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Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Jun 06, 2007 09:41pm |
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| Category | General |
| News Date | Tuesday, June 5, 2007 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | By Sharon Begley
Newsweek
June 4, 2007 issue - When Lewis Ziska wanted to see how a warmer world with more carbon dioxide in the air would affect certain plants, he didn't set up his experiment in a greenhouse or boot up a computer model. He headed for Baltimore. Cities are typically 7 degrees warmer than the countryside, as well as big sources of CO2. Although global levels of this greenhouse gas have reached 380 parts per million compared with preindustrial levels of 280, cities have way more—450 in Baltimore, 550 in Phoenix, 700 on a bad day in New York. So Ziska, a plant physiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, compared ragweed growing in vacant lots in Baltimore with ragweed in rural fields—and discovered the dark side of sunny claims that global warming will produce a "greening of planet Earth." Urban ragweed grows three to five times bigger than rural ragweed, starts spewing allergenic pollen weeks earlier each spring and produces 10 times more pollen. In as few as 20 years the whole world will have CO2levels at least as high as some cities do now. As climate changes due to the greenhouse effect, hay-fever sufferers would do well to lay in copious supplies of Kleenex. |
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