The idea worked for Dellwo. The bear gagged. Then it left.

Dellwo was able to reach his brother, who drove him to get help. Dellwo needed stitches and staples in his head and face. He had a swollen eye. There was a deep bite in his leg. But the hunter wasn’t left with any hard feeling toward the bear.

15. “I want everyone to know that it wasn’t the bear’s fault,” Dellwo said. “He was as scared as I was.”

News For You, January 5, 2016

Nations Agree on Historic Pact to Slow Global Warming

It is a first in human history and a first for the planet.

Nearly 200 nations have agreed to cut the man-made pollution that has led to climate change.

History will remember this day,” said Ban Ki-moon on December 12. That was the day the pact, or agreement, was made in Paris, France.

Ban is the secretary general of the United Nations. Taking action on the changing climate has been one of his goals.

5. U.S. President Barack Obama said the pact offers “The best chance to save the one planet we have.”

6. The nations agreed to cut what are called greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases collect in the air. They are like a blanket around the Earth. They trap heat. They cause the planet to warm. This is know as the “greenhouse effect.”

Some of the heat is needed for life on Earth. Land, oceans, and trees take it in and use it.

But human activity has caused too much of that heat to be trapped. Burning fossil fuels such as oil creates more of those gases. And cutting down forests removes trees that could take in the extra gases.

The pact calls for cutting the amount of gases to a point that the planet could take them in naturally. They want that to happen sometime between the years 2050 and 2100.

To make that goal, experts say the world will have to stop creating the gases in the next 50 years.

That would mean a complete change in how people get and use energy.  There is a lot of worry about whether the nations are ready to make those changes.

12. The pact has several parts:

Nations will try to keep warming of the planet to below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That is compared to times before there were many factories. They want that number to drop further by the year 2100, to 2.7 degrees.

Those numbers may seem small. But even little changes in the average temperature of the planet can make a big difference.

Experts predict that the houses of 280 million people will be under water from rising seas. Ben Strauss is one of those experts. He says that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees rather than 2.7 could cut the number of people affected in half.

Rich nations will support poor nations that are dealing with climate change. The pact also encourages other nations, such as China, to help if they can.

The U.N. has worked for more than 20 years to get governments to work together on the problem. An earlier pact was called the Kyoto Protocol.  It was created in 1997. But it included only rich nations. The U.S. never signed it.

The last attempt to create a pact was in 2009 in Copenhagen. It failed when nations could not agree on a deal.

Ban has invited world leaders to sign the pact at the U.N. on April 22. Earth Day is also celebrated on that day.

News For You, January 5, 2016                                                         

    

The 2015 Word of the Year? ‘-ism’

1. The dictionary company Merriam-Webster has picked its word for 2015. But it is really only part of a word. The word is –ism.

2. –ism is a suffix. That means it comes at the end of many words.

3. Some of those words have been in the news this year. They include racism and terrorism. Others are fascism and feminism.

We had a lot on our minds this year. It was a serious year,” said Peter Sokolowski. He is an editor for the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

5. People look up the meanings of words on its website. The –ism words were not the most common last year. There are others that people search for all the time.

6. But people did search for them last year because of certain news stories. That made the –ism suffix stand out.

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