Word: planetful
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...earth's climate does change. Ice ages have frosted the planet for tens of thousands of years at a stretch, and periods of warmth have pushed the tropics well into what is now the temperate zone. But given the normal year-to-year variations, the only reliable signal that such changes may be in the works is a long-term shift in worldwide temperature...
...that is precisely 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...
...Then they loaded those estimates into the even larger, more powerful computer programs that attempt to model the planet's climate. Because no one climate model is considered definitive, they used seven different versions, which yielded 235 independent predictions of global temperature increase. That's where the range of 1.4?C to 5.8?C (2.5?F to 10.4?F) comes from...
...round of cuts, whereas industrialized countries would be required, by the year 2012, to have collectively reduced their output of the "greenhouse gases" that contribute to global warming to 5.2 percent of their 1990 output levels, with the United States (which, despite constituting less than 5 percent of the planet's population, generates between 25 and 30 percent of the total output of greenhouse gases) required to make a 7 percent...
...With the doors to the White House now apparently closed to them, U.S. environmentalists are now pinning their hopes that European heads of state will be able to educate Bush about the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, and that the problem may reach catastrophic levels by the end of the century. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who is visiting Washington this week, has put climate change in the second spot on his agenda for discussions with Bush, following the conflict in Macedonia...