GABRIELLE WALKER IS AN EXPERT IN AIR

We may all think we are, as well, because it’s what we breathe keeps us alive, but this award-winning science writer and PhD lecturer really knows what she is talking about. Air is not just about breathing. Air transforms into solid food, so that every living creature on our planet would perish without it. Air protects us in so many ways, like for instance shielding us from the harsh sun flares, visiting us almost every day that are more violent than all of the thousands of nuclear war heads we have stored every where.

Gabrielle is on intimate terms with the great scientists of the past millennia, as well. She has it all in her understanding, and although she majored in chemistry at Cambridge she regularly has programs on the BBC about everything and also is Climate Change Editor for Nature magazine and Features Editor of New Scientist. In addition she is a visiting professor at Princeton.

In lectures and articles, for instance, she relates how without the great wind belts of the world, our planet would be a very different place than what we experience. It would be part frozen and the other part fried. And if the heat at the tropics would stay there the temperatures at the equator would be a full 25 degrees F warmer. In fact life would be impossible for anyone, or any thing.

She also tells us that the poles would be unbearable too. They need to gain heat, not lose it. Both pole regions receive less sunlight constantly because of the angle of the sun's rays as they hit us. The white caps also reflect a large portion of the rays back into space. Without the help of the winds and movement of air, pole temperatures would be 45 degrees F colder than we see today. This would obviously have a big effect on the areas where most of us live as well, because of the spillover of the freezing pole temps.

So summing her lecture up, without the winds and movement of the air most of our planet’s surface would be uninhabitable.

Gabrielle Walker has put all of this together in a new book called “An Ocean of Air.” Like all of her studies Gabrielle brings us closer to complete understanding of our world as we have and will know it.