Cyclone Related Quotes

The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that economic losses from various weather related natural hazards, such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters.

George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the top and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It's galactic hair, he said, smiling. At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I'd like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I'd asked.

And that is why the seductive idea that if Einstein had been born three hundred years earlier, we could have had the benefit of the theory of relativity in the seventeenth century is so flawed. Relativity couldn’t have happened back then, largely because the problems that it responded to were not yet visible. Einstein may have seen further and deeper than his contemporaries (there is still a large role for individualism: Einstein really was a creative genius), but he wasn’t pulling insights out of the ether. As Johnson writes: “Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air.” Dyson is well aware of this aspect of creativity. “Every time I have gone for a patent in a particular field, someone else has got there first,” he says. “I don’t think there has been a single time in all the thousands of patents we have applied for where we were the first. With the vacuum cyclone, there were already a number of patents lodged.