An Ocean of Air

by Gabrielle Walker

  47 triggered the appearance of animals One possible explanation is that evolution was kicked into action by mighty ice ages that blanketed the entire planet. See my book Snowball Earth (London: Bloomsbury and New York: Crown, 2003).

  [>] the radiation from ten thousand chest x-rays See Lane, Oxygen, p. 125.

  [>] a million billion in every puff Ibid., p. 310. Charmingly, Lane says that he smokes but plans to give up the habit when he finishes writing his book.

  [>] born in the chemistry of oxygen Ibid. Note that there are many additional suggestions for why we need to have sex. One of the most persuasive is the notion that we are in a continual race to out-evolve parasites. See Matt Ridley's excellent book The Red Queen (London: Penguin, 1994) for more about this.

  [>] more appropriate to the man of toil Aykroyd, Three Philosophers, p. 111.

  [>] happiness in greater abundance Ibid., p. 111.

  [>] good will among all nations Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution, p. 231.

  [>] inlist Imagination under the banner of Science Ibid., p. 254.

  [>] four-fifths of the atmosphere About this time many other chemists had begun to notice nitrogen, though the actual "discovery" of the element is usually attributed to a young Scottish chemist named Daniel Rutherford, who had isolated it a few years earlier.

  CHAPTER 3

  [>] losing three-quarters of his savings Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution, p. 91.

  [>] smoke and hurry of this immense capital Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, quoted in Crowther, p. 14.

  [>] darkened by the least shade of envy Crowther, Scientists of the Industrial Revolution,

  [>] Blackness, Soap and Honey Ramsay, The Life and Letters of Joseph Black, p. 22.

  [>] seems yet to surpass other purgatives Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 194.

  [>] engage any further in it Allan and Schofield, Stephen Hales, Scientist and Philanthropist, p. 30.

  [>] the Oak with a vast explosion Ibid., p. 43.

  [>] dispersed throughout the atmosphere He was obliged to publish his thesis as a condition of receiving his degree. It's just as well, for given his reticence about publicizing his own work we would otherwise know little about what proved to be a historic experiment.

  [>] inconveniences that would result from its absence Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 192.

  68 carbon dioxide in the air around it Van Helmont was partly right in that some water had gone into providing the sap and in stiffening the new growth. But all of the solid matter had come instead from the air.

  [>] 100,000 million tons of plant material See, for instance, "Life's a gas, if you're a plant," prepared by the United Kingdom's John Innes Centre for the Chelsea Flower Show. You can find this at http://www.jic.bbsrc.ac.uk/chelsea/handouts2004.htm.

  [>] more like a battle See the excellent feature by Fred Pearce, "The kingdoms of Gaia," in New Scientist, June 16, 2001, p. 30.

  [>] beau-ideal of a scientific lecturer New York Daily Tribune, October 23, 1872, p. 6.

  [>] by the exercise of imagination John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher, p. 181.

  [>] instantly resigned from the club Tyndall had a tendency to be oversensitive about criticism. At the early age of thirty-three he had been offered one of the two annual Royal medals by the Royal Society (which was a great honor, not only because the other recipient that year was Charles Darwin). He was about to accept when heard that one member of the council had opposed the award and was complaining bitterly about it. Immediately he wrote a letter to the secretary of the society politely declining their honor. Huxley tried to convince him to change his mind, but Tyndall was obdurate. Later, Huxley wrote that at least it was a "good sort of mistake," and added dryly that it was "not likely to do harm by creating too many imitators."

  [>] why the sky is blue He was almost right. In fact the blue of the sky derives from scattering not from particles in the air but from the air molecules themselves, as Lord Rayleigh later proved.

  [>] burning useless coal deposits See Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, pp. 4–7.

  [>] climate looked to be significant Ibid., pp. 23–24.

  [>] what difference this would make We now know that somewhere between one-third and one-half of the CO2 we've released has gradually disappeared into the ocean, which has considerably slowed down the build-up of CO2 in the air.

  [>] had been absolutely right The drop in carbon dioxide wasn't quite enough to cause the entire change in temperature, but this paper demonstrated once and for all that, added together with other greenhouse gases such as methane, it is a very important component.

  [>] temperatures soaring or plummeting See, for example, "The 'flickering switch' of late Pleistocene climate change," by K. C. Taylor et al., Nature, vol. 361 (February 4, 1993), pp. 432–36.

  [>] A recent project D. A. Stainforth et al., Nature, vol. 433 (January 27, 2005), pp. 403–406.

  CHAPTER 4

  [>] and a sneeze, 400,000 Watson, Heaven's Breath, p. 157.

  [>] bacteria simply fall with them See, for instance, "Spora and Gaia: how microbes fly with their clouds," by W. D. Hamilton and T. M. Lenton, Ethology, Ecology and Evolution, vol. 10 (1998), pp. 1–16.

  90 those distant lands would be yours With due respect to the otherwise peerless Ira Gershwin song "They All Laughed," Columbus was not the first to realize that the world was round. In fact this had been known by all educated persons since the ancients.

  [>] if he should be successful When Columbus approached them, Isabella and Fernando were flush from their triumphant routing of the Moors at Granada. They had resolved to drive out all infidels from the Iberian peninsula, and one of Columbus's most persuasive arguments was that, with the supposed wealth he would bring from China, they could pursue their goals in a new crusade to wrest Jerusalem and the Holy Lands back from Moslem control. In the same crusading spirit, the monarchs had also banished any Spanish Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. A few tides before Columbus the last ship of refugees had set sail, bound for Moslem lands or for the Netherlands, the only Christian country prepared to receive them. Columbus would have been astonished to know that he was about to discover a continent that would eventually prove a refuge from this persecution.

  [>] finest air in the world Columbus's journal, pp. 9 and 13.

  [>] very readily become Christians Not all the native peoples that Columbus encountered were quite so friendly, but that's another story.

  [>] justify his "scientific" claims Then, as now, this approach was a controversial one, and there are interesting parallels with the current popularity of "Intelligent Design" as a supposed branch of science. One contemporary reviewer of The Physical Geography of the Sea wrote: "It is now, we think, almost universally admitted, and certainly by men of the soundest faith that the Bible was not intended to teach us the truths of science. Our author, however seems to think otherwise, and has taken the opposite side in the unfortunate controversy which still rages between the divine and the philosopher." Another lauded Maury's "strong and sincere religious feelings" but added: "He unhappily does not see that in forcing Scripture to the interpretation of physical facts, he is mistaking the whole purport of the sacred Books, misappropriating their language and discrediting their evidence on matters of deep concern by applying it to objects and cases of totally different nature." See the introduction to The Physical Geography of the Sea by Matthew Fontaine Maury, 8th edition, edited by John Leighly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. xxvi.

  [>] nobody ever mentioned Cox, Storm Watchers, p. 63.

  [>] charlatanism known in the world's history Cox, Storm Watchers, p. 63. Fortunately, Congress never approved Maury's request, and he disappeared from public view in 1861 at the start of the Civil War when he joined the Confederacy.

  [>] the contrary in the southern Ferrel's autobiography in Biographical Memoirs of the N
ational Academy of Sciences, p. 296.

  [>] big enough to swamp the effect For an amusing description of some of the many unwitting disseminators of this myth, see http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/ BadCoriolis.html.

  104 truly comprehend the winds See three papers in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 47 (1966): Jordan, J. L., "On Coriolis and the deflective force," pp. 401–403; Landsberg, H. E., "Why indeed Coriolis," pp. 887–89; and Burstyn, Harold L., "The deflecting force and Coriolis," pp. 890–91.

  [>] to create the easterly trade winds George Hadley himself got this far.

  [>] three thousand pages of scientific research See Abbé's obituary in Bulletin of the Philosophical Society of Washington.

  [>] and my courage failed Biographical Memoirs, p. 298.

  [>] scientific men that America has produced See the obituary by Professor W. M. Davis, American Meteorological Journal, vol. viii, no. 8, p. 359.

  [>] surface would be unbearable Note that though ocean currents transport some of the heat necessary to alleviate this imbalance, air does most of the work. Oceans are responsible for about one-third and air for about two-thirds. See Barry and Chorley, Atmosphere, Weather and Climate.

  [>] get hurricanes only in the tropics Ferrel was the first person to realize why hurricanes never happen at the equator: It's the one place on Earth where the Coriolis force doesn't operate. Air has neither the urge to turn right nor left, so it can simply tumble into local low-pressure holes without whipping itself up into a hurricane frenzy.

  [>] roll chaotically around the middle latitudes A hurricane is typically about four hundred miles across, compared with nine hundred to eighteen hundred miles for a mid-latitude storm. Also, though hurricanes tend to blow themselves out in a few days, mid-latitude weather fronts can last a week or more. See Barry, Atmosphere, Weather and Climate.

  [>] earthquakes with thunder and lightning "New England Weather," 1876, quoted in Watson, Heaven's Breath, p. 45.

  [>] get a picture of you frying on both sides Sterling and Sterling, Forgotten Eagle, p. 154.

  [>] I never worry about healthy nerves Ibid., p. 139. 114 rancid on the grocers' shelves Ibid., p. 6.

  [>] getting into the prevailing wind channel Ibid., p. 153.

  [>] out of the moon, or somewhere Ibid., p. 158.

  [>] the most active transporter Air has 0.035 percent of Earth's water, which is 1.3 x 1018 cubic meters, enough to coat the Earth in a mere 2.5 centimeters of rain.

  CHAPTER 5

  [>] South Downs during a south-west breeze W. N. Hartley, "On the absorption of solar rays by atmospheric oxygen," Journal of the Chemical Society, vol. xxxix (1881), p. 111.

  132 the General Motors Company When Midgley arrived it was the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (Delco), but it changed to General Motors four years later.

  [>] spitting in the Great Lakes Haynes, Great Chemists, p. 1592.

  [>] reek with the smell of garlic See Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

  [>] on the technological scene The first commercial refrigeration system was patented in 1873, but they had only recently begun to be manufactured on an industrial scale.

  [>] the life of the scientific clairvoyant Haynes, Great Chemists, p. 1595.

  [>] one pure sample. I still wonder Ibid., p. 1596.

  [>] acknowledge their permanent value Cited in Biographical Memoir of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. xxiv, no. 11 (1947), pp. 361–80, by Charles F. Kettering.

  [>] single organism that has ever lived Here I've paraphrased McNeill, who, in Something New Under the Sun, said that Midgley had "more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history."

  [>] my tough luck to draw it Kettering, p. 375.

  [>] mischievous mind I've ever encountered "Father Earth," by Michael Bond, in New Scientist (September 9, 2000), p. 44.

  [>] Not a car, not a bus, but a tram Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, p. 133.

  [>] by so competent a wordsmith Ibid., p. 241.

  [>] the scientist had meant "wholly." Ibid.

  [>] weather was good enough to sell Ibid., p. 191.

  [>] exerts a pull of over 100 pounds Ibid., p. 199.

  [>] constitutes no conceivable hazard J. E. Lovelock, R. J. Maggi, and R. J. Wade, "Halogenated Hydrocarbons In and Over the Atlantic," Nature, vol. 241 (January 19,

  [>] three molecules of useless oxygen The actual reactions are much more complicated, and involve several intermediaries. See, for instance, the detailed description in Richard Wayne's brilliant textbook Chemistry of Atmospheres, 3rd Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  [>] like a miniature Pac-Man I have borrowed this memorable image from Sharon Roan in Ozone Crisis.

  [>] like the end of the world Roan, Ozone Crisis, p. 2.

  [>] and threw them all away Ibid., p. 31.

  [>] says Lovelock, he kept quiet Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, p. 205.

  [>] Molina and Rowland's findings appeared Nature, vol. 249 (June 28 1974), pp. 810–12. Lovelock's stratospheric measurements swiftly followed in the same journal.

  [>] don't know what you've got till it's gone A message that seems to have made its mark down the years. In 2003, I played this song to a group of Princeton juniors and seniors during a class I was teaching on environmental science writing and told them I'd give extra credit to anyone who could name the singer and song. In unison, they all chanted, "Joni Mitchell: 'Big Yellow Taxi.'"

  147 billions of aerosol cans Roan, Ozone Crisis, p. 37.

  [>] decent bunch of scientists "Father Earth," by Michael Bond, in New Scientist (September 9, 2000), p. 44.

  [>] with his delicate measurements Roan, Ozone Crisis, p. 4.

  [>] "Yes," and "But" Rowland and Molina, "Ozone Depletion 10 years after the alarm," in Chemical and Engineering News, vol. 72, no. 33 (August 15, 1994), pp. 8–13.

  [>] how the Washington Post put it Roan, Ozone Crisis, p. 81.

  [>] probably not going to avoid it Ibid., p. 124. Note: There were still some international rumblings. The infant United Nations Environment Program held the Vienna Convention in March 1985. It was modest in ambition, with only twenty signatories and no regulatory powers—nothing compared with what would follow the discovery of the ozone hole itself.

  [>] wooden huts up to their necks Four successive stations have been crushed by the snow, and the fifth one, though balanced on steel stilts, will soon have to be replaced.

  [>] or comforts, or women It was not until 1997 that women were allowed to winter there. The first woman visitor was back in 1973, but she doesn't really count. She was the wife of a ship's captain, who stepped onto the ice after the officers' dinner to be photographed next to the penguins in her evening gown.

  [>] what's posterity done for you Roan, Ozone Crisis, p. 127.

  [>] was published in May 1985 Farman, J. C., B. G. Gardiner, and J. D. Shanklin, "Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica reveal seasonal ClOx/NOx interaction," Nature, vol. 315 (1985), pp. 207–10.

  [>] wise to expect the unexpected Heath later claimed his group had already spotted the spurious data by the time Farman's paper was published, and had been secretly trying to interpret them. In any case, he had certainly missed his chance at one of the scientific scoops of the century.

  [>] puny humans are by comparison She told me this in an interview in London in mid-September 2001, when she had refused to be scared into cancelling her plans to fly across the Atlantic to London. She was on one of the first planes that flew after 9/11.

  [>] it would cease production Rowland and Molina, "Ozone Depletion 10 years after the alarm," in Chemical and Engineering News.

  [>] the dangers of CFCs They shared this prize with Paul Crutzen, who had first realized that the ozone layer might be vulnerable by working out that nitrogen oxides could also destroy ozone.

  [>] reject her care at our peril Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, p. 391.

  CHAPTER 6

  [>] still, small voice of the air Degna Marconi, My
Father, Marconi, p. 8.

  [>] put his schemes into practice Ibid., pp. 11–12.

  [>] inventions remained well hidden Ibid., p. 14.

  162 for our eyes to see Ultraviolet and infrared are other examples of electromagnetic waves; see chapter 5. But whereas they have wavelengths of tiny fractions of an inch, wireless waves can have a distance between successive peaks and troughs of several miles. Since the shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy, radio waves are the least energetic of all, which is why we can live in a world that is permanently crisscrossed with radio waves yet suffer no ill effects.

  [>] echoed down the valley Degna Marconi, My Father, Marconi, p. 29.

  [>] Marconi is thoroughly a cosmopolitan Dunlap, Marconi: The Man and His Wireless, p. 80.

  [>] study and scientific experiment Ibid., p. 78.

  [>] the friction of his lamp Weightman, Signor Marconi's Magic Box, p. 40.

  [>] too many 'whisky-and-sodas' Ibid., p. 41.

  [>] since the dawn of navigation Karl Baarslag, in SOS to the Rescue, quoted in earlyradiohistory.us/sec005.htm.

  [>] put all America behind him Degna Marconi, My Father, Marconi, p. 94.

  [>] activity and mental absorption Ibid., p. 105.

  [>] issue a formal statement Some people still doubt that Marconi heard his signal on that day. However, see The Friendly Ionosphere, by Crawford MacKeand (Montchanin, Delaware: Tyndar Press, 2001). MacKeand went to elaborate technical lengths to model the equipment that Marconi used, and concluded that it is highly feasible that he was right.

  [>] received them from England Dunlap, Marconi: The Man and His Wireless, p. 99.