Word: heating
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...What Lies Beneath? PACKING HEAT. It's time for serious sidelong glances. An Internet site is selling a line of undies called THUNDERWEAR for those who like their firearms up close and personal. Just tuck your gun into the secret pocket. (You can choose from various pocket sizes depending on whether you're slinging a .44 magnum or a mere "Saturday-night special.") In China, meanwhile, inventor Zhao Xin attempted suicide because of the failure of CHASTITY UNDERWEAR, which guarantees fidelity through a built-in combination lock. Zhao never got a patent approved, and perhaps it's just as well...
THAILAND, BURMA, CAMBODIA, LAOS AND CHINA On April 14 the sun passes from Pisces into Aries, beginning the Buddhist New Year. In ages past this was a time for spiritual cleansing, bathing elders and washing Buddha statues. But the oppressive heat of the dry season has prompted a revision to tradition. Now April 14-16 will see the world's biggest water fight as Southeast Asians from Phnom Penh to Phuket soak each other in three days of liquid lunacy, accompanied by dancing, feasting and singing. In Rangoon, stages erected along the streets are used to spray passersby. In Thailand...
...given day the mercury will almost certainly fall short of that mark or overshoot it, perhaps by a lot. Manhattan thermometers can reach 18? in January every so often and plunge to 10? 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 overall 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...