July 8, 2004
News Makers
CLIMATE CHAOS: Author Charles Wohlforth consulted Gerard Roe, a UW associate professor of Earth and Space Sciences, when Wohlforth researched his book on climate change titled The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change. When writer Ian Garrick Mason reviewed the book for the San Francisco Chronicle, he mentioned that climate-concerned scientists tend to create generalized models of climate behavior, “those hypercomplicated simulations of the Earth that we see pictured in the newspaper after each climate conference.” This set up a lively quote from Roe, to the effect that the chaos of climate change resists such models: “People don’t understand the Earth, but they want to, so they build a model, and then they have two things they don’t understand.”
DUST BOWL THEORY: When a NASA scientist theorized over causes for the Dust Bowl storms and drought of the Depression-era 1930s for a paper to be printed in Science, John Wallace, UW professor of atmospheric sciences, was among those who reviewed the text before it was published.
Siegfried Schubert, a meteorologist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wrote that the Pacific Ocean being slightly cooler and the Atlantic slightly warmer than usual produced a weakened jet stream, which then supplied less moisture to the Great Plains states. Next, Schubert said, the cause for the oceanic temperature variations needs to be explored.
Wallace told the Associated Press that while Schubert’s paper didn’t enable scientists to predict droughts, it helps them “get a feel for the odds, the probabilities. Anything that can get a leg up on what’s coming next summer is going to be useful.”
BOEING CHALLENGED: A New York Times article in April about Boeing and Japanese orders for the company’s upcoming 7E7 Dreamliner mentioned that European airplane manufacturer Airbus passed Boeing in 2003 as the world’s leading aircraft maker.
“It’s absolutely critical for Boeing to maintain momentum,” commented UW business professor Charles Hill in the article. “The impression is that Airbus has taken the lead, and it’s put things squarely in Boeing’s lap.”
