Fixing the Sky PDF Download

Author: James Rodger Fleming
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231144121
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

View

Book Description
Weaving together stories from elite science, cutting-edge technology, and popular culture, Fleming examines issues of health and navigation in the 1830s, drought in the 1890s, aircraft safety in the 1930s, and world conflict since the 1940s.

Author: James Rodger Fleming
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231513062
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

View

Book Description
As alarm over global warming spreads, a radical idea is gaining momentum. Forget cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, some scientists argue. Instead, bounce sunlight back into space by pumping reflective nanoparticles into the atmosphere. Launch mirrors into orbit around the Earth. Make clouds thicker and brighter to create a "planetary thermostat." These ideas might sound like science fiction, but in fact they are part of a very old story. For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have tried to manipulate weather and climate, and like them, today's climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible. Scarcely considering the political, military, and ethical implications of managing the world's climate, these individuals hatch schemes with potential consequences that far outweigh anything their predecessors might have faced. Showing what can happen when fixing the sky becomes a dangerous experiment in pseudoscience, James Rodger Fleming traces the tragicomic history of the rainmakers, rain fakers, weather warriors, and climate engineers who have been both full of ideas and full of themselves. Weaving together stories from elite science, cutting-edge technology, and popular culture, Fleming examines issues of health and navigation in the 1830s, drought in the 1890s, aircraft safety in the 1930s, and world conflict since the 1940s. Killer hurricanes, ozone depletion, and global warming fuel the fantasies of today. Based on archival and primary research, Fleming's original story speaks to anyone who has a stake in sustaining the planet.

Author: Elizabeth Kolbert
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0593136292
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

View

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

Author: James Rodger Fleming
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822979527
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

View

Book Description
Toxic Airs brings together historians of medicine, environmental historians, historians of science and technology, and interdisciplinary scholars to address atmospheric issues on a spectrum of scales from body to place to planet. The chapters analyze airborne and atmospheric threats posed to humans, and contributors demonstrate how conceptions of toxicity have evolved and how humans have both created and mitigated toxins in the air. Specific topics discussed include medieval beliefs in the pestilent breath of witches, malarial theory in India, domestic and military use of tear gas, Gulf War Syndrome, Los Angeles smog, automotive emissions control, the epidemiological effects of air pollution, transboundary air pollution, ozone depletion, the contributions of contemporary artists to climate awareness, and the toxic history of carbon "die"-oxide. Overall, the essays provide a wide-ranging historical study of interest to students and scholars of many disciplines.

Author: Kimberly Nicholas PhD
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593328175
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

View

Book Description
** Los Angeles Times bestseller ** It's warming. It's us. We're sure. It's bad. But we can fix it. After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys. In her astonishing, bestselling book Under the Sky We Make, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power--we're going to have to seize it for ourselves.

Author: James Rodger Fleming
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198024061
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

View

Book Description
This intriguing volume provides a thorough examination of the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry, from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, the book is filled with interesting perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. Chapters explore climate and culture in Enlightenment thought; climate debates in early America; the development of international networks of observation; the scientific transformation of climate discourse; and early contributions to understanding terrestrial temperature changes, infrared radiation, and the carbon dioxide theory of climate. But perhaps most important, this book shows what a study of the past has to offer the interdisciplinary investigation of current environmental problems.

Author: Mike Hulme
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745685269
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 102

View

Book Description
Climate change seems to be an insurmountable problem. Political solutions have so far had little impact. Some scientists are now advocating the so-called 'Plan B', a more direct way of reducing the rate of future warming by reflecting more sunlight back to space, creating a thermostat in the sky. In this book, Mike Hulme argues against this kind of hubristic techno-fix. Drawing upon a distinguished career studying the science, politics and ethics of climate change, he shows why using science to fix the global climate is undesirable, ungovernable and unattainable. Science and technology should instead serve the more pragmatic goals of increasing societal resilience to weather risks, improving regional air quality and driving forward an energy technology transition. Seeking to reset the planet’s thermostat is not the answer.

Author: Jerry E. Smith
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1935487671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

View

Book Description
In April 1997, United States Secretary of Defense William Cohen declared that there are terrorists at work who “... are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves...“ Weather modification in the form of cloud seeding to increase snow packs in the Sierras or suppress hail over Kansas is now an everyday affair. Hundreds of environmental and weather modifying technologies have been patented in the United States alone-and hundreds more are being developed in civilian, academic, military and quasi-military laboratories around the world at this moment! This book lays bare the grim facts of who is doing it and why. The earth and the sky have themselves been turned into weapons! Underground nuclear tests in Nevada have set off earthquakes. A Russian company has been offering to sell typhoons on demand since the 1990s. Scientists have been searching for ways to move hurricanes for over 50 years-the same timeframe that took us from the Wright Brothers to Neil Armstrong. In this book, Jerry E. Smith picks up where his 1998 book about the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) left off. He reports on recent developments at HAARP, including its possible connection to the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia and what role, if any, it played in certain “natural” disasters, like Hurricane Katrina. Tackling the chemtrail controversy, Smith examines claims that particles called aerosols are being deliberately injected into the atmosphere. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, proposed putting up a “sun screen” of aerosols to save the earth from global warming-is someone actually doing it? Numerous ongoing military programs do inject aerosols at high altitude for communications and surveillance operations. Could these include mind control or population control applications? Smith puts these technologies into context by examining the geopolitical conflicts that are driving their development from Globalization to the rise of Neo-Con Neo-Fascism.

Author: Patricia Polacco
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524739480
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50

View

Book Description
Miss Eula is back! In this heartwarming companion to Chicken Sunday, young Trisha is devastated when her grandmother passes away, but finds joy in bonds with a new friend, her new California neighborhood—and the invincible Miss Eula. There will never be anyone like her grandmother, Patricia Polacco thinks, when her grandmother passes away. But when she and her family move to California—in the middle of a drought—she meets a new friend, the irrepressible Stewart, and his amazing grandmother, Miss Eula, who not only takes Trisha under her wing, but, with Trisha and Stewart, steps up to lead their entire extraordinarily diverse neighborhood to help a hurting neighbor—and her once lush garden—survive the drought. Trisha's grandmother's old saying about the stars being Holes in the Sky turns out to be Miss Eula's, too, convincing Trisha that she has miraculously discovered another unforgettable grandmother.

Author: Peter Barnes
Publisher: Shearwater Books
ISBN:
Category : Air quality management
Languages : en
Pages : 216

View

Book Description
Dividends would be paid annually, in much the same way that residents of Alaska today receive cash benefits from oil companies that drill in their state."--BOOK JACKET.