Word: weather
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...name at the top of the party roster reads Jiang Zemin, but power in China still rests in the hands of a few octogenarians. So it made sense for them to choose as party General Secretary a man known as "the weather vane." Jiang is the consummate apparatchik, whose rise to nominal power rests almost wholly on his ability to read China's swirling political winds correctly. The 63-year-old former mayor of Shanghai perfectly mirrors the party line of the moment -- slower economic reform coupled with rigid political orthodoxy -- as he made clear last week in his maiden...
...intense solar observations should provide clues to many of the still unanswered or only partly resolved questions about the sun: Does the solar cycle affect terrestrial weather? What internal mechanisms control the cycle? Is the sun growing cooler? Hotter? Is there a basic flaw in the current theory about the fusion process that powers the solar furnace...
...suggesting that the correlation between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age might be nothing more than sheer coincidence. Changes in solar cyclic activity, the doubters argued, were not necessarily accompanied by variations in the sun's output of heat and light and probably did not affect terrestrial weather and climate...
...small a cyclic change able to have a noticeable effect on weather? Two scientists suspect it may. Karin Labitzke of Berlin's Free University and NCAR's Van Loon have discovered a relationship between the solar cycle and the stratospheric winds over the tropics. During a 28-month period, these winds reverse direction, blowing half the time from the east, the other half from the west, a phenomenon meteorologists call the QBO, or quasi-biennial oscillation. Depending on the direction of the QBO flow, Labitzke and Van Loon found, solar maximums and minimums seem linked to changes in air pressure...
...have no physical explanation for what we've found." That explanation may be hard to come by. Experts have calculated that the tiny change in the solar constant detected by Solar Max can supply less than a millionth of the energy needed to produce the observed changes in weather. "If there really is an effect," says Van Loon, "there must be an enhancing mechanism, and we don't have the foggiest idea of what that enhancing mechanism might be." Yet the statistical evidence is so compelling that many scientists are taking it seriously. The QBO data have persuaded meteorologist Anthony...