An Ocean of
Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other
Mysteries of the
Atmosphere
by Gabrielle
Walker
We spend our lives surrounded by air,
hardly even noticing it. It's the most
miraculous substance on earth, yet
responsible for our food, our weather, our
water, and our ability to hear. In fact,
we live at the bottom of an ocean of air.
In this exuberant book, gifted science
writer Gabrielle Walker peels back the
layers of our atmosphere with the stories
of the people who uncovered its
secrets:
A flamboyant Renaissance Italian
discovers how heavy our air really is:
The air filling Carnegie Hall, for
example, weighs seventy thousand
pounds.
A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds
a set of winds that constantly blow
five miles above our heads.
An impoverished American farmer
figures out why hurricanes move in a
circle by carving equations with his
pitchfork on a barn door.
A well-meaning inventor nearly
destroys the ozone layer.
A reclusive mathematical genius
predicts, thirty years before he's
proved right, that the sky contains a
layer of floating metal fed by the
glowing tails of shooting stars.
Simon Winchester, New York Times
bestselling author of The Professor and
the Madman, examines the legendary
annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island
of Krakatoa, which was followed by an
immense tsunami that killed nearly forty
thousand people. The effects of the
immense waves were felt as far away as
France. Barometers in Bogotá and
Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies
were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of
the island's destruction was heard in
Australia and India and on islands
thousands of miles away. Most significant
of all -- in view of today's new political
climate -- the eruption helped to trigger
in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western
militancy among fundamentalist Muslims,
one of the first outbreaks of
Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.
Krakatoa gives us an entirely new
perspective on this fascinating and iconic
event.
Finding the
truth in the environment
controversies...
The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Measuring the Real State of the
World
This book should be read by every
environmentalist, so that the appalling
errors of fact the environmental movement
has made in the past are not repeated. It
also indicates what needs to be done to
address the real environmental hazards we
are faced with.
Earth Report
2000...
Earth Report 2000 is an
authoritative guide to the Earth's
environment at the turn of the millennium,
sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise
Institute -- called "the best
environmental think tank in the nation,"
by the Wall Street Journal -- and
written by a collection of the most
prestigious environmental researchers.
These experts calmly and accurately assess
the ecological situation of the planet--on
subjects ranging from global warming and
ocean water quality to overpopulation and
biodiversity. They explain what we do
know, what we don't know, and offer
sensible, scientific solutions to those
real problems we do face.
