Posted Dec 8, 2014, 3:59 PM
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BANNED
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Join Date: Apr 2013
Location: Somewhere
Posts: 1,460
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Infrequent Poster
If you no like dont look. I can (and do) spend hours sometimes looking at pictures and aerials of freeways because I find them very visually appealing, and in many ways I find they can add to the urban fabric. In my opinion.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/wo...alks.html?_r=0
Optimism Faces Grave Realities at Climate Talks
By CORAL DAVENPORTNOV. 30, 2014
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--But while scientists and climate-policy experts welcome the new momentum ahead of the Lima talks, they warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding — events that could harm the world’s population and economy.
Recent reports show that there may be no way to prevent the planet’s temperature from rising, given the current level of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and the projected rate of emissions expected to continue before any new deal is carried out.
That fact is driving the urgency of the Lima talks, which are expected to produce a draft document, to be made final over the next year and signed by world leaders in Paris in December 2015.
While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable, scientists say that United Nations negotiators should not give up on their efforts to cut emissions. At stake now, they say, is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one.
---The objective now, negotiators say, is to stave off atmospheric temperature increases of 4 to 10 degrees by the end of the century; at that point, they say, the planet could become increasingly uninhabitable.
Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are already reporting that 2014 appears likely to be the warmest year on record.
Since 1992, the United Nations has convened an annual climate change summit meeting aimed at forging a deal to curb greenhouse gases, which are produced chiefly by burning coal for electricity and gasoline for transportation. But previous agreements, such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, included no requirements that developing nations, such as India and China, cut their emissions. And until now, the United States has never headed into those summit meetings with a domestic climate change policy in place.
--That reality is already setting in among low-lying island nations, like the Marshall Islands, where rising seas are soaking coastal soil, killing crops and contaminating fresh water supplies.
“The groundwater that supports our food crops is becoming inundated with salt,” said Tony A. deBrum, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands. “The green is becoming brown.”
Many island nations are looking into buying farmland in other countries to grow food and, eventually, to relocate their populations.
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