Word: icing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels...
...risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and piñon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears--prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones--are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops...
Other cities are crafting their own solutions. St. Paul, Minn., which has had to forgo Winter Carnival ice sculptures and on-ice softball tournaments in recent years because of rising temperatures, is using a biomass-fired power plant for both heat and electricity. Keene, N.H., is harnessing methane and other gases at its landfill to run a generator that powers its recycling center. Salt Lake City, Utah, has converted 1,630 traffic stops to energy-efficient light-emitting diode signals--which alone will save more than 500 tons of CO2 pollution each year and cost the city $53,000 less...
...Melting ice caps didn't figure into the fight Sunita Narain and Bhure Lal led to build the world's cleanest public-transport network. They had more pressing concerns. "New Delhi was choking to death," says Narain, 43, director of India's Center for Science and Environment. "Air pollution was taking one life per hour." Adds Lal, 63, then a senior government administrator: "The capital was one of the most polluted on earth. At the end of the day, your collar was black, and you had soot all over your face. Millions had bronchitis and asthma...
There are also different kinds of criminals, not all of them in Tony's league--feloniously or dramatically. The high-class burglars in NBC's Heist (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), planning to take down a Beverly Hills jewelry store, fall into the Ocean's Eleven school of fast-talking, ice-cool swells. (Hustle, a British import nearing the end of its season on AMC, takes a similar tack with a band of con artists.) The robbers (led by Dougray Scott and The Practice's Steve Harris) gab about strippers and Mother Teresa while on a job; the cops who chase...