The greenhouse effect is a warming near the Earth’s surface that results when the Earth’s atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. The atmosphere acts very much like the glass enclosure of a greenhouse. This effect was described by John Tyndall in 1861, though a similar notion had been mentioned by French mathematician Jean Fourier a cen […]

Most cities are warmer than surrounding rural areas, especially on calm, clear nights. Some inner cites might be 10 to 20°F warmer than low-lying rural areas. The urban warmth results from waste heat from energy use, changes in the heat capacity of the surface (concrete holds more heat than does grass), smoke acting as an […]

While attempts at deliberately altering the weather have met with only modest suc cess, humans have been changing local weather and perhaps global climate simply by going about their daily activities. Clouds form in the smoke plumes of factories and steel mills. Oceangoing ships leave trails of clouds extending 1,000 miles behind them as they […]

Humans have long dreamed of being able to change the weather. The 1946 discovery that supercooled clouds could be seeded with dry ice or silver iodide and coerced into yielding the moisture in the form of precipitation ushered in an era of wild optimism about the possibilities of human “weather control.” Ultimately the promise far […]

Constantly. It was not so long ago that scientists believed the climate of our planet was more or less constant. The discovery of the ice ages confounded that notion. But even in the current interlude between ice ages, only in the last few decades has the evidence been accumulating to show that the Earth’s climate […]

Solar power is simply the conversion of light energy into electrical energy using devices attached with special materials like silicon.Man has been late in harnessing the light energy from the radiant sun, a repository of unfathomable power. But nature has been using it for millions of years. Each of leaf of shrub, herb, or tree […]