Word: slow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon...
...glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater...
...Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says...
...they could pay farmers to store carbon and developing nations to preserve forests. The idea comes from a concept developed by Environmental Defense when Krupp helped draft the 1990 Clean Air Act. It set up a trading system to control sulfur dioxide. Krupp believes similar financial incentives could slow global warming. "Once you put a value on carbon reductions," he says, "you make winners out of innovators. You offer a pot of gold." --By Charles Alexander...
...above the warmest in the past million years. The changes at that level are substantial but something we can probably adapt to. In order to limit change to that level we need to get on a track that I call the alternative scenario, which requires that we begin to slow emissions this decade and substantially reduce them before mid- century. If we stay on a business-as-usual path for another decade, the alternative scenario becomes impractical if not impossible...