Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1889 — OUR CLIMATE NOT CHANGING. [ARTICLE]

OUR CLIMATE NOT CHANGING.

Utter Fallacy of tho Popular Motion to That KfTeot. Abbe of the meteorological building at Washington, who is the real founder ®f our weather service, takes up in the February number of the Foruin the popular idea that our climate la changing. Affair iaowuig in an inter. Jesting way how changes, if any oecue, are calculated from meteorological tables, he shows that rational climatology gives no basis -for the much-taiked-of influence upon the climate of a country produced by the growth or destruction of forests, the building of railroads or telegraphs, and the cultivation of crops over a wide extent of prairie. “Any opinion as to the meteorological effects of man’s activity,” he says, "must he based either upon the records of observation or on a priori theoretical reasoning. Now the records of experience are exceedingly diverse in various parts of the world, and lead to no uniform conclusion. The paleontological evidences of the former existence of animals and plants where they can not now thrive, show clearly that great changes have taken place during geological ages perhaps 50,000 years distant; but no important change has yet been demonstrated since human history be- __ _ li gan.

Motes in a Bar of Sunlight. Counting the dancing motes in a bar of sunshine sounds like one of those hopeless, never-ending tasks with which malignant fairies delight to break the spirit of little heroines in the German folks stories. Something more than this, however, has been achieved by modern science, which is now able to count the particles floating in any given portion of the atmosphere, and determine what proportion of these are dangerous germs and what are mere dust. Dr. Frankland’s curious experiments have shown us how John John Aitken of Falkirk, by a fatally different method, has been enabled to take stock of the more ixarmless, but hardly less interesting, dust motes. Thirty thousand such particles have been detected by him in the thousandth of a cubic inch of the air of a room. In the outside atmosphere in dry weather the same measurement of air yielded 2,119, whereas after a heavy rainfall the number was only 521. That this power of prying into atmospheric secrets will eventually yield very important—results must be obvious to nil. Among the most curious discoveries already made is the direct relation between dust particles and fog, mist and rain.