Atmosphere politics

Mankind s impact on the global climate and whether pollution from modern energy use is indeed warming the Earth have become important issues for national and international policy makers. Political pressure and public sentiment are based on complex data sets that, alone, cannot tell the whole story. The ultimate question is whether our climate is becoming warmer because of the slow build-up in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (1). The answer is not clear, because much of what we know about global climate change is inferred from historical evidence of uncertain quality. 

Nuclear war and nuclear peace are fundamental concerns of humankind. The Foundation concentrates on the strategic, technological, scientific, and political analyses of this issue in an interdisciplinary atmosphere. 

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Sprecher and I took the position that it was exceedingly irregular for the defense to have deprived the prosecution of its own records, particularly since we had constantly granted them access to the Griesheim document center. This was putting it politely. 

Sprecher still believed the political atmosphere would seriously influence the outcome. The Soviets had just cut off rail, highway, and barge shipments to Berlin. Everyone was jittery. Judge Hebert had sent his wife and children home. So had I. Still, I made a bet with Sprecher that at least Carl Krauch would be convicted of preparing an aggressive war. 

So the industry has completed 5 years of life under TSCA. We are still in business. But we have changed. Some of the changes come from responding to the law. Some of our responses are to the "spirit of TSCA" — the public demands for responsive action that created the political atmosphere in which TSCA was originally conceived. From the EPA, we have seen several false starts in getting their act together. 

Boyle, like many scholars of his day, studied and published in a number of areas including theology, philosophy, science, and political thought. In the area of chemistry, Boyle, in the tradition of van Helmont, studied gases. Aided by his assistant Robert Hooke, Boyle used a vacuum pump to conduct experiments in which he discovered air was necessary for life, sound does not travel in a vacuum, and that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to pressure. This last discovery is one of the basic gas laws, and today is known as Boyle s Law (see Chapter 9). Boyle applied his work on gases to a study of the atmosphere and determined the density of air, and how atmospheric pressure changes with elevation. 

In the depoliticised atmosphere of Suharto s Indonesia, cultural competition occupied some of the space which the robust politics of the 1950s and 1960s had left vacant. For urban Bataks seeking their place in the Indonesian sun, this could not be represented by the village cultures from which they had escaped. New cultural simplifications had to be devised, sanitised and rendered attractive to serve their competition for a place in urban and national life. The tourist gaze sometimes helped clarify and justify the package of new identity-markers, but it was the Indonesian competition that defined them. 

Two political appointees, D. James Baker, at that time head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Ro-sina Bierbaum, second in line at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, were made co-chairs of the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, one of the many constituent committees of the National Science and Technology Council. Baker, in his role as chair, directed a subcommittee of his com-... 

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