From
William
Patrick SHEEHAN
® . . . . . .Dear Masatsugu, Warmest regards! no
hurry on the paper. I just thought you might be interested in the argument. I'm
having comment from Sallie Baliunas and Leif Robinson
among others.
Looking forward to CMO #267.
Again, my sincere thanks for the wonderful material about the
transit of Venus observations in
Ever,
(
® . . . . . . . .I am
pleased to inform you that I have succeeded in obtaining a first edition --
1891 -- of "Noto" as a gift for you.
Please accept this as a small token of my appreciation. I will be sending it
shortly. I hope we may revisit the scenes there described together another year
and a half from now. Nothing, indeed, would give me greater pleasure!
My warmest and best regards for our great year of Mars, 2003,
(
® . . . . . . . .Hope you are soon well,
and glad you have already absorbed the pleasure of welcoming the New Year.
(
® . . . . . . . .I've
received interesting comments back on the Martian global paper and am sending
you a draft of my suggestions for revision that I also sent to Don and Jeff.
What's critical is getting the solar constant data that Charles Greeley Abbott and others have been collecting for years.
We would be pleased if you would be willing to join us as co-authors to
this work once we get a draft that is acceptable on all sides. It would be an honor
to include you as representative of the outstanding OAA Mars work,
which in my view sets the standard for everyone.
Ever,
(
® . . . . . . . .Also, I have wanted to
read Noto so you can have the enjoyment of
knowing every word on every passage has passed under my eye. It is a study for
our explorations in 2004. I just came to the wonderful account in the chapter,
"Over the Arayama Pass," which I could not
resist applying to
"Panoramic views are painfully plain.
They must needs be mappy at
best, for your own elevation flattens all below it to one topographic level.
Field and woodland, town or lake, show by their colors only as if they stood in
print; and you might as well lay any good atlas on the floor and survey it from
the lofty height of a footstool. Such being the inevitable, it was refreshing
to see the thing in caricature. No pains, evidently, had been spared by the
inhabitants to make their map realistic. There the geometric lines all stood in
ludicrous insistence; any child could have drawn the thing mechanically."
(
® . . . . . . . .Thank you for your many
excellent comments! They are superb; I
will read them and ponder fully.
I
must admit that my role in this paper has mainly been that of scribe --Don and
Jeff have collected quite a lot of data and it seemed worth trying to ascertain
whether the global trends on Earth and Mars might correlate. You are right, we
do need to get solar constant data that is reliable to examine this question;
there's no question that the terrestrial situation is much more complex than
that on Mars. We should also take steps to point out that the data are very
preliminary -- we don't know that Global Warming is occurring on Mars -- and
that what we are presenting in no way nullifies the fact that human input to
global warming on the Earth is likely to overwhelm solar contributions. It does
seem to me that even if the solar constant is variable that greenhouses gases
will amplify that signal, so if the sun is in fact heating up it should by no
means reassure anyone that we need take the warming less seriously.
It's unfortunate but these questions, since they involve human activity,
necessarily become (or potentially become) political. For the most part humans
make decisions based on passions and urges rather than rational data. Like
starlings (there was a study looking at this in Science a few years ago) we do
what we do based on short-term calculations of profit
and risk which is not in the long-term interest of the planet.
Parenthetically, I am not a specialist on this
subject, but have no reason not to believe that CO2 and other emissions are
the main culprit for the global warming trends. I personally mourned the
Many thanks again for your very perceptive comments which I think will
provide a more balanced view of the subject presented in this paper.
(
® . . . . . . . .I have
received so much feedback on the draft of that paper -- the subject obviously
was of general interest -- that it will take me several days to include all of
it in various attempts at revision. Yours was most helpful and I cannot thank
you enough for your comments. I shall send you a revision which you may find of
interest; then I hope to submit this to Sky & Telescope as part of
their pre-opposition coverage. Do you consent to being included as a
contributor to the article?
It is hard not to believe in terrestrial
global warming here in
Now I must also thank you for the OAA Mars Section Report which
contained your extremely valuable essay, "The 2001 Yellow Cloud and the Visibility of Tharsis-Olympus Montes."
This is a subject which I have never seen considered
in such depth or clarity. I absolutely agree with your observation that
visibility of the calderas as dark spots does not attest to lack of dust or
cloud activity but rather to brightening of the surrounding terrain -- but this
is something that I think few readers will have grasped. The relevance of the
comment to the Barnard observations of July and August 1894 are noted.
David Strauss has been in touch
regarding the passage where
(
® . . . . . . . .Here's
a fairly extensively revised version of the paper. I've taken your suggestions
very much to heart, and as a result, this is going to be a much stronger paper
than it otherwise would have been. Hope you don't mind being listed as
co-author.
I want to add a little more stuff at the end on the solar-climate
connection -- Don sent me a reference, which has some very good graphs of solar
irradiance vs. sunspots, and Sallie Baliunas also
sent me an extensive bibliography -- but I wanted you to have a whack at this
version of the paper so I can keep moving toward finality.
(
® . . . . . . . .Here's a slightly
reworked version of the paper I sent you last night.
(
® . . . . . . . .Thanks much for the very
good comments.
A
major paper on sunspot, isotope and tree ring data for several centuries -- all
connected with solar irradiance -- was published in Eos, the Transactions of
the American Geophysical Society, in October, so we have that data. I have been
in touch not only with Sallie Baliunas and her collaborators at
The paper continues to evolve, but it does, as
you indicate, need to be more focused. The version I most recently sent is a
vast improvement over the earlier ones; I should say it has been largely
because of your inputs.
It sounds as if you are harrassed
with much work and I promise not to impose more on you by further iterations of
this project unless you request them.
On a less vexsome
subject, I received in the mail yesterday Ernest Fenellosa's
book on Japanese and Chinese art, which I am looking forward to studying. ････
With very best wishes,
(
® . . . . . . . .Meanwhile, I have started
reading Ernest Fenollosa's book, "Epochs of
Chinese and Japanese Art", which I am enjoying greatly. I thought of
the last Mars opposition, that of 2001, when news of the dust storm was being
electronically relayed in real time from opposite hemispheres of the Earth when
I read his comment: "East and East
and West is West and never the twain shall meet," so runs Kipling's
dictum; and American orators use it to-day to affect our treaty
legislation. But the truth is that they
have met, and they are meeting now; and history is a thousand times richer for
the contact.... The interchange views from the basis of a common
humanity." If only this were posted
in the minds of those who are currently so conflict-driven rather than
peaceable, and that includes some world leaders whose horizon extends no
farther than the pig-sty of their own narrowly-proportioned minds.
(
® . . . . . . . .Many thanks for the
latest comments. The sunspot data is certainly of interest, and brings home
once again how complicated all these matters are. There's also cosmic ray data
that has been discussed in relation to the global climate change thesis -- it
may affect cloud cover -- and probably applies particularly in the case of
Neptune, where the interstellar medium effects are more significant.
(
® . . . . . . . .I'll be leaving tomorrow
-- January 25 -- for Yerkes Observatory (southern
THE FEELING IS DEEP --
DEEP -- NOT TRIUMPH -- NOT VIOLENT JOY -- THE DEEPEST FEELING OF ALL: THAT OF
BEING PERMITTED TO SEE A LITTLE FARTHER INTO THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE UNIVERSE
THAN ANYONE HAS BEEN PERMITTED TO SEE BEFORE.
THE GALAXIES HAVE
BEEN IN MY THOUGHTS AND DREAMS ALL NIGHT.
(
Bill
SHEEHAN (