Just a days after the Nobel prize was awarded for global warming
work, an alarming new study finds that warming signals are
stronger, and happening sooner than expected, due to increased
human emissions of carbon dioxide and an Earth less able to
absorb them. Carbon dioxide emissions were 35 percent higher in
2006 than in 1990, a much faster growth rate than anticipated,
researchers reported in Tuesday’s edition of the peer-reviewed
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers
cited three factors: global economic growth; the global economy
becoming more carbon intense — since 2000 more carbon is being
emitted to produce each dollar of global wealth, they noted —
and a decline in the land and oceans’ ability to absorb carbon
from the atmosphere. "The carbon cycle is generating stronger-
than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate 'forcing' — that
is, mechanisms that 'force' the climate to change," said co-
author Mike Raupach, a co-chair of what's known as the Global
Carbon Project. "In tu