Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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More ominous are reports from citizen groups emphasizing the dioxin's human toll. Friends of the Earth, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C., has collected over 500 cases of injury which occurred after spraying. Many involve dizziness, nausea and skin diseases, symptoms of dioxin exposure. In most cases, their problems ceased when the affected individuals left the sprayed areas...
Still, scientists are by no means certain that nature will follow their scenarios. The earth's climate is the product of such a complex mix of factors that it becomes impossibly difficult to isolate just one. For example, climatologists do not yet know the exact role of atmospheric dust. Dust can cool the earth by screening out warming sunlight, as has been noted after major volcanic eruptions like that of Krakatoa in 1883, yet also act as an atmospheric cap keeping in heat. Says Scripps' Charles Keeling: "Dust impedes radiation in both directions. We do not know...
There is another wrinkle in these climatological complications. For about two decades ending in the early 1970s, the earth was in what seemed to be a cooling phase. Some climatologists suggested that the chill marked the beginning of a "little ice age," like the one that persisted in Europe from about 1550 to 1850. If they are right, then the cooling forces-which could be attributable to anything from increased atmospheric dust to subtle changes in the amount of heat received from the sun-will be pitted against the warming force of the so-called greenhouse effect. For a while...
...burning of fossil fuels continues to increase at an annual rate of 3% to 4%, as scientists like Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research consider likely, then the greenhouse effect may well prevail. In that case, it will be a hot time on earth. And once the warming has taken place, even if all discharges of CO2 into the atmosphere could be abruptly halted, it would take centuries for the excess gas to be absorbed by the oceans and dwindling forests...
...pressing a spirit caged by infinite space. In an age when reason and the romance of individual freedom were replacing old certitudes, Piranesi's labyrinthine galleries, infinitely receding arches and end less stairs must have been as profoundly unsettling to his contemporaries as the edge of a flat earth was to the ancients or black holes in space are to modern man. -A.T. Baker