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This is our lungs, and we connect to our Earth's great air to the bloodstream, and in this atmosphere, and our inspiration, our start to our last breath to. Time has a long history, customs, in order to expedite the import of the painting at the bottom of the newborn and shortness of breath, lips open, mirror, the person is dying, bookmark our existence. It is the oxygen in the atmosphere. Sparks fire in our party, we have to be able to move, eat and reproduce - certainly alive. Clean, fresh air gulped air straight from the sea is not the only human to traditional health tonic, it is life itself, and 30 pounds, all adults and requires that their daily life.           The Ocean Above Us     Until a black mood takes her and she rages about our heads, most us are unaware of our atmosphere. The "atmosphere": what a dull name for such a wondrous thing. And it's hardly specific... If we took the same linguistic approach to things maritime, we would use the catchall word water to replace sea and ocean, leaving us with no way to indicate whether we meant a glassful or half a planet's worth of hydrogen oxide, as H2O is properly known.   It was Alfred Russel Wallace, cofounder with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, who came up with the phrase "the Great Aerial Ocean" to describe the atmosphere. It's a far better name, because it conjures in the mind's eye the currents, eddies, and layers that create the weather far above our heads, and they are all that stand between us and the vastness of space. Wallace's phrase was born of a romantic era of scientific discovery when both amateurs and professionals were making significant contributions toward understanding why cyclones rage in certain regions of the globe, and how "carbonic acid," as carbon dioxide was sometimes described, affects the distributions of plants and animals.   Reading such work, you get the sense that their discoveries caused as much excitement as did the dredging up of monsters from the deep or, more contemporarily, pictures sent from Mars. Staid scientists would write rapturously of atmospheric dust: What an astonishing thing it is, Wallace mused, that without dust, sunsets would be as dull as dishwater, our glorious blue sky would be as black and uniform as ink…   Today the wonders of the atmosphere are often reduced to dry facts that, where they are known at all, are learned by rote by bored school-children. Despite having been forced to swallow them when at school, I still find the workings of the atmosphere fascinating. It connects everything with everything else and thus performs many services that we take for granted.   It is in our lungs that we connect to our Earth's great aerial blood-stream, and in this way the atmosphere inspires us from our first breath to our last. The time-honored customs of slapping newborns on the bottom to elicit a drawing of breath, and the holding up of a mirror to the lips of the dying are bookmarks of our existence. And it is the atmosphere's oxygen that sparks our inner fire, permitting us to move, eat, and reproduce—indeed to live. Clean, fresh air gulped straight from the great aerial ocean is not just an old-fashioned tonic for human health, it is life itself, and thirty pounds of it are required by every adult, every day of their lives.   The great aerial ocean, indivisible and omnipresent, has so regulated our planet's temperature that for nearly 4 billion years Earth has remained the sole cradle of life amid an infinity of dead gases, rock, and dust. Such a feat is as improbable as the development of life itself; but the two cannot be separated, for the great aerial ocean is the cumulative effusion of everything that has ever breathed, grown, and decayed. Perhaps it is the means by which life perpetuates the conditions necessary for its existence...           — Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth                       Indexes/18