Global Warming: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session, Part 2

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Page 151 - ... projects and activities. Contributing to the awareness of the importance of indigenous concerns was the role played by indigenous peoples and their supporters at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.
Page 204 - Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.
Page 73 - Sharp, Chairman Subcommittee on Energy and Power Committee on Energy and Commerce United States House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 Dear Mr.
Page 294 - The size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability; alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger humaninduced greenhouse warming.
Page 300 - The results of scenarios can vary considerably from actual outcomes even over short time horizons. Confidence in scenario outputs decreases as the time horizon increases, because the basis for the underlying assumptions becomes increasingly speculative. Considerable uncertainties surround the evolution of the types and levels of human activities (including economic growth and structure), technological advances, and human responses to possible environmental, economic and institutional constraints....
Page 294 - ... conclusions which we summarize as follows: Gases and Aerosols • Depletion of ozone in the lower stratosphere in the middle and high latitudes results in a decrease in radiative forcing which is believed to be comparable in magnitude to the radiative forcing contribution of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) (globally-averaged) over the last decade or so. • The cooling effect of aerosols resulting from sulphur emissions may have offset a significant part of the greenhouse warming in the Northern Hemisphere...
Page 360 - Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee The Global Climate Coalition (GCC), the leading business voice on climate change, is a broad-based organization of business trade associations and companies representing virtually all elements of United States industry, including the energy-producing and energyconsuming sectors. The Coalition was established in 1989 to coordinate business participation in the scientific and policy debate on the global climate change issue.
Page 299 - Stratospheric Ozone Depletion. — Even if the control measures of the 1990 London amendments to the Montreal Protocol were to be implemented by all nations, the abundance of stratospheric chlorine and bromine will increase over the next several years. The Antarctic ozone hole, caused by industrial halocarbons, will therefore recur each spring. In addition, as the weight of evidence suggests that these gases are also responsible for the observed reductions in middle- and high latitude stratospheric...
Page 186 - September 1984, working either in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs of the De-partment of State or in one of the Bureaus of the Agency for International Development.
Page 298 - A comprehensive, multi-year, high spatial resolution satellite data set has been used to to estimate that the average rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazonian forest between 1978 and 1989 was 2.1 million hectares (Mha) per year. The rate increased between 1978 and the mid-1980s, and has decreased to 1.4 Mha/yr in 1990. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), using information supplied by individual countries, recently estimated that the rate of global tropical deforestation in closed...

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