To understand how the fate of the planet came to be entrusted to a corps of mostly anonymous, mid-level diplomats, you have to go back to the nineteen-eighties, when the world confronted its first atmospheric crisis.
The breakup of the supercontinents, rising sea levels (creating shallow, "life-friendly" seas), a nutrient crisis, fluctuations in atmospheric composition, including oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, and changes in ocean chemistry (promoting biomineralisation) could all have played a part.
In half a human lifetime the planet has faced three atmospheric crises.
This paper presents the experimental results on heat transfer and crisis using the dielectric refrigerant R141b pool boiling under atmospheric pressure.
He has always been interested in the climate's variability, and recently, in how we try to temper and harness atmospheric and geothermal energies faced with climate crises.
Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA 1.11pm BST There were some atmospheric images out of Washington last night as the government crisis developed.
So we are responding to the crisis of our warming planet by constructing a network of ultra-powerful atmospheric ovens.
But these didn't last long – the end of atmospheric testing and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis had drawn the sting from the nuclear disarmament campaign.
In recent decades, the world has been confronted with an energy crisis associated with irreversible depletion of traditional sources of fossil fuels, coupled with atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
