Scientists Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan found in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that there already exists a 1 in 20 chance that the 2.2 trillion tons of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere could cause an existential warming threat. (scientificamerican.com)
[2:38 p.m. Updated Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago has a fresh post on Realclimate warning that a shift in the talks toward focusing on «low - hanging fruit» and away from the unrelenting buildup of carbon dioxide is actually raising the long - term warming threat.] (dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com)
A Stanford - led study just published gives an overview of the risks versus benefits of fracking, highlighting not least that fracking opens formerly unreachable deposits of fossil fuels for humanity to combust, at exactly the moment when the global warming threat requires us to scale back. (treehugger.com)