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...other partners.) Grimsson traces his interest in climate change to the 1980s, when he met a fellow legislator who saw trouble on the horizon: Al Gore. Back home, Grimsson, 63, has witnessed Iceland's conversion from a coal-dependent economy to a nation that gets most of its heat from clean, renewable geothermal resources. "My job as a young boy was to get the coal for the house for my grandmother," he says, recalling Reykjavík's soot-black skies. "If Iceland could achieve such a radical change in one generation, enormous changes can succeed all over the world...
...Dolphin, Eagle, Falcon and Gecko--the team members nailed a version in 2004 that met their goal of shrinking a laptop to one-eighth its size. But it was too hot for laps, so it was scrapped. A faster, slicker processor has since cooled things down. Today, however, the heat is external. In the decades since Allen birthed the Microsoft mouse, hardware competition has roared. In addition to OQO, Sony and Samsung have released mini laptops in the same $2,000 range as the FlipStart. And Apple looms as a dark horse...
...need for adaptation is rooted in the unhappy fact that we can't turn global warming off, at least not anytime soon. The momentum of the climate system--carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for decades, while oceans store heat for centuries--ensures that no matter how much humanity cuts greenhouse-gas emissions, our previous emissions will keep warming the planet for decades. Even if we were to magically stop all emissions today, "temperatures will keep rising, and all the impacts will keep changing for about 25 years," says Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government...
Nevertheless, adaptation has implicitly emerged on the American agenda, thanks to Hurricane Katrina. The earth's weather system is too complex to pin blame for Katrina definitively on global warming. But unusually strong hurricanes like Katrina are exactly what scientists expect to see--along with fiercer heat waves, harsher droughts, heavier rains and rising sea levels--as global warming intensifies. If the nation is serious about rebuilding New Orleans and its neighbors, it must make them as resilient to global warming as possible. "We have to fight for New Orleans," says Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center...
...images of drowning polar bears didn't quiet most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did. Dismissing a scientist's temperature chart is one thing. Dismissing the death of a major American city is something else entirely. What's more, the heat is only continuing to rise. This past year was the hottest on record in the U.S. The deceptively normal average temperature this winter masked record-breaking highs in December and record-breaking lows in February. That's the sign not of a planet keeping an even strain but of one thrashing...