Clean Air Act: Risks from Greenhouse Gas Emissions : Hearing Before the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress, Second Session, on the Economic and Environmental Risks Associated with Increasing Greenhouse Gas Emissions, March 13, 2002

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Page 150 - No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were.
Page 82 - He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Page 92 - Climate change' means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
Page 46 - Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.
Page 71 - ... greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the observed climate changes during the 20th century cannot be unequivocally established. The fact that the magnitude of the observed warming is large in comparison to natural variability as simulated in climate models is suggestive of such a linkage, but it does not constitute proof of one because the model simulations could be deficient in natural variability on the decadal to century time scale.
Page 82 - Meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests...
Page 57 - In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.
Page 55 - Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward).
Page 58 - Global warming could well have serious adverse societal and ecological impacts by the end of this century, especially if globally-averaged temperature increases approach the upper end of the IPCC projections. Even in the more conservative scenarios, the models project temperatures and sea levels that continue to increase well beyond the end of this century, suggesting that assessments that examine only the next 100 years may well underestimate the magnitude of the eventual impacts. Has science determined...
Page 62 - For example, there is evidence to suggest that droughts as severe as the "dust bowl" of the 1930s were much more common in the central United States during the 10th to 14th centuries than they have been in the more recent record. Mean temperature variations at local sites have exceeded...

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