Department of Earth and Environmental Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, New York 12180, USA Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA Institute of Marine and Coastal Science, Rutgers University, 71 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901, USA Department of Geology and Geophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas...

global temperature has increased from 13.7 to 14.3 degrees Celsius. The 1990s were, in many respects, the warmest years of the 20th century. Most of the world’s glaciers have receded over the last few decades. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere—the chief cause of the greenhouse effect—has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 360 ppm since the start of the Industria...

Economic freedom is known to have a profound effect on the efficient allocation of resources. Without subsidies, tariffs, and other government interventions, economic activity operates in the most efficient manner because of competitive pressures to produce more with fewer inputs. This means that energy use per unit of production is decreased with the presence of free markets (Graph 2). Free ma...

Introduction Climate change and global warming have drawn worldwide attention in the new century. Concern about possible global warming and the controversy over the claim that it is mainly caused by the greenhouse effect provide motivation for better understanding the mathematics, physics, and chemistry of greenhouse gases. The molecules of these gases trap heat in the form of infrared radiatio...

Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change. Carbon dioxide displays exceptional persistence that renders its warming nearly irreversible for more than 1,000 y. Here we show that the warming due to non-CO(2) greenhouse gases, although not irreversible, persists notably longer than the anthropogenic changes in the greenhouse gas concent...

For some years now, problems relating to gas emissions that affect climate and result from human activities have assumed a global dimension of large importance. The climate is, indeed, influenced by the concentrations of some pollutants in the atmosphere; these pollutants trap the long wave radiation emitted by the Earth and alter the energy balance, causing an accentuation of the natural green...

Recently it has come to our attention that a paper was published in this journal entitled "recycling greenhouse gas fossil fuel emissions into low radiocarbon food products to reduce human genetic damage" (Williams in Environ Chem Lett 5:197-202, 2007). In this article, it is argued that food grown in a greenhouse is healthier for people, when the greenhouse is fertilised with CO(2) prepared fr...

Although the greenhouse effect is by many considered as one of the most serious environmental problems, several economic studies of the greenhouse effect, most notably Nordhaus’s DICE model, suggest that it is optimal to allow the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) to increase by a factor of three over the next century. Other studies have found that substantial reductions can be justified on e...