Word: landing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what he was doing in Following the Equator when he wrote, "All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth--including America, of course--consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, however insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and restolen 500 times...
...take as long as 100,000 years for the carbon dioxide we've been pouring into the atmosphere to be gone. Most of it will have settled into the ocean, on its way to becoming new limestone beds on the seafloor; the rest will have been absorbed by the land, some of it eventually forming new deposits of coal. Even now, the water and soil are acting like great sponges, soaking up at least some of the carbon our industrial species emits every day and slowing--if not preventing--the climate-changing damage we're doing to our world...
That's why a paper that came out last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was so alarming. CO2, the scientists concluded, is piling up faster than ever in the air, not only because our emissions continue to rise but also because the ocean and land have quit sopping up as much as they used to. Apparently, they've had enough...
Dialing back emissions now will thus be less effective than we hope, because a growing share of what we still produce will stay in the sky rather than being absorbed by the oceans and land. The answer may be to quit thinking about solving climate change as only a matter of cutting greenhouse gases off at the source and to start considering how to clean up the mess that's already there. After all, when a busted pipe floods your home, you do more than just fix the leak and let evaporation take care of the water...
What's more, you'd be left with a lot of hydrochloric acid to get rid of on land, while the changed ocean chemistry would surely kill a lot of fish--though only, says House, in the immediate vicinity of the electrolysis plants. "I would bet against any of this happening in the next half-century," House concedes. Still, he adds, "if global warming gets really bad, we could do it." Harvard has applied for a patent on the process just in case...