Word: meannesses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jill Eisenstadt hopes that unlike From Rockaway, the second novel will stand on its own binding. "I don't mean to sound defensive," she says at the end of our interview. "But that's the thing--people are always making me defensive about the book when it's supposed to speak for itself without you having to defend it to people. And that makes you feel like you really failed as a writer, because people aren't understanding...
Does that mean, as one critic put it, that models projecting climatic change are "just the opinion of their authors about how the world works"? Not necessarily. That the model eventually proved accurate, if only in hindsight, was a tribute to the powers of computer climate models -- and a demonstration of their shortcomings. The models attempt to reduce the earth's climate to a set of grids and numbers, then manipulate the numbers based on the physical laws of motion and thermodynamics. The sheer number of calculations involved is mind-boggling. A three-dimensional model, for example, requires more than...
Still, the existence of an ozone hole did not necessarily mean CFCs were to blame, and a number of alternative explanations were proposed. Among them, says Dan Albritton, director of the Federal Government's Aeronomy Laboratory in Boulder, was the notion that the "hole did not signify an ozone loss at all, just a breakdown in the distribution system." An interruption in the movement of air from the tropics, where most ozone is created, to the poles could easily result in less ozone reaching the Antarctic. Another theory: perhaps the sunspot activity that peaked around 1980 created more ozone- destroying...
...consequences. Without it, points out Climate Modeler Jeff Kiehl, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, "the earth would be uninhabitable. It is what keeps us from being an ice-frozen planet like Mars." Indeed, if gases like CO2 did not trap the sun's energy, the earth's mean temperature would be 0 degrees F, rather than the current 59 degrees...
This from the government whose rallying cry has long been "Export or Die" ? Does this mean that Japan, the world's most fearsome economic competitor, is ready to roll down its sleeves and relax while its rivals carve up its slice of the global market? Not exactly. But Japan, under pressure to reduce a trade surplus that reached $83 billion last year, is indeed trying to soothe foreign critics by curbing exports and opening its markets to imported goods...