Saving our Skins - Going Viral on Substack
I really enjoyed writing that, but ...
It’s a pity that title is a teensy bit misleading. But, as you’ll see below, it’s not an out-and-out fib.
I’ve just finished editing the original posts of Saving our Skins so they now faithfully reproduce the most recent published version of the book.
You can lick on the underlined links at the end of this post to take you directly to each chapter. Comments welcome!
The versions posted previously on Substack were just first drafts. And, for the first time on Substack, the story now includes the Going Viral chapter about the Covid-19 pandemic. It was written after the substack postings. It provides an interesting perspective another year or so down the line. And, yes, that really is its title. Sorry about the deception it might have raised with the title of that this post. But if I’m lucky, it’ll be a harbinger of greater things to come. As you’ll see, that particular chapter is a bit out of date, but I resisted the urge to update it here. Perhaps an excuse for a 2nd edition one day? I’m open to offers from any publishers out there!
While reading this on-line version denies you the tactile pleasure of holding the book in your own sweaty palms, it does have the advantage of denying Bezos untold riches (and $2 for me in royalties per book). I’ve decided I’ll never get rich from this project, so I’m prepared to waive that fee for now. This version on Substack will be freely available - at least to all subscribers signed up before the end of the month.
Just a quick editorial note before you launch into it. This version differs from the printed version in several ways. Some good, and one bad.
First the good news. You can read it in bed without a bedside lamp, and there are no page breaks, so the pictures are exactly where they should be. It also includes hot links to related materials and it’s more up-to-date than the printed version because a few typos that slipped through the net have also been corrected.
The bad news is that the fledgling Substack doesn’t yet allow subscripts and superscripts (or at least I haven’t been able to find out how to include them). That’s a bit of a problem for sciencey posts like these. For instance, the formula for nitrogen dioxide appears as NO2, rather than NO with a subscripted 2. The correct meaning is pretty obvious in this case, but for numbers expressed in scientific notation, there can be ambiguity. For example, one hundred in scientific notation is 10 to the power of two. With the substack editor limitations, that would appear as 102. Not very different from the correct answer in this case, but worse for 1000, which would appear as 103. And so on … To avoid any ambiguity I’ve added the ’^’ symbol, so 100 = 10^2 (meaning 10 to the power of two), and one thousand appears as 10^3, etc. Avogadro’s number appears here as 6 x 10^23. Much easier than writing 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!
Saving our Skins
Chapter 1. Jets and Lies
Chapter 2. Sun, Earth and Radio
Chapter 3. Changing of the Guard
Chapter 4. Measuring Ozone
Chapter 5. Nights to Remember
Chapter 6. Lauder Stargazers
Chapter 7. The Dreaming Spires
Chapter 8. Zeeman Modulation and more …
Chapter 9. The Ozone Hole
Chapter 10. Finding the Culprit
Chapter 11. Why Worry?
Chapter 12. UV and More
Chapter 13. Dark Clouds and Silver Linings
Chapter 14. Fire and Water
Chapter 15. The Things We Did
Chapter 16. Balancing Acts
Chapter 17. The Montreal Protocol
Chapter 18. Flies in the ointment
Chapter 19. Questions and Answers
Chapter 20. Changing Faces
Chapter 21. A Safer World?
Chapter 22. Going Viral
Chapter 23. Back to the Beginning
Epilogue. The Game Breaker
Appendix. Comings and Goings
The Back Story. Life before Lauder
Bibliography. About the Author
Feel free to sign up - at no cost - for future occasional postings on the intersection between Ozone, UV, Climate, and Health …