Letters - February 10, 1999
I was appalled by the one-sided cover story on global warming (PAW, December 2). Had the article not omitted so much crucial information, many of your readers would have less to fear for the future of their grandchildren.
The climate models that make such dire predictions are produced on a supercomputer, but never has the old saw about computers -- "garbage in, garbage out" -- been more applicable. Among the critically important variables to be considered in any climate model is the effect of clouds. Most models assume clouds absorb 3 percent of the sun's radiation, but more recent estimates indicate absorption rates are closer to 19 percent, so that past predictions could be wildly off target. Similarly, our estimates of the amount of energy actually entering the earth's atmosphere and the amount of sunlight reflected back into space by the earth's surface vary enough over time to overwhelm the effects of other variables in the models.
The article also ignores how increased carbon dioxide benefits life on earth by acting as a fertilizer. By tripling CO2 levels, operators of Dutch greenhouses increase their yields by 20 to 40 percent. Extra CO2 also helps plants use their water more efficiently by inducing the "pores" (stomata) on the leaves to partially close, so that less water vapor escapes. Experiments show that doubling the world's carbon dioxide would raise crop yields an average of 52 percent.
The article states that few scientists refute global warming, but a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a nonprofit research group that receives no money from industry, suggests otherwise. Signed by 17,000 scientists, it states in part, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating" of the earth's atmosphere.
Jay Lehr '57
Powell, Ohio
There are solid scientific reasons to resist the rush toward accepting global warming as a doctrine. Despite a growth in carbon dioxide levels, temperatures as measured by satellite systems have not increased. Thus far, climate models have been no more successful at predicting the future with more carbon dioxide than weather models have been at predicting rain or shine at Reunions. Two simple tests must be applied to any simulation before it can even begin to claim some validity. The first is that all relevant meteorological phenomena, including such critical items as the effects of cloud cover and water vapor, must be included in the calculations. The second is that the models must be able to work in reverse. How can researchers hope to extrapolate forward 50 years when computer models cannot explain the climate of 100 or 500 years ago? To my knowledge, neither of these criteria has been fulfilled to date.
Finally, a caption for one of the article's illustrations concludes that a melting of Arctic sea ice will increase sea levels. This is, of course, hogwash. Even Yale students know that ice is more voluminous than an equal quantity of water. Only the melting of Greenland's ice (which is on land and not in the sea) could increase sea levels.
Isaiah Cox '94
London, England
Your article is hopeful about the possibility of solar power or nuclear fusion replacing fossil fuels, but it's questionable whether such alternative energy sources will be practical anytime soon. A better source is nuclear fission, which can produce an unlimited supply of energy without any significant emissions of CO2. No nuclear plant built to U.S. standards has ever injured a single member of the public.
The declining use of fission in this country is due to institutional and legal, not technical, problems. As a result, building a nuclear plant takes 12 years in the United States but just four to six years in other countries, and the process is far more expensive.
Bertram Wolfe '50
Monte Sereno, Calif.
The lack of any word about nuclear fission in your article is a serious omission. Fission is a proven process, used to generate 70 percent of the power in such countries as France, Switzerland, and Japan. It produces no carbon dioxide and is safe when operated responsibly with uptodate technology. In the U.S., nuclear fission is opposed by well meaning but misguided people who have forced such a welter of redundant and contradictory regulations on the nuclear industry that its cost has skyrocketed. Admittedly, the disposal of nuclear wastes remains a problem, but one that is solvable and much less threatening than global warming. Until nuclear fusion power becomes available, nuclear fission remains the best and likely only hope of stemming global warming.
James Boyd Smith '45
Princeton, N.J.
Writing about the eating clubs, Daniel A. Grech '99 makes several false assertions that I would like to correct (On the Campus, December 2).
Grech suggests that the closing of DEC (Dial-Elm-Cannon), which brings the number of clubs to 11 (from a high of 16 in the late 1960s), is part of a historic trend toward fewer clubs. He ignores the fact that only 11 clubs existed for a brief period in the mid-1970s. Over the last 26 years, the number of clubs has remained steady between 11 and 13. The potential reopening of DEC in the former Cannon building in 2001 could again raise the number of clubs to 12.
The author's claim that bicker clubs are necessarily stronger than sign-in clubs belies the fact that many bicker clubs became sign-in clubs to strengthen their membership base. The current system offers more choices to students, some of whom prefer the bicker process, some of whom prefer sign-ins. Despite the loss of DEC, the number of students signing into clubs has remained relatively unchanged over the last five years, just as the number of bicker-club members has remained constant.
Grech states that "the majority of African-American students don't join eating clubs." While it's true that the percentage of African-Americans who join clubs is lower than the percentage of Caucasians, the majority of African-American upperclassmen are club members. Additionally, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans -- the other three of the four minority groups as defined by the university -- all are represented at levels comparable to Caucasians. Two of the 11 club presidents this year are minorities.
Grech also compares the expense of joining a club versus the cost of purchasing a meal plan from Dining Services (a difference, on average, of $1,500, not the $2,000 he claims). Club members are paying for more than meals, however. Among the other benefits of club membership are extensive computer clusters tied to the Internet, access to alumni and professors through expanding club-sponsored programs, and spacious facilities for studying and relaxing.
It's too early to project the long-term effect on the club system of the Frist Campus Center, now under construction. Meanwhile, relations between the clubs and the university are growing stronger, the university is constructing new academic buildings along the walk immediately to the north of Prospect Avenue, and the trustees may soon begin to look into the possibility of increasing the number of undergraduates. All this bodes well for the future health of the eating clubs.
Michael A. Jackman '92
Inter-Club Adviser
Princeton, N.J.
Your October 21 Notebook article on the demise of DEC (the eating club made up of the former Dial, Elm, and Cannon) noted the failure by DEC's graduate board to keep undergraduate members informed of plans for the club's future. These individuals should have been a primary concern, but as I know from my daughter and other DEC members, this was not the case. Undergraduates were not allowed to attend board meetings discussing their fate. They did not receive deposits due them until late in the summer (long after the decision to close DEC had been made), and the letter notifying them of the board's actions arrived just a week before classes. Prospective members of the new, resurrected Cannon Club should be aware of this history of unresponsiveness.
John R. Turney '65
Columbia, Md.
In her article "The Fictive Princeton" (paw November 4), Ann Waldron no doubt drew up her "Complete List of Princeton-Related Fiction" knowing that half the fun of doing so would be getting letters pointing out items she had missed. Here's mine.
She Loves Me Not, by "Edward Hope" (the pseudonym of Edward Hope Coffey '20) is a Princeton novel published in 1933. Firestone Library has a copy of the novel (or at least it did 30 years ago). There was a movie version of it made in 1934, starring Bing Crosby, Miriam Hopkins, and Kitty Carlisle (w'31). The film occasionally used to turn up on the Late Show in New Jersey during the 1960s. Howard Lindsay also adapted the novel as a stage comedy in the early 1930s.
The plot of She Loves Me Not is pretty frivolous. A night-club performer (the Miriam Hopkins character) hides out from gangsters in a Princeton dorm after she accidentally witnesses a murder. She starts out by sneaking through a bay window into the room of senior Paul Lawton (Crosby), and by the end of the story she has won him away from the Seven-Sistersish Miss Carlisle. The gangsters, of course, are foiled in the meantime by clever undergraduates.
Both the book and the film set the story explicitly at Princeton. If I remember correctly, the novel's descriptive details about the campus are reasonably accurate. The movie uses actual exterior shots of Blair Hall and Nassau Hall to set the scene, and I recall that "Old Nassau" is sung during the opening credits. Bing's room at "63 Anderson Hall" is clearly meant to be in Blair, and except for its size -- big enough for a grand piano -- it's a pretty fair rendition of a typical Blair suite.
Like Booth Tarkington 1893's Cherry, Coffey's novel doesn't quite fit the pattern Waldron observes, in which male authors have traditionally concentrated on themes of snobbery and male camaraderie, while alumnae novelists have more recently turned the genre to love and sex. She Loves Me Not, for all its screwball plot elements, did depict love (if not sex) on the Princeton social scene long before "the hot-house environment of the coeducational campus" came along. The movie version introduced the song "Love in Bloom," and it had its share of 1930s-style double-entendre dialogue.
I pass all this along as one who enjoyed both the book and the movie, and in my capacity as head coach (emeritus) of the Princeton varsity team that won the Ivy League trivia championship in 1967.
Tim Tulenko '67
Kiev, Ukraine
One to add to the list is Princeton Town, by Day Edgar. Published in 1929 by Scribner's, this series of vignettes of undergraduate life isn't great literature, but it's interesting and nostalgic.
Philip S. May '52
Jacksonville, Fla.
While commuting to work I have been reading some novels by the French-Lebanese author Amin Maalouf. In the second volume of his two-volume Samarcande (1988, 1992) he features a Princetonian working in Iran at the turn of the century. During a period of oriental despotism and British-Russian colonial exploitation, he tries to enlighten the people and help them gain their independence. A Czarist sniper kills him during an uprising. It's an absorbing book -- caught up in reading it, I've missed my Metro stop several times.
Martin G. Luling *93
Paris, France
Your article mentions Jesse Lynch Williams 1892's The Adventures of a Freshman (1899) but not Princeton Stories, his earlier book of 11 short stories of campus life, published in 1895 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
William C. Trimble, Jr. '58
Owings Mills, Md.
I'd like to add to your note in the December 16 Letters regarding the omission in the list of Princeton novels of Deadly Meeting, a mystery set in Firestone Library by one Robert Bernard. The author was actually Professor of English Robert B. Martin, under whom I studied Victorian poetry. Your reference states the year of publication as 1993, but Deadly Meeting was first published in 1970, by W.W. Norton. In that edition, at least, the story's venue was a fictional New England university named Wilton.
Donald Marsden '64
Hempstead, N.Y.
I hope that when I read Scott Berg '71's new biography of Charles Lindbergh I won't find the common mistake, repeated in your November 18 cover story, suggesting that Lindbergh's was the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. That distinction belongs instead to John Alcock and Arthur Brown, two British aviators who flew from Newfoundland to Ireland eight years earlier, in June 1919. Lindbergh's flight is justifiably celebrated as a feat of engineering and human endurance, but that of Alcock and Brown, while shorter, was much the more daring. Working with primitive engines and flight instruments, they had more than one close scrape in their 16-hour adventure. Their prize was 10,000 British pounds, on offer from the Daily Mail since 1913.
They fared better than Harry Hawker and his navigator, who also were competing for the Daily Mail prize during that first postwar spring. They wound up ditching with a broken radiator halfway across. A Danish steamer happened to be in the neighborhood and brought Hawker home. A good thing too: had the company that he soon founded not been around to produce fighters for the Battle of Britain 20 years later, the Nazis might have had an even more sinister history.
Tad McGeer '79
Bingen, Wash.
Editor's note: Our article should have specified that Lindbergh's flight, from New York to Paris, was the first solo transatlantic crossing.
After reading J.I. Merritt '66's article about Scott Berg's biography of Lindbergh I had that familiar Yogi Berra feeling of "Déjà vu all over again."
Lindbergh was certainly fallible, but he was not, as Berg states, an antisemite, "genteel" or otherwise. Nor, contrary to his critics, was he a Nazi or a liar. Had he been these things, Jimmy Stewart '32 would not have so admired him. In The Last Hero, Walter S. Ross's 1967 biography of Lindbergh, the author states, "He may have used some of the language of anti-Semitism, but this does not make him an anti-Semite. His own private statements exculpate him of that charge. It would be out of character for him to lie on a subject as vital as this." Ross also quotes the American officer who asked Lindbergh to gather intelligence on his visits to Germany in the 1930s, "Lindbergh distructed the Nazi government and found its anti-Semitic policies abhorrent."
Kenneth A. Stier, Jr. '54
Great Neck, N.Y.
Regarding the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's son and the subsequent trial and execution of Bruno Hauptmann for that crime: I have great admiration for the American petit jury system, but I also have a suspicion of the eagerness to manufacture and sustain folk heroes. The two notions converge in the life of Lindbergh. Since the jury declared Hauptmann guilty, so be it. Opposition to the death penalty is effective only in the light of substantiated countervailing truth. Such evidence, admittedly circumstantial but vastly more reasonable than the case made against Hauptmann, was not available to the jury, but a good deal of it is presented in Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier's 1993 book, The Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax. The authors make a compelling case that Lindbergh himself, in a cruel practical joke gone terribly wrong, was responsible for his son's death. Such was the hero-worship of the man and the outrage over the loss of the child that the trial was rigged so that the jury was left with no doubts of Hauptmann's guilt.
W.W. Keen James '51
New Bedford, Mass.
In his November 18 letter about my article on the Mile of the Century Edwin Bragdon '43 gave a fine description of one of the most exciting races in the seven years of Princeton Invitation Meets. But a couple of details need correcting. It was in 1940 (not 1939) that the late Ed Burrowes '42 (not his classmate Edmund Burrough) came from behind to win that race. And he did so in the 880, not the 440. Burrowes was the only Princetonian to win an Invitation event and one of only a small handful even to compete. Among the others were Bill Bonthron '34, Stan Medina '37, Phil Goold '39, and Paul Douglas '41.
Herb Shultz '40
Kingston, N.Y.
I welcomed the December 2 letter from Dr. Karen Smith '83 asking for articles about alumni "who also graduated" but weren't academic or career superstars. But paw annually publishes hundreds of stories about ordinary alumni who've led happy, fulfilling lives and been valued leaders in their communities. You can find them in Memorials.
John Brittain '59
Lewistown, Penn.
Paw's memorials are getting too deadly. Gone are the times when some classmate "joined the advance guard" or "had a go in the Elysian Fields." Now it's all end game. But a memorial in the issue of October 7 gave me hope when it wished a departed Triangle performer good luck on his new show. Get a life, paw -- or should I say, Break a Leg?
B.J. Duffy '41
Hingham, Mass.
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