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As the production crew awaits appropriate weather conditions, Dreyer confides in Wahl his anxiety over the day's cloudy atmosphere. He tells Wahl that it is difficult for him to sleep at night because he spends so much of his time worrying about the weather. Dreyer describes the way in which a film must grow naturally out of its surroundings and emphasizes the importance of the atmosphere to the film's success. Later in the evening, Dreyer and Wahl have coffee with the entire cast of the film, and Dreyer discusses the work for the coming day. Wahl reveals Dreyer's original studio plan to film the scenes in chronological order; however, out in the country, Dreyer takes the easier shots first and then waits to film the most crucial scenes when the atmosphere cooperates. Toward the end of the chapter, Wahl introduces the film's producer, Tage Nielsen, who comes to the set angry about the weather delays.

This chapter looks at how the carnival fan groups expressed their collective identity at and around matches. It argues that humour, the ‘piss-take’ (Willis 1977) and the desire to witness and re-tell stories of ‘incident’ was central to the identity of the groups. It considers the creation and content of football chants (including racist and indecent chants) and the importance of ‘atmosphere’ at matches. It also looks at how different sub-cultures within a match-going support differentiate themselves and elevate their mode of support through stereotype and derision. Finally it considers the use of language and both regional and club-specific slang in creating group identity.

When they returned from the field, French anthropologists published both specialized and broadly scientific materials but also texts that were harder to classify, literary and narrative-based renderings of their fieldwork experiences. This trend reflects tensions, outlined by Marcel Mauss, between documentary imperatives and the need to represent the intangible “atmosphere” of a society under investigation in evocative documents. This chapter deals with the ways scholars like Mauss, Griaule, Durkheim, Gustave Lanson, and Alfred Métraux negotiated these tensions, often by producing narrative texts that supplemented more objective, muesum-based attempts at scientific knowledge production by communicating ethnographic knowledge through rhetoric. These and other figures wrestle with the question of narrative evocation and its ties to the potential scientific validity of subjective impressions.

This chapter addresses ethnographic citations of indigenous literature, an important device used in the more literary supplemental texts published by French anthropologists. Studying work by Paul-Émile Victor, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Soustelle, and Alfred Métraux, the chapter demonstrates how anthropologists sought to revive textually the “atmosphere” of a given society by citing indigenous poetry. This trope both accorded and denied certain virtues to literature in its perceived opposition with science. A close reading of Métraux’s L’Île de Pâques reveals how French anthropologists struggled with the idea that an unmediated experience of alterity was impossible, and an engagement with Mauss shows that, in his perspective, the idea of atmosphere contained the commensurability of the subjective and the objective.

Chapter 7 studies Marcel Griaule’s Les Flambeurs d’hommes, an opaque ethnographic text dealing with an imagined, archaic Ethiopia. It accounts for the oddities of this book, full of archaisms and written in the third person, by showing that it can be read as an attempt to solve the epistemological contradictions of anthropology at the time. In Les Flambeurs d’hommes Griaule undertakes the paradoxical project of inventing an evocative document, a text that communicates the “ways of feeling” of others but that cannot be suspected of dabbling in rhetoric or affectation, one that communicates an atmosphere but does so unintentionally and without realizing it. This distinction is drawn out by way of an extended comparison with Stendhal’s Chroniques italiennes, which is read as an evocative literary document bespeaking a knowledge project that is thoroughly anthropological. The comparative analysis of these two texts reveals the disparate practices of reading they prescribe as well as relationships to readerly publics that highlight the distinctions between traditional forms of cultural knowledge and the anthropology of the 1930s in France.

The conclusion recapitulates the limitations of ambient media as a form of social critique, but ends on a positive note by noting how ambient media allow for an affirmation of the weak and environmentally vulnerable self, and point to the potential for more inclusive forms of atmospheric attunement.

The chemical properties of the volatile elements in groups 15 to 18 are outlined, showing how the the periodicicty of the properties of the elements shapes their chemistry. The manufacture of hydrogen and chlorine is described, showing how mercury-free methods have been developed for the latter. The effect of the formation of atmospheric CO₂ on atmospheric oxygen content is explained in terms of dissolution in the oceans. Remediation of the exhaust gases from internal combustion engines by catalysts to remove CO2, NOx and carbonaceous particulates is explained. Options for carbon capture and storage by physical and chemical processes are evaluated, and examples provided of these processes in operation. Exploitation of the atmosphere for energy capture using wind turbines has been aided by the development of high performance magnets. The basis of these magnets and the role of rare earth elements is explained.

The Oxford group was successful in proposing a large instrument, the Improved Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder or ISAMS for short, as part of the scientific payload on NASA’s new and very large meteorological satellite, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite. UARS weighed in at over six tonnes and required a dedicated space shuttle launch. After much delay and expense this is achieved and spectacular results, especially on the problem of depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, were achieved. This earned the author tea with Margaret Thatcher at No. 10 and led to a frightening encounter with the 9/11 terror attacks in Washington.

Whoever made the dollar bill green had a right instinct. There is a connection, profound and yet so easy to ignore, between the money in our pocket and the green earth, though the connection is more than color. The dollar bill needs paper, which is to say it needs trees, just as our wealth in general derives from nature, from the forest, the earth and waters, the soil. That these are all limited and finite is easy to see, and so also must be wealth; it can never be unlimited, though it can be expanded and multiplied by human ingenuity. Somewhere on the dollar bill that message might be printed, a warning that you hold in your hand a piece of the limited earth that should be handled with respect: “In God we trust; on nature we must depend.” The public is beginning to understand that connection in at least a rudimentary way and to realize that taking better care of the earth will cost money, will lower the standard of living as it is conventionally defined, and will interfere with freedom of enterprise. By the evidence of opinion polls, something like three out of four Americans say they are ready to accept those costs, a remarkable development in our history. The same can be said for almost every other nation on earth, even the poorest, who are learning that, in their own long-term self-interest, the preservation of nature is a cost they ought to pay, though they may demand that the rich nations assume some of the cost. Having money in one’s pocket, no matter how green its color, is no longer the unexamined good it once was. Many have come to realize that wealth might be a kind of poverty. The human species, according to a team of Stanford biologists, is now consuming or destroying 40 percent of the net primary terrestrial production of the planet: that is nearly one half of all the energy fixed by photosynthesis on the land. We are harvesting it, drastically reorganizing it, or losing it through urbanization and desertification in order to support our growing numbers and even faster growing demands.

This final chapter explores the relationship between place, belonging, and order in migration policing. It foregrounds the question of ‘place’ as a category of analysis to understand how immigration and police officers relate to and make sense of their quotidian work and the different publics they interact with. Foregrounding space in policing sheds light on its importance for visualizing, sensing, and constructing order. This spatial and atmospheric dimension of policing forms part of officers’ cognitive maps through which they attach meaning to and make sense of their patches, and the world beyond them. As these officers deal on an everyday basis with people hailing from far away, what are their perceptions of the world outside their patches and how do these ideas and experiences impact on their work? Directing our attention to the geographies of migration policing, its spatial dimensions illuminate how officers apprehend and construct ‘the here and now’ of the local and vernacular in relation to the ‘outside’ and the past. While the intensification of global movements and interconnections—and the attendant economic, social, and political transformations it entailed–has been said to de-border the state and erode a sense of place, their testimonies point to a recasting of it (of the immediate communities and the nation) in a globalizing context. In such context, these sensibilities which articulate experiences of change have become more acute as these officers convey their sense that the world has been turned upside down.

The first thing I did in Miami was to write a proposal to the National Science Foundation for a mass spectrometer, in order to test Hess’s idea of a spreading seafloor. Funding was not a problem in those halcyon and bygone days of yore. Once, I remember, Cesare came trotting down the hall calling out that it was the end of the fiscal year and the NSF was on the phone; they were calling to say they had two hundred thousand dollars left over from the budget, and did anyone want it? No one did, we all had enough money. Lordy, lordy. (Loud sigh.) And so the money for the mass spectrometer came through, but not before summer, and I was not about to spend July and August in the Miami furnace. Instead, I arranged to go up to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where Ollie Schaeffer had become head of a new earth sciences department, to use his mass spectrometer to measure the ages on a suite of rocks brought back by one of my new friends at Miami, Enrico Bonatti, a marine geologist who had just returned from a research cruise with ocean floor samples that were perfect for testing the spreading seafloor hypothesis. He had dredged up basalts from the flanks of the East Pacific Rise and a half dozen other samples at various distances from it. So we should see young ages on the ridge rocks, and a spectrum of increasingly older ages as we moved outwards. Basalts are good material for normal potassium-argon dating, and those on the seafloor, we thought, should be even better. The basis of K/Ar dating is that you have a magma region somewhere inside the earth, with potassium continually decaying to argon. When the magma erupts, throwing out molten basaltic rocks, all the argon previously produced will bubble out and be lost to the atmosphere; as the lava cools into basaltic rocks, they will have potassium in them, but no argon, effectively setting the dating clock to zero.

There are two distinct categories of remotely sensed data: satellite data and aerial data or photographs. Unlike aerial photographs, satellite data have been routinely available for most of the earth’s land areas for more than two decades and therefore are preferred for reliably monitoring global vegetation conditions. Satellite data are the result of reflectance, emission, and/or back scattering of electromagnetic energy from earth objects (e.g., vegetation, soil, and water). The electromagnetic spectrum is very broad, and only a limited range of wavelengths is suitable for earth resource monitoring and applications. The gaseous composition (O2, O3, CO2, H2O, etc.) of the atmosphere, along with particulates and aerosols, cause significant absorption and scattering of electromagnetic energy over some regions of the spectrum. This restricts remote sensing of the earth’s surface to certain “atmospheric windows,” or regions in which electromagnetic energy can pass through the atmosphere with minimal interference. Some such windows include visible, infrared, shortwave, thermal, and microwave ranges of the spectrum. The shortwave-infrared (SWIR) wavelengths are sensitive to moisture content of vegetation, whereas the thermal-infrared region is useful for monitoring and detecting plant canopy stress and for modeling latent and sensible heat fluxes. Thermal remote sensing imagery is acquired both during the day and night, and it measures the emitted energy from the surface, which is related to surface temperatures and the emissivity of surface materials. This chapter focuses on the contribution of visible and infrared wavelengths to global drought monitoring, and chapter 6 discusses visible, infrared, and thermal wave contributions. Under microwave windows, the satellite data can be divided into two categories: active microwave and passive microwave. Chapters 7 and 8 describe applications of passive and active microwave remote sensing to drought monitoring, respectively. Early use of satellite data was pioneered by the Landsat series originally known as the Earth Resource Technology Satellite (ERTS; http://landsat7.usgs.gov/index.php). Landsat was the first satellite specifically designed for broad-scale observation of the earth’s land surface.

The climate work of the unrestrained and undisciplined geographic determinist, eugenicist, and popular writer Ellsworth Huntington (1876–1947) can be categorized into three large themes: the influence of weather and weather changes on workers and students, the influence of climate on world civilizations, and the influence of solar variations on climate change. The first represented a sort of meteorological Taylorism, the second a reprise of enlightenment determinism, and the third a simplistic and wholly unrealistic pseudoscientific theory. Why, then, should we bother with him? One answer was provided by the historian Arnold Toynbee, who was “enormously influenced” by Huntington’s ideas about the relation between human beings and their physical environments. It was Toynbee’s opinion that “[s]tudents of human affairs may agree or disagree with Huntington, but in either case they will be influenced by him, so it is better that they should be aware of him.” Although Huntington’s thought was indeed influential in its time, since then his racial bias and crude determinisms have been largely rejected. Nonetheless, his categorical errors seem destined to be repeated by those who make overly dramatic claims for weather and climatic influences. Ellsworth Huntington was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on September 16, 1876, the third child and eldest son of Henry Strong Huntington, a Congregationalist minister, and Mary Lawrence Herbert. The Huntingtons were proud of their Puritan ancestry, which they traced to 1633. Following the call of the ministry, the family moved to Gorham, Maine, in 1877 and then in 1889 to Milton, Massachusetts, a wealthy suburb of Boston. Ellsworth attended the public high school, where he excelled in athletics and academics. His biographers have called him reclusive, but his brother suggested that perhaps he was humble rather than shy. Huntington passed the Harvard entrance examinations, but family finances precluded his enrollment there. Instead, he attended Beloit College, where he boarded with a maternal aunt, from 1893 to 1897. Following in the footsteps of T. C. Chamberlin (Beloit 1866), Huntington studied both classics and geology, publishing his first article, on local road-making materials, in the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences.