Word: clouding
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...rode our bicycles down to the mess hall, had breakfast and rode the bikes to the briefing room. It was dark, and it was raining, and the cloud cover was complete. We just sort of felt our way around. Inside the briefing room, the crowd was quiet. The big map at the end of the room was covered as usual with its drawstring curtains. Pretty soon, in came the colonel, and he went to one end of the curtains. A captain went to the other end and held the drawstrings. They looked at their watches--looked at each other...
...These pollutants, which take the form of tiny, airborne particles called aerosols, act as nuclei around which cloud droplets form. The problem is, there are too many aerosols in the atmosphere competing for water molecules, so the cloud droplets that form are too small and never become weighty enough to fall to the ground. As a result, says Beate Liepert, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the atmosphere could be filled with moisture while Earth's surface thirsts for rain...
Surowiecki's thesis posits an uncanny and generally unconscious collective intelligence working not by top-down diktat but rather in dynamic arrangements of what the economist Friedrich Hayek called "spontaneous order." Surowiecki cites the giant flock of starlings evading a predatory hawk. From the outside, the cloud of birds seems to move in obedience to one mind. In fact, Surowiecki writes, each starling is acting on its own, following four simple rules: "1) stay as close to the middle as possible; 2) stay 2 to 3 body lengths away from your neighbor; 3) do not bump into any other starling...
...Clouds, which reflect sunlight, ought to cool the earth. But they can also hold in warmth. That second effect swamps the first. According to Minnis' calculations, increased cloud cover since the 1970s ought to have led to a warming of .36° to .54°F per decade. The actual warming during this period falls within that range, at just under .5°. That may not sound like much, but when only 9°F separate our current temperature from the last Ice Age, it's clear that a little warming makes a big difference. "This study," says Minnis, "demonstrates that contrails should...
...exactly what occurred in 2001, between Sept. 11 and 14, when U.S. air travel was shut down following the terrorist attacks. During that period, the swing between daytime highs and nighttime lows sometimes measured more than twice as much as usual, perhaps owing to a reduction in cirrus clouds that allowed collected solar heat to radiate away. New and larger passenger planes might exacerbate the problem, but it is the frequency of flights that matters most. One way to tackle warming would be to have planes fly roughly 25% lower--altitudes less conducive to cirrus-cloud formation. But there...