Word: gas
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Geoengineering has long been the province of kooks, but as the difficulty of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become harder to ignore, it is slowly emerging as an option of last resort. The tipping point came in 2006, when the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen published an editorial examining the possibility of releasing vast amounts of sulfurous debris into the atmosphere to create a haze that would keep the planet cool. "Over the past couple of years, it's gone from an outsider thing to something that is increasingly discussed," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution...
...somewhere between a few hundred million dollars and a couple of billion dollars a year, compared with the unknowable cost of decarbonizing the entire world. But the drawbacks are serious. Worsening air pollution is a risk. We'd have to keep geoengineering indefinitely to balance out continued greenhouse-gas emissions, and the motivation to decarbonize might disappear if we believed we had an insurance policy. And those are just the consequences we know about. But the truth is, we're already performing an unauthorized experiment on our climate by adding billions of tons of man-made carbon dioxide...
...Puerto Rico, and found that only about a quarter of the nitrogen that spills into rivers makes it to open water, with most of the rest managed by bacteria that live in the waterways. In a process called denitrification, the microbes convert nitrates in the water into nitrogen gas, which is released into the atmosphere. It's an excellent example of a biological service: one of the many free processes performed for us by our environment, without which life as we know it might not be possible. (Think how expensive it would be if we had to pay to remove...
...collecting particles from the plumes of gas and water vapor bursting out of Enceladus at approximately 800 miles per hour, scientists hope to better understand the composition of the moon's surface in contrast to its interior - scientists believe that some of the plumes' water-ice particles emerge from within the moon and some bounce off its surface. Scientists also want to know whether there is any liquid water - an essential component to supporting life - below the moon's iced surface. "The thing that makes Enceladus so exciting is that all of the ingredients you would need to support life...
...There were daily statements from the White House to prepare the American public for this war. To support the claim that Saddam Hussein had WMDs the Kurdish chemical weapons episode of 1988 was brought up again and again fifteen years later. Interestingly, the US blamed Iran for the gas in 1988 and never condemned Iraq until months before the invasion. Such old and isolated instances were revisited to exaggerate the threat while the past few relatively quiet years in Iraq were ignored completely. In addition, links were made between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, leading to the unsubstantiated claim...