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Researchers Scramble to Create CO2-Busting Technologies

With carbon dioxide comprising 80 percent of greenhouse gases, researchers are creating technologies to neutralize emissions and reverse their effects on global warming.

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PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent:

Global warming. Almost all climatologists agree it's a clear and future danger. Wallace Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia University, has been blaming his fellow humans for over 30 years.

WALLACE BROECKER, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory:

The way we're going now, we're not being responsible. We're saying, "We want energy as cheap as we can get it, damn the future."

PAUL SOLMAN:

Meanwhile, says Broecker, the world's population is heading toward nine billion. If current trends continue, carbon in the atmosphere may triple by the end of the century.

WALLACE BROECKER:

And triple is something like a six-degree centigrade warming. We would certainly melt the Greenland icecap and probably release the West Antarctic ice sheet, which together would raise sea level about thirty-six feet.

PAUL SOLMAN:

Thirty-six feet?

WALLACE BROECKER:

Yes. So that would mean all coastal property throughout the whole world would be destroyed, unless you diked it off.