Word: weathers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that era may well be ending. From his studies of weather history, British Climatologist Hubert H. Lamb concludes that climate runs in roughly 200-year-long cycles, and that the earth is now entering one of its chilly phases. Perhaps the gloomiest of the weather prophets, Bryson speculates that the earth may be reverting to a frigid interlude comparable to what some scientists call the "little ice age" that cooled Europe from the 16th through 19th centuries. During those years Greenland's once lush fields vanished, England's productive vineyards withered, and agricultural disasters like Ireland...
...middle latitudes that are the earth's breadbasket. Continued cooling could lead to agricultural disasters. The vaunted "miracle" wheat and rice of the Green Revolution were specifically created by plant geneticists to thrive under the optimum growing conditions of recent years. They are particularly vulnerable to vagaries of weather. A decline in moisture can significantly reduce their yields; they can also become susceptible to blights and pests. It was a bout of wet, chilly air during the growing season that apparently touched off the Middle Ages' outbreaks of St. Anthony's fire -excruciatingly painful convulsions and gangrenous...
Scientists disagree sharply about the cause of the earth's cooling and whether it will continue. But a flood of observations by weather satellites and other new instruments show its major effect: a gradual expansion in recent years of the so-called circumpolar vortex-the great icy winds that whip around the top and bottom of the world. Those winds move generally from west to east, but the outer edge of the vortex twists and bends, like the bottom of a large, swirling skirt. In the U.S. Far West, for instance, the winds bring down cold, dry Arctic...
Despite concern about the harm that could be done by nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, scientists have yet to find any significant effect on climate. At present, many weather researchers are far more interested in the effects of sunspots, the fierce magnetic storms on the solar surface, which are often accompanied by the eruption of great flares of immensely hot gases. The streams of particles shot off during these episodes are already known to disturb the earth's magnetic field and disrupt communications. Astrophysicist Walter Orr Roberts, former director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, thinks that they...
...ease the adverse effects of changing climate, some people talk of "weather modification." Cloud seeding, for example, has been tried to release rains over parched fields. But the technique is still primitive and it raises serious political and ecological questions: if rain makers manage to bring water to one region will they be depriving another-perhaps in a neighboring country? The skilled plant breeders who created the Green Revolution can breed tougher grains to meet changes of climate. But these will take time to perfect, and their use will be limited unless science makes greater progress in long-range weather...