Word: heating
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...just inside Israel that set in motion Phase 1 of Sharon's plan. A group of young Israelis gathered there each morning to wait for the bus. A young Palestinian, a student at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, approached the kids with his leather jacket zipped up, despite the heat of the morning. Beneath the jacket was a girdle of explosives. When he detonated, he took two Israeli youngsters with him. It was the third explosion--and two other bombs were defused--within Israel's borders in 24 hours. There had been so many car bombs in the three weeks...
...given day the mercury will almost certainly fall short of that mark or overshoot it, perhaps by a lot. Manhattan thermometers can reach 65[degrees] in January every so often and plunge to 50[degrees] in July. And seasons are rarely normal. Winter snowfall and summer heat waves beat the average some years and fail to reach it in others. It's tough to pick out over-all changes in climate in the face of these natural fluctuations. An unusually warm year, for example, or even three in a row don't necessarily signal a general trend...
...what's happening. A decade ago, the idea that the planet was warming up as a result of human activity was largely theoretical. We knew that since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, factories and power plants and automobiles and farms have been loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. But evidence that the climate was actually getting hotter was still murky...
Faced with these hard facts, scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible. Nor are the changes over. Already, humans have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide, the most abundant heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, to 30% above pre-industrial levels--and each year the rate of increase gets faster. The obvious conclusion: temperatures will keep going...
Public health could suffer. Rising seas would contaminate water supplies with salt. Higher levels of urban ozone, the result of stronger sunlight and warmer temperatures, could worsen respiratory illnesses. More frequent hot spells could lead to a rise in heat-related deaths. Warmer temperatures could widen the range of disease-carrying rodents and bugs, such as mosquitoes and ticks, increasing the incidence of dengue fever, malaria, encephalitis, Lyme disease and other afflictions. Worst of all, this increase in temperatures is happening at a pace that outstrips anything the earth has seen in the past 100 million years. Humans will have...