Atmospheric Science Quotes

While an elderly man in his mid-eighties looks curiously at a porno site, his grandson asks him from afar, “‘What are you reading, grandpa?’” “‘It’s history, my boy.’” “The grandson comes nearer and exclaims, “‘But this is a porno site, grandpa, naked chicks, sex . . . a lot of sex!’” “‘Well, it’s sex for you, my son, but for me it’s history,’ the old man says with a sigh.” All of people in the cabin burst into laughter. “A stale joke, but a cool one,” added William More, the man who just told the joke. The navigator skillfully guided the flying disc among the dense orange-yellow blanket of clouds in the upper atmosphere that they had just entered. Some of the clouds were touched with a brownish hue at the edges. The rest of the pilots gazed curiously and intently outwards while taking their seats. The flying saucer descended slowly, the navigator’s actions exhibiting confidence. He glanced over at the readings on the monitors below the transparent console: Atmosphere: Dense, 370 miles thick, 98.4% nitrogen, 1.4% methane Temperature on the surface: ‒179°C / ‒290°F Density: 1.88 g/cm³ Gravity: 86% of Earth’s Diameter of the cosmic body: 3200 miles / 5150 km.

Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?' 'The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of, the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends, and a more-than minor life. And then i screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there's no sugar-coating it: She deserved better friends. When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified. into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it spite of having lost her. Beacause I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know that she forgives me for being dumb and sacred and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here's how I know: I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirety. There is a part of her knowable parts. And that parts has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, One thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself -those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Eidson's last words were: "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.

..the planet is just too small for these developing countries to repeat the economic growth in the same way that the rich countries have done it in the past. We don't have enough natural resources, we don't have enough atmosphere. Clearly, something has to change.

The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and moon came out — and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles.

We!” he emphasizes, pointing at his crew, “get to be the first link in a new chapter in our history. But I want you all to really consider what is going on here…” He takes the tone of a circus ringmaster. “This is bigger than successfully colonizing Mars and Ganymede. It’s bigger than Columbus or Magellan. It’s even bigger than the first homo sapiens leaving Africa.” He raises his voice even more, waving his arms. “Hell, this is bigger than fish crawling out of the fucking water and growing legs! Think about it!” Everyone is quiet, avoiding eye contact with Calvin. Everyone except Captain Taylor looks at him ambiguously. “Why not Cook and Vancouver?” Taylor asks.  “Excuse me, sir?” “You said Columbus or Magellan, but that’s preposterous. Magellan was a madman who tortured his crew and never made the whole trip, and Columbus, to be honest, is completely overblown. The dignity alone that Captain Cook commanded…” “Yeah, yeah, OK. Cook and Magellan? Frances Drake? Whoever. The point is…” Calvin walks to the glass and points. “This,” the pudgy showman continues, “is right here, right now. Got it?! Everyone here needs to admit the real reason we want to go down to that mysterious blue planet, figure out the atmosphere, and collect some space plasma. It’s not because it’s our job. No. It’s time we’re all honest and admit we are now part of something much bigger than ourselves. It’s not just our job, it’s our story. It’s our story as human beings, it’s our instinct to explore!

The mariner will have dominion over the atmosphere and the great deep, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air.

Energetically speaking, antimatter is the mirror image of matter, so the two instantly cancel each other out if they come in contact. Keeping antimatter isolated from matter is a challenge, of course, because everything on earth is made of matter. The samples have to be stored without ever touching anything at all—even air.

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies. "Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth." "Right, like geologists." "Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle..." "So, it's like oceanography or hydrology." "And the atmosphere." "Meteorology, climatology..." "It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet." "How is that different from ecology or environmental science?" "Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--" "Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci." "Some geographers specialize in different world regions." "Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department." "They're not." (Long pause.) "So, uh, what is it that do study then?

The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe. The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God.” “And we are a part of God because we are a part of the universe,” Vanessa said. “Or better yet, we are the universe. I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time—when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after.

Ava wrinkled her nose. “I’m glad I didn’t have to try to land the Lasaran escape pod. I’m pretty sure it would’ve gone up in flames before I even finished entering the atmosphere.” Unbuckling his harness, he shook his head. “Most pods are equipped with autopilots that would’ve guided you safely through the atmosphere.” “Then hurled me at the ground like a ball?” He paused. “Mmmmaybe?

Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time--these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all.

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame.

The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God.

We can become a great generation that leaves our world—our home—in better shape than it is now while raising the quality of life for people everywhere. This will not be easy. We’ve already loaded the atmosphere with enough heat-trapping gases of various kinds to cause our planet to keep warming for many, many years to come. But the situation is far from hopeless.

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face -- that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat -- that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.

And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.

The water beneath the Temple was both actual and metaphorical, existing as springs and streams, as spiritual energy, and as a symbol of the receptive or lunar aspect of nature. The meaning of that principle is too wide and elusive for it to be given any one name, so in the terminology of ancient science it was given a number, 1,080. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. These two numbers, which have an approximate golden-section relationship of 1:1.62, were at the root of the alchemical formula that expressed the supreme purpose of the Temple. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. Not merely was it used to generate energy from fusion of atmospheric and terrestrial currents, but it also served to combine in harmony all the correspondences of those forces on every level of creation.

The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration. When he stops to think, he does recognize, however, that the whole atmosphere of the world in which he lives is tinged by science, as is shown most immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little deeper thinking shows him that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire mental outlook of modern civilised man on the world about him.

Nature is a living whole,' he later said, not a 'dead aggregate'. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this 'universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed' that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life - pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those 'organic powers are incessantly at work', he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important 'in their relation to the whole', he explained.

There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum.

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

Everything that we know of since the Big Bang is ruled by those four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force). We are all connected by these four rules..I think the pursuit of finding one law to explain the universe if science but also the pursuit of God. The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe. The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God...We are the universe. I would go so far to say that human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time - when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before and they will be many things after. The air I am breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now - the cells, the air, the bacteria - it's not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws. When you die, someone will bury you or turn your body into ashes. Eventually, you will return to the Earth. You already are a part of the Earth. What better reason do we have to take care of the Earth and everything on it than the knowledge that we are of one another? The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees. As scientists we call that symbiosis and that is the consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other - that's God to me....Life is God and my life it tied to yours and everyone's on this planet. How does this not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?

The brain, which operates on electromagnetic impulses, is as much an activity of the universe as are the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere or on a distant star. Therefore science is one form of electromagnetism that spends it time studying another form…science is god explaining god through a human nervous system…isn’t spirituality the same thing?

You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything." "Everything?" "Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos. but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there's one in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it." "God is everywhere." "In a sense, yes. That's why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn't enough to worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find the best point for it. And yet..." "And yet?" "And yet... You're not taking me seriously by any chance, are you, Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we're not the type to take things seriously.... Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you've spent a lifetime hanging the Pendulum in many paces, and it's never worked, but there, in the Conservatoire, it works.... Do you think there are special places in the universe? On the ceiling of this room, for example? No, nobody would believe that. You need atmosphere. I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe, to recognize it, we have to believe in it. Well, let's go see Signor Garamond." "To hang the Pendulum?" "Ah, human folly! Now we have to be serious. If you are going to be paid, the boss must see you, touch you, sniff you, and say you'll do. Come, let the boss touch you; the boss's touch heals scrofula.

Hatha yoga is a way of working with the body, a way of disciplining, purifying, and preparing it for higher levels of energy and for greater possibilities. Hatha yoga is not exercise. It is, instead, about understanding the mechanics of the body, creating a certain atmosphere, and then using physical postures to channel or drive your energy in specific directions. This is the aim of the various asanas, or postures. That kind of posture that allows you to access your higher nature is a yogasana. It is the science of aligning your inner geometry with the cosmic geometry.

Was Superstorm Sandy caused by greenhouse warming of the planet? In a word, no. Individual storms arise from specific conditions in the atmosphere. Since records have been kept, hurricanes have varied in number and intensity each season with cycles going up and coming down. The temptation to attribute any specific weather event to global warming distracts us from considering and adopting adaptive strategies, such as improving and expanding irrigation for agriculture and the water supply for cities, that will serve us well when climate changes inevitably arrives on our doorstep.

The CO2 has to come out, which it does by forming bubbles. Now, champagne is pressurized to six times the atmospheric pressure on earth at sea level, enough to propel a popped champagne cork faster than 30 miles an hour. Lesson: letting the cork shoot out of a bottle when you open it is both tacky and dangerous.

It cannot, of course, be stated with absolute certainty that no elements can combine with argon; but it appears at least improbable that any compounds will be formed. [This held true for a century, until in Aug 2000, the first argon compound was formed, argon fluorohydride, HArF, but stable only below 40 K (−233 °C).]

Curiously enough we will find that no two children, even those born in the same family, grow up in the same situation. Even within the same family the atmosphere that surrounds each individual child is quite particular. Thus the first child has notoriously a different set of circumstances from the other children. The first child is at first alone and is thus the center of attention. Once the second child is born, he finds himself dethroned and he does not like the change of situation. In fact it is quite a tragedy in his life that he has been in power and is so no longer. This sense of tragedy goes into the formation of his prototype and will crop out in his adult characteristics.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People sceamed, wept, gave away t heir possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the world to "Sugar Magnolia." Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward.

The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after.’ He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man.

Your memory will return when it’s ready. I haven’t got much more energy, Fleur. The wind is helping me to time travel and be here with you this yesterday.

Yes, I see it. It is falling to the ground Scarred with burn holes and marks, yet still it floats. It whispers gently in the wind like Fleur with all her hope.

Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.

The Dwellers are not going to be happy. Only they're allowed to let off nukes in the atmosphere. And it isn't even fireworks season.

for manipulating the atmosphere and oceans

If amino acids can only be made where there is no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and porphyrins can only be made when there is free oxygen, then these things needed by every cell could not have existed together to form the first cell! What’s more, many of these compounds are antagonistic. They will combine and destroy each other—anywhere except within a living cell.

The law of computers is the same as the law of the marketplace. The earth's atmosphere was divided up into a network of cubes, each reducible to a collection of points, and each point the product of a set of calculations. As far as science was concerned, this was the end of clouds, which were but a series of coordinates simulated in a space of greater than three dimensions.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

An astoundingly perfect black void sat where the sun had been, surrounded by a jagged white nimbus of light that nearly brought me to tears. This was the solar corona, the hot outer edges of the sun's atmosphere that drive a flood of particles into space and generate a phenomenon known as a stellar wind, a key property of how our sun and other stars evolve. I had studied this particular aspect of stars for almost my entire life, using a dozen of the best telescopes in the world, but this was the first time I could see a star's wind with my own naked-eye. Around us, the sky was a strangely uniform dome of sunsets in every direction, and the warmth of sunlight had been replaced by an almost primal up-the-neck chill. It felt like the planet itself had been put on pause at this particular place and moment in time, a frozen moment of "look.

Hearing is the motion of molecules; sound is a wave in the atmosphere; solidity is the characteristic of spatial juxtaposition of atoms; smell is something given off by a body, rather than something belonging to a body.

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something’s meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe ‘the afterlife’ is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself—those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, ‘Teenagers think they are invincible’ with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure—even at a time of the month when this could not be true—that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together. I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice—he read the Scriptures every morning—and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. Then the boys made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter—oh, mine too—pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.

If the European grows accustomed not to rule, a generation and a half will be sufficient to bring the old continent, and the whole world along with it, into mortal inertia, intellectual sterility, universal barbarism. It is only the illusion of rule, and the discipline of responsibility which it entails, that can keep Western minds in tension. Science, art, technique, and all the rest live on the tonic atmosphere created by the consciousness of authority. If this is lacking, the European will gradually become degraded. Minds will no longer have the radical faith in themselves which impels them, energetic, daring, tenacious, towards the capture of great new ideas in every order of life. The European will inevitably become a day-to-day man. Incapable of creative, specialized effort, he will always be falling back on yesterday, on custom, on routine. He will turn into a commonplace, conventional, empty creature, like the Greeks of the decadence and those of the Byzantine epoch.

When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.

Claiming that a person who views the Bible as nothing but a compendium of myths is thus denying the existence of a Creator is like claiming a person who rejects the junk science behind ‘man-made global warming’ is denying the existence of atmosphere.

Now, champagne is pressurized to six times the atmospheric pressure on earth at sea level, enough to propel a popped champagne cork faster than 30 miles an hour. Lesson: letting the cork shoot out of a bottle when you open it is both tacky and dangerous.

The ultimate goal of a meteorologist is to set up differential equations of the movements of the air and to obtain, as their integral, the general atmospheric circulation, and as particular integrals the cyclones, anticyclones, tornados, and thunderstorms.

And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.

Since it might appear unusual that a bio-psychiatrist should work as an expert in the realm of non-living nature, I believe it will be helpful to give the following summary: My present work began in the realm of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, with natural scientific investigations of the energy at work in human emotions. This led to the discovery of the bio-energy in the living organism, termed organismic orgone energy; and further to the discovery of the same type of a basically physical orgone energy in the atmosphere. Orgonomy is not psychiatry, but the science of biophysics of the emotions, thus also including psychiatry, and physics in the realm of basic cosmic orgone energy. It is not mysticism, but natural scientific, experimental investigation, also of mystical emotions and experiences. Orgone energy is energy before matter (not after matter, as is atomic energy). It is studied by means of Geiger-Müller Counters and other physical instruments. It follows entirely new, hitherto unknown functional laws of nature, and not the well known mechanical laws of electricity, heat, or mechanics.

The population explosion is the primary force behind the remaining six groups of critical global events [diminishing land resources, diminishing water resources, the destruction of the atmosphere, the approaching energy crisis, social decline, and conflicts/increasing killing power].

years ago, when it underwent a rapid increase to the current level of 21%. The amount of oxygen in today’s atmosphere is far greater than could ever be sustained without the influence of living creatures, which not only produce oxygen in huge quantities but use it up again, in particular

...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue-green algae among the microorganisms.

All living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness. If this veil is taken from them, if people condemn a religion, an art, a genius to orbit like a star without an atmosphere, then we should no longer wonder about their rapid decay and the way they become hard and barren. That is the way it is now with all great things which never succeed without some delusion. But every people, indeed every person, who wishes to become mature needs such an enveloping delusion, such a protecting and veiling cloud. But today people generally despise becoming mature, because they honour history more than living. Indeed, people exult over the fact that now 'science is beginning to rule over living'. It is possible that people will attain that goal but it is certain that a life so governed is not worth much, because it is much less living and it establishes a life for the future far less than does the previous life governed not by knowledge but by instinct and powerful illusory images. But, as stated, it is clearly not to be the era of fully developed and mature people, of harmonious personalities, but the era of common work which is as useful as possible. That, however, amounts only to the fact that people are to be trained for the purposes of the time, in order to get to work with their hands as promptly as possible. They are to labour in the factories of the universal utilities before they are mature, that is, so that they really no longer become mature, because this would be a luxury, which would deprive the 'labour market' of a lot of power.

If virulent germs were normal in the atmosphere, how numerous would be the occasions for their penetration independently by way of the lungs and intestinal mucus! There would not be a wound, however slight, the prick even of a pin, that would not be the occasion for infecting us with smallpox, typhus, syphilis, gonorrhoea.

The chaos and the confusion of all possible outcomes penetrated every pixel of computer generated light, and the waves of all sub-existential normality flooded by, creating an atmosphere of peaceful eventuality. I felt that a gradual restoration was in place, and that piece by piece, universes were being reformed and restored.

The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one's fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist—it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create, and the fine fabric of a lyric is no more fitted to contain this point of view than a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock.

Nostalgia was diagnosed [as a medical illness] at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body internal and external well-being were treated together...Our progeny well might poeticize depression and see it as a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac.

For those who haven’t yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies, a history not yet written into us, the feeling it arrives in the shape of shadows, an atmospheric wrongness, and harrowing predictions; these are stories that change our own. The moment we begin to truly engage with climate science, our narratives of self and future are whirled out of orbit.

The railway trains full with reservists are no longer accompanied by the loud acclamations of the young ladies; the soldiers no longer smile at the populace out of their carriage windows; instead they slink silently through the streets, their packs in their hands, while the public follows its daily preoccupations with dour faces. In the sober atmosphere of the morning after, another chorus takes the stage: the hoarse cries of the vultures and hyenas which appear on every battlefield: ten thousand tents guaranteed to specification! A hundred tons of bacon, cocoa, coffee substitute, instant delivery but cash only, hand grenades, tools, ammunition belts, marriage brokers for the widows of the fallen, agencies for government supply--only serious offers considered! The cannon fodder inflated with patriotism and carried off in August and September 1914 now rots in Belgium, in the Vosges, in the Masurian swamps, creating fertile plains of death on which profits can grow. Hurry, for the rich harvest must be gathered into the granaries--a thousand greedy hands stretch across the ocean to help.

In this atmosphere of general discouragement, it is tempting to attack something that is sufficiently linked to the powers-that-be so as not to appear very sympathetic, but sufficiently weak to be a more-or-less accessible target (since the concentration of power and money are beyond reach). Science fulfills these conditions, and this partly explains the attacks against it.

As to rocket ships flying between America and Europe, I believe it is worth seriously trying for. Thirty years ago persons who were developing flying were laughed at as mad, and that scorn hindered aviation. Now we heap similar ridicule upon stratoplane or rocket ships for trans-Atlantic flights. (1933) [Predicting high-altitude jet aircraft for routine long-distance travel.]

Investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google cofounder Larry Page. Planetary Resources’ lead was followed in 2013 by a firm called Deep Space Industries. Its website currently looks like a science fiction film setting, with illustrations of CubeSats, scouting vehicles, and huge mining spacecraft assembled in space and never intended to enter a planet’s atmosphere.

A small bubble of air remained unabsorbed... if there is any part of the phlogisticated air [nitrogen] of our atmosphere which differs from the rest, and cannot be reduced to nitrous acid, we may safely conclude that it is not more than 1/120 part of the whole. [Cavendish did not realize the significance of the remaining small bubble. Not until a century later were the air’s Noble Gases appreciated.]

The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first major study of global warming in 1979. At that point, climate modeling was still in its infancy, and only a few groups, one led by Syukuro Manabe at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and another by James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had considered in any detail the effects of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Still, the results of their work were alarming enough that President Jimmy Carter called on the academy to investigate. A nine-member panel was appointed. It was led by the distinguished meteorologist Jule Charney, of MIT, who, in the 1940s, had been the first meteorologist to demonstrate that numerical weather forecasting was feasible. The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, or the Charney panel, as it became known, met for five days at the National Academy of Sciences’ summer study center, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its conclusions were unequivocal. Panel members had looked for flaws in the modelers’work but had been unable to find any. “If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible,

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.

Nostalgia was diagnosed at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body—internal and external well-being—were treated together. This was a diagnosis of a poetic science—and we should not smile condescendingly on the diligent Swiss doctors. Our progeny well might poeticize depression and see it as a metaphor for a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac.

If it had been practical technologically efficient science fiction, it would have long since fallen to rust by the road. But since it is a self-separating fable, even the most deeply rooted physicists at Cal-Tech accept breathing the fraudulent oxygen atmosphere I have loosed on Mars. Science and machines can kill each other off or be replaced. Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on. If it is not immortal, it almost seems such.

It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

The world’s oceans are both the most important and the most problematic piece of the earth’s climate system. They hold more than 90 percent of the climate’s heat and are its long-term memory. Conditions in the atmosphere swing wildly from day to day and year to year in response to any number of influences—that’s part of what makes untangling weather and climate so difficult. The oceans, on the other hand, change—and respond to changes—over decades to centuries.

Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer’s voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of “Green River” by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son”; the oboes in Beethoven’s Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience.

Order Out of Chaos ... At the right temperature ... two peptide molecules will stay together long enough on average to find a third. Then the little trio finds a fourth peptide to attract into the little huddle, just through the random side-stepping and tumbling induced by all the rolling water molecules. Something extraordinary is happening: a larger structure is emerging from a finer system, not in spite of the chaotic and random motion of that system but because of it. Without the chaotic exploration of possibilities, the rare peptide molecules would never find each other, would never investigate all possible ways of aggregating so that the tape-like polymers emerge as the most likely assemblies. It is because of the random motion of all the fine degrees of freedom that the emergent, larger structures can assume the form they do. Even more is true when the number of molecules present becomes truly enormous, as is automatically the case for any amount of matter big enough to see. Out of the disorder emerges a ... pattern of emergent structure from a substrate of chaos.... The exact pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding every living cell in the realm of biology -- all this beauty and order becomes both possible and predictable because of the chaotic world underneath them.... Even the structures and phenomena that we find most beautiful of all, those that make life itself possible, grow up from roots in a chaotic underworld. Were the chaos to cease, they would wither and collapse, frozen rigid and lifeless at the temperatures of intergalactic space. This creative tension between the chaotic and the ordered lies within the foundations of science today, but it is a narrative theme of human culture that is as old as any. We saw it depicted in the ancient biblical creation narratives of the last chapter, building through the wisdom, poetic and prophetic literature. It is now time to return to those foundational narratives as they attain their climax in a text shot through with the storm, the flood and the earthquake, and our terrifying ignorance in the face of a cosmos apparently out of control. It is one of the greatest nature writings of the ancient world: the book of Job.

But when it has been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic property of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles. Upon this principle I have based a practice.

Authority does not have to be a person or institution which says: you have to do this, or you are not allowed to do that. While this kind of authority may be called external authority, authority can appear as internal authority, under the name of duty, conscience, or super-ego. As a matter of fact, the development of modern thinking from Protestantism to Kant's philosophy, can be characterized as the substitution of internalized authority for an external one. With the political victories of the rising middle class, external authority lost prestige and man's own conscience assumed the place which external authority once had held. This change appeared to many as the victory of freedom. To submit to orders from the outside (at least in spiritual matters) appeared to be unworthy of a free man; but the conquest of his natural inclinations, and the establishment of the domination of one part of the individual, his nature, by another, his reason, will or conscience, seemed to be the very essence of freedom. Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issued by man's conscience are ultimately not governed by demands of the individual self but by social demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms. The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be his own; how can he rebel against himself? In recent decades "conscience" has lost much of its significance. It seems as though neither external nor internal authorities play any prominent role in the individual's life. Everybody is completely "free", if only he does not interfere with other people's legitimate claims. But what we find is rather that instead of disappearing, authority has made itself invisible. Instead of overt authority, "anonymous" authority reigns.It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion. Whether a mother says to her daughter, "I know you will not like to go out with that boy", or an advertisement suggests, "Smoke this brand of cigarettes--you will like their coolness", it is the same atmosphere of subtle suggestion which actually pervades our whole social life. Anonymous authority is more effective than overt authority, since one never suspects that there is any order which one is expected to follow. In external authority it is clear that there is an order and who gives it; one can fight against the authority, and in this fight personal independence and moral courage can develop.But whereas in internalized authority the command, though an internal one, remains visible, in anonymous authority both command and commander have become invisible.It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against.

A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth's atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth's external crust, and finally of the origin and development of living organisms. These considerations naturally divide the physics of the earth into three essential parts, the first being a theory of the atmosphere, or Meteorology, the second, a theory of the earth's external crust, or Hydrogeology, and the third, a theory of living organisms, or Biology.

That I might investigate the subject matter of this science with the same freedom of spirit we generally use in mathematics, I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them; and to this end I have looked upon passions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere.

The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen.

Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years—thousands if it gets really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In the ocean the residence time is thought to be more like a hundred years. Altogether about 60 percent of water molecules in a rainfall are returned to the atmosphere within a day or two. Once evaporated, they spend no more than a week or so—Drury says twelve days—in the sky before falling again as rain. Evaporation is a swift process, as you can easily gauge by the fate of a puddle on a summer’s day. Even something as large as the Mediterranean would dry out in a thousand years if it were not continually replenished. Such an event occurred a little under six million years ago and provoked what is known to science as the Messinian Salinity Crisis. What happened was that continental movement closed the Strait of Gibraltar. As the Mediterranean dried, its evaporated contents fell as freshwater rain into other seas, mildly diluting their saltiness—indeed, making them just dilute enough to freeze over larger areas than normal. The enlarged area of ice bounced back more of the Sun’s heat and pushed Earth into an ice age. So at least the theory goes. What is certainly true, as far as we can tell, is that a little change in the Earth’s dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining. Such an event, as we shall see a little further on, may even have created us.

In the course of an extended investigation into the nature of inflammation, and the healthy and morbid conditions of the blood in relation to it, I arrived several years ago at the conclusion that the essential cause of suppuration in wounds is decomposition brought about by the influence of the atmosphere upon blood or serum retained within them, and, in the case of contused wounds, upon portions of tissue destroyed by the violence of the injury. To prevent the occurrence of suppuration with all its attendant risks was an object manifestly desirable, but till lately apparently unattainable, since it seemed hopeless to attempt to exclude the oxygen which was universally regarded as the agent by which putrefaction was effected. But when it had been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic properties of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles.

Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling. The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground. I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence. As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told. The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.

Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since preindustrial times, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 to 378 parts per million. During the same period, the concentration of methane has more than doubled, from .78 to 1.76 parts per million. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square meter, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, like aerosols, subtracted) for every single square meter of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. If greenhouse gases were held constant at today’s levels, it is estimated that it would take several decades for the full impact of the forcing that is already in place to be felt. This is because raising the earth’s temperature involves not only warming the air and the surface of the land but also melting sea ice, liquefying glaciers, and, most significant, heating the oceans, all processes that require tremendous amounts of energy. (Imagine trying to thaw a gallon of ice cream or warm a pot of water using an Easy-Bake oven.) The delay that is built into the system is, in a certain sense, fortunate. It enables us, with the help of climate models, to foresee what is coming and therefore to prepare for it. But in another sense it is clearly disastrous, because it allows us to keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren.

Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first…and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure buildup, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like—what?—an ecology—a fellfield—or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well—a bit grandiose, that—really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better—weather—storm fronts of thought, high-pressure zones, low-pressure cells, hurricanes—the jet streams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds…life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

you are interested in learning more about NASA, the space shuttle program, astronomy, or astrophysics, here are some of the books I loved reading during the writing of this novel. Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control by Paul Dye Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier Cosmos by Carl Sagan The Art of Stargazing by Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock The Science of “Interstellar” by Kip Thorne

You allege some considerations in favor of a Deity from the universality of a belief in his existence. The superstitions of the savage, and the religion of civilized Europe appear to you to conspire to prove a first cause. I maintain that it is from the evidence of revelation alone that this belief derives the slightest countenance. That credulity should be gross in proportion to the ignorance of the mind that it enslaves, is in strict consistency with the principles of human nature. The idiot, the child and the savage, agree in attributing their own passions and propensities to the inanimate substances by which they are either benefited or injured. The former become Gods and the latter Demons; hence prayers and sacrifices, by the means of which the rude Theologian imagines that he may confirm the benevolence of the one, or mitigate the malignity of the other. He has averted the wrath of a powerful enemy by supplications and submission; he has secured the assistance of his neighbour by offerings; he has felt his own anger subside before the entreaties of a vanquished foe, and has cherished gratitude for the kindness of another. Therefore does he believe that the elements will listen to his vows. He is capable of love and hatred towards his fellow beings, and is variously impelled by those principles to benefit or injure them. The source of his error is sufficiently obvious. When the winds, the waves and the atmosphere act in such a manner as to thwart or forward his designs, he attributes to them the same propensities of whose existence within himself he is conscious when he is instigated by benefits to kindness, or by injuries to revenge. The bigot of the woods can form no conception of beings possessed of properties differing from his own: it requires, indeed, a mind considerably tinctured with science, and enlarged by cultivation to contemplate itself, not as the centre and model of the Universe, but as one of the infinitely various multitude of beings of which it is actually composed.

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour - religious, heroic, or social - Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time. Reason, rather than religion, was the driving force in this search for rules to govern human behaviour in the Renaissance world. The power and mystique of religion had been overthrown in one bold stroke: where the marvellous no longer holds sway, real life has to provide explanations. Man, and the use he makes of his powers, capabilities, and free will, is thus the subject matter of Renaissance literature, from the early sonnets modelled on Petrarch to the English epic which closes the period, Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished. The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is at its most frightening - and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.

Those who nod sagely and quote the tragedy of the commons in relation to environmental problems from pollution of the atmosphere to poaching of national parks tend to forget that Garrett Hardin revised his conclusions many times over thirty years. He recognized, most importantly, that anarchy did not prevail on the common pastures of midieval England in the way he had described [in his 1968 essay in 'Science']. The commoners--usually a limited number of people with defined rights in law--organized themselves to ensure it did not. The pastures were protected from ruin by the tradition of 'stinting,' which limited each herdsman to a fixed number of animals. 'A managed commons, though it may have other defects, is not automatically subject to the tragic fate of the unmanaged commons,' wrote Hardin, though he was still clearly unhappy with commoning arrangements. As with all forms of socialism, of which he regarded commoning as an early kind, Hardin said the flaw in the system lay in the quality of the management. The problem was alays how to prevent the managers from furthering their own interests. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians? Hardin observed, crucially, that a successful managed common depended on limiting the numbers of commoners, limiting access, and having penalties that deterred. [...] None of Hardin's requirements for a successfully managed common is fulfilled by high-seas fishery regimes

So, whether the aliens explore with chemistry or with radio waves, they might come to the same conclusion: a planet where there’s advanced technology must be populated with intelligent life-forms, who may occupy themselves discovering how the universe works and how to apply its laws for personal or public gain. Looking more closely at Earth’s atmospheric fingerprints, human biomarkers will also include sulfuric, carbonic, and nitric acids, and other components of smog from the burning of fossil fuels. If the curious aliens happen to be socially, culturally, and technologically more advanced than we are, then they will surely interpret these biomarkers as convincing evidence for the absence of intelligent life on Earth.

In the last few years I have been advocating a methodology of scientific research programmes, which solves some of the problems which both Popper and Kuhn failed to solve. First, I claim that the typical descriptive unit of great scientific achievements is not an isolated hypothesis but rather a research programme. Science is not simply trial and error, a series of conjectures and refutations. ‘All swans are white’ may be falsified by the discovery of one black swan. But such trivial trial and error does not rank as science. Newtonian science, for instance, is not simply a set of four conjectures—the three laws of mechanics and the law of gravitation. These four laws constitute only the ‘hard core’ of the Newtonian programme. But this hard core is tenaciously protected from refutation by a vast ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses. And, even more importantly, the research programme also has a ‘heuristic’, that is, a powerful problem-solving machinery, which, with the help of sophisticated mathematical techniques, digests anomalies and even turns them into positive evidence. For instance, if a planet does not move exactly as it should, the Newtonian scientist checks his conjectures concerning atmospheric refraction, concerning propaga­tion of light in magnetic storms, and hundreds of other conjectures which are all part of the programme. He may even invent a hitherto unknown planet and calculate its position, mass and velocity in order to explain the anomaly.

But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

In using the present in order to reveal the past, we assume that the forces in the world are essentially the same through all time; for these forces are based on the very nature of matter, and could not have changed. The ocean has always had its waves, and those waves have always acted in the same manner. Running water on the land has ever had the same power of wear and transportation and mathematical value to its force. The laws of chemistry, heat, electricity, and mechanics have been the same through time. The plan of living structures has been fundamentally one, for the whole series belongs to one system, as much almost as the parts of an animal to the one body; and the relations of life to light and heat, and to the atmosphere, have ever been the same as now.

Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.35 We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.

The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth’s atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day. Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time. A good portion of Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop.

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions. As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second-an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet or observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverrier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many other instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that 'our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.

… no technical skill is worth more than knowing how to select exciting research projects. Regrettably, this vital ability is almost never taught. When I signed on with a research adviser in my first year of graduate school, I was thrilled to be given a problem to work in the physics of the upper atmosphere. That I had no idea what motivated the problem did not prevent me from carrying out an analysis, on a supercomputer of the day, and publishing my first paper at the age of 22… I found myself assimilating technical skills without ever grasping the significance of the problem, without understanding how or whether it was at the cutting edge of science. This way of working became a habit, one that seriously threatened my career… I relied on a senior scientist to tell me what would be an interesting problem to work on; then I would carry out the task… Four years and two postdoctoral positions after earning a PhD—still having little sense of what I wanted to learn as a scientist—I was on the job market.

One cannot do justice to Marx without recognizing his sincerity. His open-mindedness, his sense of facts, his distrust of verbiage, and especially of moralizing verbiage, made him one of the world’s most influential fighters against hypocrisy and pharisaism. He had a burning desire to help the oppressed, and was fully conscious of the need for proving himself in deeds, and not only in words. His main talents being theoretical, he devoted immense labour to forging what he believed to be scientific weapons for the fight to improve the lot of the vast majority of men. His sincerity in his search for truth and his intellectual honesty distinguish him, I believe, from many of his followers (although unfortunately he did not altogether escape the corrupting influence of an upbringing in the atmosphere of Hegelian dialectics, described by Schopenhauer as ‘destructive of all intelligence’). Marx’s interest in social science and social philosophy was fundamentally a practical interest. He saw in knowledge a means of promoting the progress of man.

It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there it is, as much a part and product of life as wine and bread. Taken all in al, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works, and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond maybe shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion. The word 'chance' does not serve to account well for structures of such magnificence... We should credit it for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature. It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People screamed, wept, gave away their possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the words to 'Sugar Magnolia'. Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People screamed, wept, gave away their possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn’t know the words to “Sugar Magnolia.” Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward.

The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something’s meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself—those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.

After more than twenty years as a transactional trader and businessman in what I called the “strange profession,” I tried what one calls an academic career. And I have something to report—actually that was the driver behind this idea of antifragility in life and the dichotomy between the natural and the alienation of the unnatural. Commerce is fun, thrilling, lively, and natural; academia as currently professionalized is none of these. And for those who think that academia is “quieter” and an emotionally relaxing transition after the volatile and risk-taking business life, a surprise: when in action, new problems and scares emerge every day to displace and eliminate the previous day’s headaches, resentments, and conflicts. A nail displaces another nail, with astonishing variety. But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of their environment. Not to mention a level of envy I have almost never seen in business. … My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy.

Despite Imbry's demurrals, Ghyll never missed an opportunity to expound on his creed, and was now again launched upon a lecture. "Life, after all," he said, "is but a succession of greater and lesser probabilities—a melange of maybes, as the Grand Prognosticator so aptly put it. Look at you, here in the supposed security of Bolly's Snug, supping and swilling with nary a care. Yet can you deny that a fragment of some asteroid, shattered in a collision far out in thither space back when humankind was still adrip with the primordial slime, having spent millions of years looming toward us, might now, its moment come, lance down through the atmosphere at immense speed and obliterate you where you stand?" "I do not deny the possibility," said Imbry. "I say that the likelihood is remote." "Yet still it exists! And if we couple that existence to a divine appetite for upsetting mortal plans—" "I can think of other, less far-fetched scenarios that might lead to the obliteration of someone in this room," said the thief. He accompanied the remark with an unwinking stare that ought to have caused Ghyll to stop to consider that, though Imbry was so corpulent as to be almost spherical, he was capable of sudden and conclusive acts of violence. And that consideration would have led, in turn, to a change of subject. But the Computant was too deeply set in his philosophy to take note of how others responded to it, and continued to discourse on abstruse concerns.

All living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness. If this veil is taken from them, if people condemn a religion, an art, a genius to orbit like a star without an atmosphere, then we should no longer wonder about their rapid decay and the way they become hard and barren. That is the way it is now with all great things which never succeed without some delusion. But every people, indeed every person, who wishes to become mature needs such an enveloping delusion, such a protecting and veiling cloud. But today people generally despise becoming mature, because they honor history more than living. Indeed, people exult over the fact that now 'science is beginning to rule over living'. It is possible that people will attain that goal but it is certain that a life so governed is not worth much, because it is much less living and it establishes a life for the future far less than does the previous life governed not by knowledge but by instinct and powerful illusory images. But, as stated, it is clearly not to be the era of fully developed and mature people, of harmonious personalities, but the era of common work which is as useful as possible. That, however, amounts only to the fact that people are to be trained for the purposes of the time, in order to get to work with their hands as promptly as possible. They are to labor in the factories of the universal utilities before they are mature, that is, so that they really no longer become mature, because this would be a luxury, which would deprive the 'labor market' of a lot of power.

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics..." "The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head..." "One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse. She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

It must be clear to those who look below the surface of things that far-reaching changes in our fundamental ideas and attitudes are setting in, and that the world of to-morrow will be a very different one from that which carried us into the abyss in 1914. In this connection a grave duty arises also for our science and philosophy. The higher thought of our day should not exhaust itself in fine-spun technicalities of speculation or research, but should regard itself as dedicated to service and should make its distinctive contribution towards the upbuilding of a new constructive world-view. We are passing through one of the great transition epochs of history; we are threatened with reaction on the one hand and with disintegration on the other. The old beacon lights are growing dimmer, and the torch of new ideas has to be kindled for our guidance. The word is largely with our intellectual leaders. In the last resort a civilisation vi PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION depends on its general ideas; it is nothing but a spiritual structure of the dominant ideas expressing themselves in institutions and the subtle atmosphere of culture. If the soul of our civilisation is to be saved we shall have to find new and fuller expression for the great saving unities—the unity of reality in all its range, the unity of life in all its forms, the unity of ideas throughout human civilisation, and the unity of man's spirit with the mystery of the Cosmos in religious faith and aspiration. Holism is in its own way a groping towards the new light and to new points of view. And I cannot help feeling that if the full extent of its implications is realised, both science and philosophy

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions. Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. Science resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her -- green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs -- would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself -- those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Get used to it. The weather may feel like science fiction, but the science underlying it is very real and mundane. It takes only a small increase in global average temperatures to have a big effect on weather, because what drives the winds and their circulation patterns on the surface of the earth are differences in temperature. So when you start to change the average surface temperature of the earth, you change the wind patterns—and then before you know it, you change the monsoons. When the earth gets warmer, you also change rates of evaporation—which is a key reason we will get more intense rainstorms in some places and hotter dry spells and longer droughts in others. How can we have both wetter and drier extremes at the same time? As we get rising global average temperatures and the earth gets warmer, it will trigger more evaporation from the soil. So regions that are already naturally dry will tend to get drier. At the same time, higher rates of evaporation, because of global warming, will put more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so areas that are either near large bodies of water or in places where atmospheric dynamics already favor higher rates of precipitation will tend to get wetter. We know one thing about the hydrologic cycle: What moisture goes up must come down, and where more moisture goes up, more will come down. Total global precipitation will probably increase, and the amount that will come down in any one storm is expected to increase as well—which will increase flooding and gully washers. That’s why this rather gentle term “global warming” doesn’t capture the disruptive potential of what lies ahead. “The popular term ‘global warming’ is a misnomer,” says John Holdren. “It implies something uniform, gradual, mainly about temperature, and quite possibly benign. What is happening to global climate is none of those. It is uneven geographically. It is rapid compared to ordinary historic rates of climatic change, as well as rapid compared to the adjustment times of ecosystems and human society. It is affecting a wide array of critically important climatic phenomena besides temperature, including precipitation, humidity, soil moisture, atmospheric circulation patterns, storms, snow and ice cover, and ocean currents and upwellings. And its effects on human well-being are and undoubtedly will remain far more negative than positive. A more accurate, albeit more cumbersome, label than ‘global warming’ is ‘global climatic disruption.’ 

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there, denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing-hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times, not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces, the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements from the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building blocks of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed. Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generation of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth. Congealing and warming, the Earth released methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the first oceans. Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightning and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the primitive atmosphere; the fragments fell back together into more and more complex forms, which dissolved into the early oceans. After a while the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clay. And one day a molecule arose that quite by accident was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth. As time passed, more elaborate and more accurate self replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun. Single-celled plants evolved, and life began generating its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free living forms bonded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell. One celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized organ systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Plants and animals discovered that land could support life. Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born live instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early ocean coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Assistant veterinarian Dorokhov dissolved cattle horns in nitric acid and offered this poison to cancer patients. Technician Anatolii Kachugin preached healing with heavy metal salts. Aleksandra Troitskaia, a veterinary doctor from Kaluga, gave her patients an extract from cancer cells as a vaccine. In the atmosphere of insanity that gripped the country, patients dragged themselves to these hoaxers in droves. Apparently to make this picture ultimately surrealistic, Soviet art depicted the creation of the most advanced medicines (those that were at the times being created in the United States) in the USSR, with American spies (headed by the ambassador) supposedly chasing after them.

Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

There were other worries too … in particular, might the experiment be too successful, setting off a chain reaction that not only spread through the experiment’s supply of uranium-235, but through everything else on Earth as well? Might the atmosphere catch fire? Calculations suggested: probably not. Besides, the big worry was that if the Allies didn’t get nuclear fission working soon then the Germans would beat them to it. Given the choice between our blowing up the world and the enemy blowing up the world, it was obvious what to do. That is, on reflection, not a happy sentence.

Heidegger’s word Sein (being) cannot be easily defined, because what it refers to is not like other categories or qualities. It certainly is not an object of any kind. Nor is it an ordinary shared feature of objects. You can teach someone what a ‘building’ is by pointing to a lot of different structures from grass huts to skyscrapers; it may take a while but eventually they will get it. But you could go on forever pointing out huts, meals, animals, forest paths, church portals, festive atmospheres, and looming thunderclouds, saying each time, ‘Look: being!’, and your interlocutor is likely to become more and more puzzled. Heidegger sums this up by saying that Being is not itself a being. That is, it is not a defined or delineated entity of any kind. He distinguishes between the German word Seiende, which can refer to any individual entity, such as a mouse or a church door, and Sein, which means the Being that such particular beings have. (In English, one way of signalling the distinction is by using the capital ‘B’ for the latter.) He calls it the ‘ontological difference’ — from ‘ontology’, the study of what is. It is not an easy distinction to keep clear in one’s mind, but the ontological difference between Being and beings is extremely important to Heidegger. If we get confused between the two, we fall into errors — for example, settling down to study some science of particular entities, such as psychology or even cosmology, while thinking that we are studying Being itself.

Though bodies are leagues apart and their associations forgotten, their associations float in the general atmosphere of human mind.

But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of their environment. Not to mention a level of envy I have almost never seen in business.… My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy.

What you believe about climate change doesn’t reflect what you know,” said Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School who studies risk perception. “It expresses who you are." To illustrate this point, Kahan cited the results of yet another survey by the Pew Research Center. This survey was designed to test basic scientific knowledge and it posed questions like “What is the main function of red blood cells?” When respondents were asked what gas “most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise,” 58 percent chose the correct answer: “carbon dioxide.” There was little difference in the proportion of Democrats and Republicans who gave the right response; among the former it was 56 percent, among the latter 58 percent. (Among Independents, 63 percent chose correctly.) But polls that ask Americans about their own beliefs about global warming show a significant partisan divide; in another Pew survey, 66 percent of Democrats said they believed that human activity was the “main cause” of global warming, while only 24 percent of Republicans did. This suggests there are many Democrats who don’t know what’s causing climate change but still believe humans are responsible for it and many Republicans who do know, yet still deny that humans play a role. And what this shows, according to Kahan, is that people’s views on climate change are shaped less by their knowledge of the science than by their sense of group identity. To break the political logjam, he argues, Americans need to find ways of talking about climate change that don’t require members of one group or the other to renounce their cultural identity. “If you show people there is some way of responding to the problem that’s consistent with who they are, then they’re more likely to see the problem,” Kahan told me. Kari Marie Norgaard is a sociologist at the University of Oregon who has studied how people talk about climate change. She, too, believes there’s a strong cultural component to Americans’ attitudes, but she sees the problem as reflecting the strategies people use to avoid painful subjects. Norgaard argues that it’s difficult even for people who are privately worried about climate change to discuss the issue in public because on the one hand they feel guilty about the situation and on the other they feel helpless to change it. “We have a need to think of ourselves as good people,” she told me. Meanwhile, the very lack of discussion about the issue feeds itself: people feel that if it really were a serious problem, others would be dealing with it: “It’s difficult for people to feel that climate change is really happening in part because we’re embedded in a world where no one else around us is talking about it.” “It becomes a vicious cycle between the political gridlock and the cultural and individual gridlock,” Norgaard went on. What could possibly break this cycle? Norgaard argues that if the nation’s political leaders would candidly discuss the issue “it could be very powerful. It could free up a lot of the hopelessness people feel and allow them to mobilize.” “I think there are probably multiple levels at which we could break this cycle,” she went on. And though, after more than thirty years of ignored warnings, the challenge has grown all the more daunting, she said, “I don’t believe we get to give up.

In Brazil, the rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed at an alarming rate by bulldozing and burning. There are many excellent reasons to prevent this continuing – loss of habitat for organisms, production of carbon dioxide from burning trees, destruction of the culture of native Indian tribes, and so on. What is not a good reason, though, is the phrase that is almost inevitably trotted out, to the effect that the rainforests are the ‘lungs of the planet’. The image here is that the ‘civilized’ regions – that is, the industrialized ones – are net producers of carbon dioxide. The pristine rainforest, in contrast, produces a gentle but enormous oxygen breeze, while absorbing the excess carbon dioxide produced by all those nasty people with cars. It must do, surely? A forest is full of plants, and plants produce oxygen. No, they don’t. The net oxygen production of a rainforest is, on average, zero. Trees produce carbon dioxide at night, when they are not photosynthesizing. They lock up oxygen and carbon into sugars, yes – but when they die, they rot, and release carbon dioxide. Forests can indirectly remove carbon dioxide by removing carbon and locking it up as coal or peat, and by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Ironically, that’s where a lot of the human production of carbon dioxide comes from – we dig it up and burn it again, using up the same amount of oxygen. If the theory that oil is the remains of plants from the carboniferous period is true, then our cars are burning up carbon that was once laid down by plants. Even if an alternative theory, growing in popularity, is true, and oil was produced by bacteria, then the problem remains the same. Either way, if you burn a rainforest you add a one-off surplus of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but you do not also reduce the Earth’s capacity to generate new oxygen. If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide permanently, and not just cut short-term emissions, the best bet is to build up a big library at home, locking carbon into paper, or put plenty of asphalt on roads. These don’t sound like ‘green’ activities, but they are. You can cycle on the roads if it makes you feel better.

Like the Great Oxidation Event, the Great Unconformity injected an enormous quantity of oxygen into the atmosphere through a massive and efficient subduction of organic carbon into Earth's mantle. When this event occurred, the oxygen quantity in Earth's atmosphere jumped from 1% or less up to 8%. Just before the time of the Cambrian explosion 543 million years ago, another major continental erosion event coupled with oceanic sediment subduction led to a jump in the atmosphere oxygen level from 8 to 10%.

modern science itself agrees that we don’t really see with our eyes. They are merely links in a long chain stretching from the sun, through sunlight and atmosphere and illuminated objects, through eye lenses and retinae and optic nerves, right down to particle/wavicle-haunted space in a region of the brain, where at last (it’s said) seeing really occurs.

happy to share our hard-earned tree-ring data with one another and with the broader science community on the International Tree-Ring Data Bank,* a publicly accessible internet database hosted by the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) paleoclimate program

Humans have been inadvertently increasing the earth’s albedo for almost two centuries, as the burning of sulphur-laden coal produces tiny particles (aerosols) in the lower atmosphere that enhance the planet’s reflectivity. One of my first calculations upon joining BP in 2004 had to do with that aerosol cooling. The company was embarking on a campaign to brand natural gas as “a bridge to a low-carbon future,” as it produces only half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as coal. However, I quickly estimated, literally on the back of an envelope, that a sizable portion of that CO2 reduction would be negated by the loss of aerosol cooling from the coal. BP management was not pleased when I pointed that out.

A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not help with all its might and all the means at its disposal-if it does not help woman, twofold and threefold enslaved in the past, to get on to the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest possible care of the children ... for whose benefit it has been made. But how can one create ... a new life based on mutual consideration, on self-respect, on the real equality of women . . . on the efficient care for children-in an atmosphere poisoned with the roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of masters and slaves, that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle against 'foul language' is an essential condition of mental hygiene just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical hygiene.

weather and climate are not at all the same thing. 1 The relationships between the two are complicated, especially for weather phenomena related to precipitation, otherwise known as rain and snow. For example, though it may seem counterintuitive, rising temperatures can indeed lead to more snow—for instance, if a rise in low temperatures keeps the Arctic Ocean from freezing in winter, more water will evaporate into the atmosphere.

The amount of water on the earth is essentially fixed. Almost all of it (some 97 percent) is in the oceans, and almost all of the rest is on the land—in ice and snow (especially the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets), in lakes and rivers, and in groundwater. But as we saw in Chapter 2, the one hundred-thousandth of the earth’s water that resides in its atmosphere plays a central role in climate—water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and clouds account for most of the earth’s albedo.

The sun’s energy moves water among these various reservoirs to form what’s termed “the hydrological cycle.” The largest and most dynamic part of this cycle is the flow of water from the earth’s surface into the atmosphere (85 percent of this flow comes from evaporation of the ocean, the other 15 percent from the land, much of it transpired by plants). That water remains aloft for an average of ten days before condensing and falling back to the surface as rain or snow (77 percent falling on the ocean and 23 percent on the land).

Climatologists who use global computer models to simulate the long-term behavior of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans have known for several years that their models allow at least one dramatically different equilibrium. During the entire geological past, this alternative climate has never existed, but it could be an equally valid solution to the system of equations governing the earth. It is what some climatologists call the White Earth climate: an earth whose continents are covered by snow and whose oceans are covered by ice. A glaciated earth would reflect seventy percent of the incoming solar radiation and so would stay extremely cold. The lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, would be much thinner. The storms that would blow across the frozen surface would be much smaller than the storms we know. In general, the climate would be less hospitable to life as we know it. Computer models have such a strong tendency to fall into the White Earth equilibrium that climatologists find themselves wondering why it has never come about. It may simply be a matter of chance.

There is a Life-Principle of the world, a universal agent, wherein are two natures and a double current, of love and wrath. This ambient fluid penetrates everything. It is a ray detached from the glory of the sun, and fixed by the weight of the atmosphere and the central attraction. It is the body of the Holy Spirit, the universal Agent, the Serpent devouring his own tail. With this electro-magnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, the ancients and the alchemists were familiar. Of this agent, that phase of modern ignorance termed physical science talks incoherently, knowing naught of it save its effects; and theology might apply to it all its pretended definitions of spirit. Quiescent, it is appreciable by no human sense; disturbed or in movement, none can explain its mode of action; and to term it "fluid," and speak of its "currents," is but to veil a profound ignorance under a cloud of words.

If virulent germs were normal in the atmosphere, how numerous would be the occasions for their penetration independently by way of the lungs and intestinal mucus! There would not be a wound, however slight, the prick even of a pin, that would not be the occasion for infecting us with smallpox, typhus, syphilis, gonorrhoea. --as quoted in Béchamp or Pasteur?: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology By Ethel D. Hume on page 308 [prefaced by Pasteur: Plagiarist, Imposter: The Germ Theory Exploded By R. B. Pearson], ISBN# 978-1-46790-012-6, 2011

The sky is blue because the molecules of the atmosphere scatter the blue wavelengths more than the others; the blue seems to come from everywhere in the sky.

I will never forget standing in the middle of a historical home that is supposed to be home to a ghost that has a nasty attitude. The subflooring and some of the walls were exposed from the dilapidation of time, and on a night where winds were high, the sounds and atmosphere felt more like a movie set than they did reality. A couple of days before I had just written a farewell that I had never wanted to write, and my mind was interrogatively scouring the, "whys," of why there had to be a farewell? While standing there, not long before it was time for me to call it a night and conclude my overnight stay, while bathed in an empty sorrow, I felt a microsecond's calm from the grief. For a fleeting moment, I was grateful that I had been given the opportunity to show up and to put things to the measuring stick in the name of science. That seems to be my calling. Callings are not always the lives that we would choose on our own. That ever brief snippet of time was the closest thing I could find next to solace in the moment, if it was even in the proximity of solace, at all.

The next most significant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is different from water vapor in that its concentration in the atmosphere is much the same all over the globe. CO2 currently accounts for about 7 percent of the atmosphere’s ability to intercept heat. It’s also different in that human activities have affected its concentration (that is, the fraction of air molecules that are CO2). Since 1750, the concentration has increased from 0.000280 (280 parts per million or ppm) to 0.000410 (410 ppm) in 2019, and it continues to go up 2.3 ppm every year. Although most of today’s CO2 is natural, there is no doubt that this rise is, and has been, due to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.

how could changing fewer than three molecules out of 10,000, a 0.03 percent change, increase the atmosphere’s heat-intercepting ability by about thirty times that amount (1 percent)? And

While we’ve talked about how the overall amount of that radiation has to balance the warming sunlight, the radiation is actually spread over a spectrum of different wavelengths. Think of those like “colors,” although not visible to our eyes. Water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas, intercepts only some colors, but because it blocks almost 100 percent of those it does, adding more water vapor to the atmosphere won’t make the insulation much thicker—it would be like putting another layer of black paint on an already black window. But that’s not true for carbon dioxide. That molecule intercepts some colors that water vapor misses, meaning a few molecules of CO2 can have a much bigger effect (like the first layer of black paint on a clear window). So the greater potency of a CO2 molecule depends upon relatively obscure aspects of how it, and water vapor, intercept heat radiation—another example of why the details are important when attempting to understand human influences on the climate.

Understanding how the climate system responds to human influences is, unfortunately, a lot like trying to understand the connection between human nutrition and weight loss, a subject famously unsettled to this day. Imagine an experiment where we fed someone an extra half cucumber each day. That would be about an extra twenty calories, a 1 percent increase to the average 2,000-calorie daily adult diet. We’d let that go on for a year and see how much weight they gained. Of course, we would need to know many other things to draw any meaningful conclusions from the results: What else did they eat? How much did they exercise? Were there any changes in health or hormones that affect the rate at which they burn calories? Many things would have to be measured precisely to understand the effect of the additional cucumbers, although we would expect that, all else being equal, the added calories would add some weight. The problem with human-caused carbon dioxide and the climate is that, as in the cucumber experiment, all else isn’t necessarily equal, as there are other influences (forcings) on the climate, both human and natural, that can confuse the picture. Among the other human influences on the climate are methane emissions into the atmosphere (from fossil fuels, but more importantly from agriculture) and other minor gases that together exert a warming influence almost as great as that of human-caused CO2.

But there are several important differences between methane and carbon dioxide. One is that methane concentrations are much lower (2,000 parts per billion, which is about 1/200th that of CO2’s 400 parts per million). Another difference is that a methane molecule lasts in the atmosphere for only about twelve years—though after that, chemical reactions covert it to CO2. And a third difference is that, because of the peculiarities of how molecules interact with the different colors of infrared radiation, every additional methane molecule in the atmosphere is thirty times more potent in warming than a molecule of carbon dioxide. These differences—lower concentration and shorter lifetime, but greater warming potency—must be taken into account when comparing CH4 and CO2 emissions. For instance, the 300 million tons of methane humans emit each year is only 0.8 percent of the 36 gigatons of CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels.

Upward flows of energy and water vapor (think thunderhead clouds) occur over areas much smaller than the 100 km (60 miles) of our grid. This is particularly troublesome in the tropics, where upward flows are important in lofting energy and water vapor from the ocean surface into the atmosphere. In fact, the flow of energy carried into the atmosphere by evaporation of the ocean waters is more than thirty times larger than the human influences shown back in Figure 2.4. So subgrid assumptions about this “moist convection”—how air and water vapor move vertically through the flat grid boxes—are crucial to building accurate models.

The world is still the same, keeping the atmospheric pressure aside, but it's the minds that are busy wandering around. Ruin and flee from the present moment, while seeking for the future.

Not all human influences are warming. Aerosols are fine particles in the atmosphere such as those produced by the burning of low-quality coal. They cause severe health problems, contributing to millions of deaths per year. But they also make the globe more reflective both by directly reflecting sunlight and by inducing the formation of reflective clouds. Human-caused aerosols, together with changes in land use like deforestation (pasture is more reflective than forest), increase the albedo and so exert a net cooling influence that cancels about half of the warming influence of human-caused greenhouse gases.

The most significant human-caused greenhouse gases influencing the climate are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Their concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing because we’re emitting them; that’s why efforts to reduce human influences on the climate focus on reducing emissions.

The earth formed 4.5 billion years ago with a fixed endowment of carbon. Today, that carbon is found in several different circumstances around the planet—what are called “reservoirs.” The largest reservoir by far is the earth’s crust, which contains almost all of the planet’s carbon, about 1.9 billion gigatons (1 gigaton, abbreviated Gt, is one billion tons).2 The next largest amount, about 40,000 Gt, is in the oceans, almost all of that far below the surface. There are about 2,100 Gt more stored on land in soils and living things, and 5,000–10,000 Gt in fossil fuels underground. The roughly 850 Gt of carbon in the atmosphere, almost all in the form of carbon dioxide, is equal to about 25 percent of the carbon at or near the earth’s surface (in the soils, plants, and shallow ocean) but is only 2 percent of the total carbon in the oceans.

The CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels disrupts the balance of this great annual cycle, since that carbon has been pulled out of the deep underground, where it was isolated from these natural processes. The amount of carbon that fossil fuel use adds to the cycle is currently about 4.5 percent of what flows each year. About half of that increase is taken up annually by the surface (the rising CO2 has increased vegetation over much of the planet), and the remainder stays in the atmosphere, increasing its CO2 concentration.

A fourth, more subtle confirmation comes from carbon isotopes—the relatively rare carbon atoms that are about 8 percent heavier than ordinary carbon atoms. About 1.1 percent of the earth’s carbon is the isotope 13C; the rest is the lighter isotope 12C. But the proportion of 12C and 13C isn’t the same in all forms of carbon. In particular, the chemical reactions of life have a very slight preference for 12C, so that the carbon in living things (as opposed to mineral carbon in the earth’s crust) is “light”; that is, it has a slightly lesser proportion of 13C. Since the carbon in the atmosphere’s CO2 has become progressively “lighter” over the decades, we can infer that it arises from the burning of fossil fuels, which, after all, were once living things.

zooming out to look over geological times gives us a quite different perspective. The natural processes moving the earth’s carbon around were different in the past, so much so that by geological standards, today’s Earth is starved for atmospheric CO2

Only once in the geological past—the Permian period, 300 million years ago—have atmospheric CO2 levels been as low as they are today. Plant and animal life flourished abundantly during times when CO2 levels were five or ten times higher than today’s. But those were different plants and animals. So while carbon dioxide, in and of itself, is not particularly a concern for the planet, what is a concern is that, because life today has evolved to be well-suited to a low level of CO2 (anatomically modern humans appeared only some 200,000 years ago, at the extreme right of this chart), the rapid increases of the past century might prove disruptive. Concentrations up to 1,000 ppm (2.5 times that in open air today) are common in classrooms or auditoriums.

Carbon dioxide is the single human-caused greenhouse gas with the largest influence on the climate. But it is of greatest concern also because it persists in the atmosphere/surface cycle for a very long time. About 60 percent of any CO2 emitted today will remain in the atmosphere twenty years from now, between 30 and 55 percent will still be there after a century, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain after one thousand years.

Carbon dioxide is the single human-caused greenhouse gas with the largest influence on the climate. But it is of greatest concern also because it persists in the atmosphere/surface cycle for a very long time. About 60 percent of any CO2 emitted today will remain in the atmosphere twenty years from now, between 30 and 55 percent will still be there after a century, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain after one thousand years.7 The simple fact that carbon dioxide lasts a long time in the atmosphere is a fundamental impediment to reducing human influences on the climate. Any emission adds to the concentration, which keeps increasing as long as emissions continue. In other words, CO2 is not like smog, which disappears a few days after you stop emissions; it takes centuries for the excess carbon dioxide to vanish from the atmosphere. So modest reductions in CO2 emissions would only slow the increase in concentration but not prevent it. Just to stabilize the CO2 concentration, and hence its warming influence, global emissions would have to vanish.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change defines “climate change” as: . . . a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods . . .7 That definition explicitly excludes changes due to natural causes, which differs from the plain-language meaning of the term. So when the average person hears “climate change” (as in the commonly shouted credo Climate change is real!), they are likely to assume it means change we are responsible for.

If the average albedo were to increase from 0.30 to 0.31, say because of a 5 percent increase in cloudiness, that additional reflectivity would largely compensate for the warming influence of doubling the atmosphere’s CO2

Just like that cold weather gear, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere intercept and impede the flow of infrared heat from the earth’s surface into space. Some of that heat finds its way back down to the surface, where it causes additional warming

The most common of the gases making up the earth’s atmosphere are nitrogen (78 percent) and oxygen (21 percent). Combined, then, these two account for 99 percent of the dry atmosphere, and because of the peculiarities of molecular structure, heat passes through them easily. The largest part of the remaining 1 percent is the inert gas argon. But while even less abundant, some of the other gases—most significantly water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone—intercept, on average, about 83 percent of the heat emitted by the earth’s surface.8 So the earth does indeed emit energy equivalent to what it absorbs from the sun, but instead of directly flowing off into space, cooling our planet to a chilly average of 0ºF, much of that energy is intercepted by the atmosphere blanketing us.

Water vapor is the most important of the greenhouse gases. Of course, the amount in the atmosphere at any given place and time varies greatly (the humidity changes a lot with the weather). But on average, water vapor amounts to only about 0.4 percent of the molecules in the atmosphere. Even so, it accounts for more than 90 percent of the atmosphere’s ability to intercept heat.

The great majority of men in cities are apt to pride themselves on their own exemption from ‘superstition’, and to smile pityingly at the poor countrymen and countrywomen who believe in fairies. But when they do so they forget that, with all their own admirable progress in material invention, with all the far-reaching data of their acquired science, with all the vast extent of their commercial and economic conquests, they themselves have ceased to be natural. Wherever under modern conditions great multitudes of men and women are herded together there is bound to be an unhealthy psychical atmosphere never found in the country—an atmosphere which inevitably tends to develop in the average man who is not psychically strong enough to resist it, lower at the expense of higher forces or qualities, and thus to inhibit any normal attempts of the Subliminal Self (a well-accredited psychological entity) to manifest itself in consciousness.

The city pounced on him when Jake opened the front door of the building. Even at this early hour, people were on the move, a fraction of them in the city’s decrepit subway trains, the rest above ground, pushing forward with determination below long rows of trees recently planted along what used to be parking lanes. It hit him every time he opened the door—how the street had shrunk, how the sidewalks and bike lanes had expanded, and how these rearranged proportions had changed the atmosphere into something radically new, an entirely different city.

In America today, anyone over fifty lives in dread of the Big A—Alzheimer’s disease. Small social gatherings (dinner, cocktail parties, etc.) take on the atmosphere of a segment from NPR’s weekly quiz show “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.” That’s the one where guests vie with each other in intense competitions to be the first to come up with the names of such things as the actor playing a role in the latest mini-series everybody is binging on. Almost inevitably, someone will pull out a cellphone to check the accuracy of the person who responded first. Quick, quicker, quickest lest others suspect you of coming down with the initial symptoms of the Big A. Although Alzheimer’s disease is not nearly as common as many people fear, nevertheless worries about perceived memory lapses are increasingly expressed to friends. They are also the most common complaint that persons over fifty-five years of age bring to their doctors. Such memory concerns are often unjustified and arouse needless anxiety. This widespread anxiety has helped create a national pre-occupation with memory and signs of memory failure. One of the reasons for this panic is the confusion in many people’s minds about how we form memories.

...I feel inexplicably overcome with discomfort; something is off- something I can't understand, explain, or ignore....in Japan I learned a word for this very thing- fun'iki, in ineffable feeling of goodness or badness or contentment or discomfort. Atmosphere may be the closest we can come [in English].

You can literally re-code your being; repair, animate and activate your 12-Strand DNA; heal (emotional and etheric) trauma; and cure cancer and other illnesses; all through the use of sound frequencies, the harmonic science of the ancients. For sound is vibration, the oscillating motion of molecules in the atmosphere. All dimensions exist in states of vibration.

* To be sure, today Tyndall would probably be called a physicist, and he is best remembered for his pioneering investigations of the absorptive properties of atmospheric gases. He seems, in fact, to have been the first person to predict the greenhouse effect, which he did in 1861: On a fair November day the aqueous vapour in the atmosphere produced fifteen times the absorption of the true air of the atmosphere. It is on rays

insulation provided by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which raises our planet’s surface temperature to its observed value. How that insulation

The snow came quickly, white hornets stinging in the thin atmospheric night.

These cells took oxygen from our blood and returned carbon dioxide, which traveled back through the veins, through the lungs, and into the atmosphere: the process of breathing.

If you’ve followed this far, you might be puzzled by two things. First, how could changing fewer than three molecules out of 10,000, a 0.03 percent change, increase the atmosphere’s heat-intercepting ability by about thirty times that amount (1 percent)? And second, how could a mere 1 percent increase in heat-intercepting ability be such a big deal?

It is not too much to say that, in light of advancing science, many of the infirmities that beset us, whether of heart, intellect or temper, are the results of defective education. ... The principle which underlies the possibility of all education is discovered to us: we are taught that the human frame, brain as well as muscle, grows to the uses it is earliest put to. ... We find that we can work definitely towards the formation of character; that the habits of the good life, of the alert intelligence ... are somehow related in the very distance of his brain. Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. ... education is a life; all life must have its appropriate nourishment ... the spiritual life is nourished by ideas; and it is the parent's duty to sustain a child's inner life with ideas as they sustain the body with food.

...A city and a bacterium are each situated at the very extreme boundaries of the shapes that life takes on earth...With the exception of the earth's atmosphere, the city is life's largest footprint. And microbes are its smallest.

14. Cooperation between science and faith. If there’s one thing that differentiates SoulBoom from the majority of mystical faiths of the past, it is a core belief in the essential harmony between science and religion. Our universe is not singular; it is unified. A unified field of physical and spiritual forces that shape and determine our lives. Science is often seen as logical and objective and spirituality as “airy-fairy” and subjective. However, it’s time to rectify once and for all this false dichotomy. As Louis Pasteur said, “A little science takes you away from God but more of it takes you to Him.” Both are methods of examining and interacting with the same reality. We understand the physical world, its laws, operations, and mysteries through the lens of science. Science is both a database of knowledge and a system of learning about natural laws by using repeatable experiments that reveal factual truth about those systems. We at SoulBoom would argue the same is true of the spiritual world. Spiritual guidance from the world’s great faith traditions and from Indigenous belief systems allow us to understand the “why” that exists beyond the “how” of science. If science leads us to create an atomic bomb, religion shows us that peace is the ultimate goal. If technology helped create tremendous advances in transportation, energy, and construction, a wise, moral imperative tells us that the resulting CO2 in the atmosphere will be devastating to our species and thousands of others and must be limited for the good of our descendents.

But what we have learned from atmospheric science is that the give-and-take, call-and-response that is the essence of all relationships in nature was not eliminated with fossil fuels, it was merely delayed, all the while gaining force and velocity. Now the cumulative effect of those centuries of burned carbon is in the process of unleashing the most ferocious natural tempers of all.

You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame. ‘Why do people hate waiting for an engineer’s appointment?’ ‘Why do people not like it when their flight is delayed?’ ‘Why do people hate standing on trains?’ All of these questions seem facile – and because of this, our rationalising brains find it dangerously easy to come up with a plausible answer. But just because there is a rational answer to something, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a more interesting, irrational answer to be found in the unconscious.

Now, under certain conditions, nitrogen will unite with oxygen to produce N2O, nitrous oxide—better known as laughing gas. But, fortunately for human beings, this unity does not take place in the normal atmosphere. The

before you begin an External Qi Healing session: Practice qigong and meditation Cleanse the space Build a trustful atmosphere The patient must ask (unless incapable)

As a result, anecdotes abound in the tech world about scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors who study and train here but move to Silicon Valley or Austin or North Carolina, lured by climate and lifestyle and a more freewheeling atmosphere. Technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have branch offices in Cambridge, but are headquartered on the West Coast. To compete on a global scale, Bostonians need to claim their place in the global conversation. Friday marks a step in that direction. At a press conference at the Ragon Institute, The Boston Globe will join Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MGH in announcing HUBweek, a week-long festival of discussions and creative problem-solving scheduled for Oct. 3 to 10 of next year. It’s a collaborative effort to bring big ideas out from behind institutional walls. To draw participants from all over the nation, and the world, all four co-hosts are creating programming that will focus on game-changing science, technology, engineering, and art. The week will feature some central events, kicking off with a master class at Fenway Park.

There is a great lesson to be learned from our neighboring planet Venus. Venus is very much like Earth in size and composition, but its surface temperature is about 460° C (860 F), hotter than your oven when it’s set to “broil.” The difference between the temperatures of Earth and Venus is not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. No, Venus is hot primarily because its atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that keeps the Sun’s heat trapped in the planet’s atmosphere. Venus is the extreme case of climate change: There is no way life, as we know it, could survive at those beyond-broiling temperatures. It would take a big change in Earth’s geology and chemistry for it to become exactly like Venus. But humans are pouring carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere right now at an alarming rate, shoving our climate in that high-carbon direction, which is a terrifying prospect. We do not want to become even a little like Venus.

You can basically compare the pattern of just about anything that you can think of that has been made by humans to things that were not made by humans. For example: an icebox and freezer are basically a manmade miniature variation of winter while an oven is basically a manmade miniature variation of summer. Each were manufactured by humans who had an understanding of the laws of nature that govern the atmosphere.

Synthetic biology was the transistor of the twenty-first century. Yet political realities in America made it increasingly unfeasible for entrepreneurs there to tinker with the building blocks of life. Every cluster of human cells was viewed as a baby in America. A quarter of the population wasn’t vaccinated. A majority of Americans didn’t believe in evolution. Social-media-powered opinions carried more influence than peer-reviewed scientific research. In this virulently anti-science atmosphere, synbio research was hounded offshore before it had really begun. Activists crowed over their victory.

Venus is kept that way by a thick, dense atmosphere that’s full of carbon dioxide. It’s the greenhouse effect gone wild—runaway, as it is oft described. In fact, the models of climate change here on Earth were developed in part by scientists, James Hansen especially, who were studying the atmosphere of Venus. They observed that visible light passes the atmosphere, hits the surface, and then is reradiated as heat that is then trapped by carbon dioxide. This process has a big influence on whether or not a planet is habitable.

It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from nonprofit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation’s infrastructure is different from another’s, and so on. Yet whether we are considering any family, any institution, or any nation, for terrorism to hold sway the same three emotional prerequisites must always persist in that relationship system.    There must be a sense that no one is in charge—in other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with “nerve.”    The system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation. That is, its leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the terrorist—whether a bomber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive.    There must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in “being reasonable.” From an emotional process view of leadership, whether we are talking about families or the family of nations, these three emotional characteristics of a system are the differences that count.

However, I have a stronger hunch that the greatest part of the important biomedical research waiting to be done is in the class of basic science. There is an abundance of interesting fact relating to all our major diseases, and more items of information are coming in steadily from all quarters in biology. The new mass of knowledge is still formless, in complete, lacking the essential threads of connection, displaying misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys. There are fascinating ideas all over the place, irresistible experiments beyond numbering, all sorts of new ways into the maze of problems. But every next move is unpredictable, every outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time. I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind of activity, but I suppose you could find out by looking through the disorderly records of the past hundred years. Somehow, the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting sense of being wrong is the normal attitude of the investigators. It has to be taken for granted that the only way in is by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that something can be highly improbable, maybe almost impossible, and at the same time true. Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, "Impossible!" spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely.

Regardless of where they strike, large asteroids would boil seas, fill the air with dust and acidic compounds, and perhaps induce carbon dioxide to cook off out of the rocks and into the air, triggering a strong greenhouse effect, all of which in turn would change the world’s climate faster than living things could adjust to. Giant impactors could create enormous waves in the ocean and in the atmosphere that could upset weather patterns around the world for extended periods. Perhaps asteroids have also helped unleash Earth’s internal heat and caused subsequent volcanism.

Venus is very much like Earth in size and composition, but its surface temperature is about 460° C (860 F), hotter than your oven when it’s set to “broil.” The difference between the temperatures of Earth and Venus is not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. No, Venus is hot primarily because its atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that keeps the Sun’s heat trapped in the planet’s atmosphere. Venus is the extreme case of climate change: There is no way life, as we know it, could survive at those beyond-broiling temperatures. It would take a big change in Earth’s geology and chemistry for it to become exactly like Venus. But humans are pouring carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere right now at an alarming rate, shoving our climate in that high-carbon direction, which is a terrifying prospect. We do not want to become even a little like Venus. We

But consider the mountain-building period of the Flood of Noah’s day (e.g., Genesis 8:4,5 Psalm 104:8–9,6 etc.) involving immense volcanic activity acting in conjunction for more than half of the year and surely some volcanic activity that was post-Flood too — which would extend the effects. The point is that immense amounts of fine ash and dioxides were put in the upper atmosphere to linger for hundreds and hundreds of years.

For those familiar with creation, you may also be familiar with a particular scientific model that has dominated creation circles for about 50 years. This model has been denoted as the canopy theory or canopy model(s). In this science model, there was supposed to be a canopy of water (solid, liquid, or gas) that may have surrounded the earth from creation until its alleged dissipation at the Flood. The reason for this model was to try to explain a better atmosphere prior to the Flood and possible health benefits for man, animals, and plants. After all, man before the Flood was living to great ages. So this model was proposed based on the “waters above” in Genesis

The primary source of water for the Flood was the springs of the great deep bursting forth (Genesis 7:1127). This water in turn likely provided some of the water in the “windows of heaven” in an indirect fashion. There is no need for an ocean of vapor above the atmosphere to provide for extreme amounts of water for the rain that fell during the Flood.

Most believe the Flood of Noah triggered the Ice Age. The rising magmas, lavas, and hot waters associated with continental plate movements would have caused ocean temperatures to rise. Also, fine ash from volcanic eruptions probably lingered in the upper atmosphere in post-Flood years, which, unlike a greenhouse effect, would reduce the sunlight for cooler summers. So the mechanism for such a rare event was in place due to Genesis 6–8. But what happens in an ice age? A lot of water is taken out of the ocean and deposited on land, so the ocean level drops.7 This exposes land bridges. One well-known land bridge was the one that crossed what we call today “the Bering Strait” from Alaska to Russia, so it is easily feasible for animals to have walked from Asia to North and South America.

Some unknown process was, it seemed, protecting CO2 from the anticipated destruction. This unexpected and strange stability presented a puzzle, which was solved by Michael McElroy at Harvard and Ron Prinn9 at MIT, two atmospheric scientists whose careers have straddled earth and planetary science. The answer, they found, lay in the highly reactive element chlorine. Even minuscule amounts of chlorine in such an environment wreak outsize havoc on oxygen compounds, catalyzing their destruction and reconstituting CO2. Modeling Venus in the early 1970s, McElroy and Prinn showed that you would not expect ozone to survive in an environment where stray chlorine atoms were running

We come into a world with a history shaped by the subtle dichotomy of culture and ethos, the dynamic forces of ideas and philosophy, and the mesmerizing undercurrent and of science and religion. The relentless clicking of time binds generations of people together. Family, country, cultural trends, and shared historical precepts link people. How we act in our lifetimes will affect the continuum of history. Our deeds will construct the industry, companies, commerce, cities, and governmental intuitions that shape our children’s lives. Our economic choices and environmental policies will determine the quality of the water that our children drink and the air they breathe. Our collective consciousness as depicted through works of literature, poetry, music, films, personal charity, and political benevolence will affect the cultural atmosphere for generations to come.

There are no walls in the atmosphere.

the President’s Science Advisory Committee, Panel on Environmental Pollution, published a report entitled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.”44 This report included a section on “climatic effects of pollution” that is notable for treating CO2 as a pollutant. It also includes an appendix on “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” written by a committee chaired by Roger Revelle that also included Wallace Broecker, Joseph Smagorinsky, Harmon Craig, and Charles Keeling. This appendix discusses consequences of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide such as the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, sea level rise, ocean warming, increasing acidity of fresh waters, and increased photosynthesis. The appendix notes that “[t]he climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.

No institute of science and technology can guarantee discoveries or inventions, and we cannot plan or command a work of genius at will. But do we give sufficient thought to the nurture of the young investigator, to providing the right atmosphere and conditions of work and full opportunity for development? It is these things that foster invention and discovery.

Fredrickson shows18 that happiness increases our sense of belonging, allowing us to see things from others’ perspective and thereby more likely to make a positive difference in their lives. It dramatically increases our ability to build relationships and friendships. In turn, we feel more connected, more confident, and more supported by our growing networks. Our happiness also affects our colleagues’ productivity. Just as difficult co-workers can create a challenging atmosphere, people who are positive and supportive create an uplifting atmosphere.

With every ordinary person now being told that his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art and government, were as good as if not better than those of “connoisseurs” and “speculative men” who were “college learnt,” it is not surprising that truth and knowledge, which had seemed so palpable and attainable to the enlightened late eighteenth century, now became elusive and difficult to pin down.65 As popular knowledge came to seem as accurate as the knowledge of experts, the borders the enlightened eighteenth century had painstakingly worked out between religion and magic, science and superstition, naturalism and supernatural-ism, became blurred. Animal magnetism now seemed as legitimate as gravity. Popular speculations about the lost tribes of Israel seemed as plausible as scholarly studies of the origins of the Indian mounds of the Northwest. Dowsing for hidden metals appeared as rational as the workings of electricity. And crude folk remedies were even thought to be as scientific as the bleeding cures of enlightened medicine. The result was an odd mixture of credulity and skepticism among many middling Americans. Where everything was believable, everything could be doubted. Since all claims to expert knowledge were suspect, people tended to mistrust anything outside of the immediate impact of their senses. They picked up the Lockean sensationalist epistemology and ran with it. They were a democratic people who judged by their senses only and who doubted everything that they had not seen, felt, heard, tasted, or smelled. Yet because people prided themselves on their shrewdness and believed that they were now capable of understanding so much from their senses, they could be easily impressed by what they sensed but could not comprehend. A few strange words spoken by a preacher, or hieroglyphics displayed on a document, or anything written in highfalutin language could carry great credibility. In such an atmosphere hoaxes of various kinds and charlatanism and quackery in all fields flourished.66

Veins stood out in her temples as she struggled against her silence. No one noticed. Those words had already been used up, spent, thrown out into the atmosphere to dissipate without effect.

(...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth. That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ... ... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ... ... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift... ... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ... ... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ... ... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ... In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act.

From this basis, Boyd sets out to develop a normative view on a design for command and control. As in Patterns of Conflict, he starts with some ‘samples from historical environment’, offering nine citations from nine practitioners, including from himself (see Box 6.1):6 Sun Tzu (around 400 BC) Probe enemy strength to unmask his strengths, weaknesses, patterns of movement and intentions. Shape enemy’s perception of world to manipulate/undermine his plans and actions. Employ Cheng/Ch’I maneuvers to quickly and unexpectedly hurl strength against weaknesses. Bourcet (1764–71) A plan ought to have several branches . . . One should . . . mislead the enemy and make him imagine that the main effort is coming at some other part. And . . . one must be ready to profit by a second or third branch of the plan without giving one’s enemy time to consider it. Napoleon (early 1800s) Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less chary of the latter than the former. Space we can recover, time never. I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute. The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack. Clausewitz (1832) Friction (which includes the interaction of many factors, such as uncertainty, psychological/moral forces and effects, etc.) impedes activity. Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. In this sense, friction represents the climate or atmosphere of war. Jomini (1836) By free and rapid movements carry bulk of the forces (successively) against fractions of the enemy. N.B. Forrest (1860s) Git thar the fustest with the mostest. Blumentritt (1947) The entire operational and tactical leadership method hinged upon . . . rapid concise assessment of situations, . . . and quick decision and quick execution, on the principle: each minute ahead of the enemy is an advantage. Balck (1980) Emphasis upon creation of implicit connections or bonds based upon trust, not mistrust, that permit wide freedom for subordinates to exercise imagination and initiative – yet harmonize within intent of superior commanders. Benefit: internal simplicity that permits rapid adaptability. Yours truly Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops to enmesh adversary in a world of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic, chaos . . . and/or fold adversary back inside himself so that he cannot cope with events/efforts as they unfold.

The stuff of life, in other words, arose in places and times somewhat more accessible to our telescopic investigations. Since most of us spend our lives confined to a narrow strip near Earth’s surface, we tend to think of the cosmos as a lofty, empyrean realm far beyond our reach and relevance. We forget that only a thin sliver of atmosphere separates us from the rest of the universe. But science continues to show just how intimately connected life on Earth is to extraterrestrial processes. In particular, several recent findings have further illuminated the cosmic origins of life’s key ingredients. Take the element phosphorus, for example. It is a critical constituent of DNA, as well as of our cells, teeth and bones. Astronomers have long struggled to trace its buildup through cosmic history, because the imprint of phosphorus is difficult to discern in old, cool stars in the outskirts of our galaxy. (Some of these stellar “time capsules” contain the ashes of their forebears, the very first generation of stars that formed near the dawn of time.) But in a paper published in December in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team reported that it had measured the abundance of phosphorus in 13 such stars, using data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their findings highlight the dominant role of so-called hypernovae, explosions even more energetic than supernovae that spell the demise of massive stars, in making the elements

All that Copernicus could suggest on this head was that perhaps the atmosphere might help to carry things forward, and enable them to keep pace with the earth.

Impara a riconoscere la felicità, quando la incontri. Se la riconosci la ricorderai per sempre, ti apparterrà per sempre. Non ti lascerà mai completamente, anche quando saprai che tutto, intorno a te, è destinato a cambiare.

We should’ve taken all our canine teeth out before we ever left the motherworld. We should’ve cut our claws on the journey up through the atmosphere. The heavens weren’t ready for us, and now we’ve turned the place into a mortuary for the species

The physicist can investigate the nature of the atom, at least in the modern age, without having to meet the opposition of anyone who is interested in perpetuating certain strongly held ideas about its structure. The research worker in medicine and the psychologist can investigate the operation of the human body and mind without having to be concerned about the prejudices of the rest of the community. There is no pressure in these sciences to make the results conform to someone else's prejudices and preconceptions. But the economist is not so fortunate. His investigations touch the pocketbook, always a sensitive spot. Consequently, he is exposed to all kinds of pressures: the pressure of those who want him to prove the free trade is the only way to prosperity, and of those who want him to show that without protective tariffs, the American worker will be deprived of his job. To satisfy one vocal group he must prove that high wages are the cause of unemployment; to satisfy another, he must show that unemployment is bound to grow unless wages are raised. He must prove that the gold standard should be maintained; likewise he must show that it ought to be abolished. The difficulties of being objective in such an atmosphere are, of course, enormous. The economist must seek truth, when from all sides he is under pressure to defend causes.

maybe we need to shower the atmosphere with gamma rays to reverse the process. As long as it’s not light or radiation rays,

The collision of material ejected from the volcano's craters caused a build-up of static electricity in the atmosphere, which when combined with the accumulation of charge from rising hot air and moisture from the crater's meltwater reaching many kilometers up, created a huge amount of electricity that needed to be discharged, leading to spectacular, if hellish, sights.