Word: abbots
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, complained Mark Twain. Last week, however, somebody did. Dr. Charles Greeley Abbot, grey, 72-year-old Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announced the most important advance in weather forecasting since...
...Abbot had developed a method of long-range prediction by measuring variations in the amount of heat the earth gets from the sun. His system works so well that last year he forecast almost to the drop how much rain would fall and which days would be rainy in Washington...
Scientists in general have given surprisingly little study to the effects of the sun on the weather. But Astrophysicist Abbot has been watching solar radiation with heliotrope devotion for 49 years. Twenty-five years ago he began to take daily recordings of solar heat. The Smithsonian set up delicate measuring instruments on three mountaintops in desert areas which averaged 300 cloudless days a year-Table Mountain, Calif., Burro Mountain, N. Mex. and Mt. Montezuma, Chile...
...heat the earth normally gets from the sun is the equivalent of 250 trillion horsepower. But Dr. Abbot found that on any given day solar heat might vary as much as 5% from normal. One reason: sunspots, which throw out great conical sprays of electric particles that interfere with solar rays. When Dr. Abbot compared changes in solar heat with changes in the weather, he discovered some remarkable parallels: a rise in solar activity was almost invariably followed (usually in 14 to 17 days) by a fall in earthly temperatures, and vice versa. A solar change of less than...
...Benedict also set an ideal for himself and future abbots: "It beseemeth the abbot to be ever doing some good for his brethren rather than to be presiding over them. He must, therefore, be learned in the law of God, that he may know whence to bring forth things new and old; he must be chaste, sober, and merciful, ever preferring mercy to justice, that he himself may obtain mercy...