the atmosphere to heat up the earth in a greenhouse effect that could eventually produce disastrous climate changes. But until recently, the prophets of global warming garnered about as much attention as the religious zealots who insist that Armageddon is near. When Colorado Senator Timothy Wirth held congressional hearings on the greenhouse effect in the fall of 1987, the topic generated no heat at all. "We had a very, very distinguished panel," Wirth recalled at the TIME Environment Conference...
Hansen thus became perhaps the most prominent scientist willing to say straight out that the earth-warming effect of excess carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases generated by industry and agriculture had crossed the line from theory into fact. By itself, Hansen's bold assertion was dramatic enough. But the unusual string of weather-related disasters that struck the world last summer could not have been better timed to drive his point home. The heat waves, droughts, floods and hurricanes may be previews of what could happen with ever increasing frequency if the atmosphere warms 3 degrees...
Ironically, the same greenhouse effect that may be so dislocating made earth hospitable to life in the first place. Without a heat-trapping blanket of naturally occurring CO2, the planet would have an average surface temperature of only 0 degrees F instead of 59 degrees F. Reason: like the glass panes of a greenhouse, CO2 molecules are transparent to visible light, allowing the sun's rays to warm the earth's surface. But when the surface gives off its excess heat, it does so not with visible light but with infrared radiation. And since CO2 absorbs infrared rays, some...
...flow of CO2 on earth was caused by only natural processes until less than 200 years ago. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, man suddenly threw a new factor into the climatic equation. Carbon dioxide is released in large quantities when wood and such fossil fuels as coal, oil and natural gas are burned. As society industrialized, coal- burning factories began releasing CO2 faster than plants and oceans, which absorb the gas, could handle it. In the early 1900s, people began burning oil and gas at prodigious rates. And increasing population led to the widespread...