December 15, 1992

To see the hope of South Korea's economy, one must put on a special pair of pants, a jump suit, a hood, facial mask, booties and two pairs of gloves, pass through three separate air showers and walk over three sticky floor mats. Only then, completely free of dust and other particles, can one enter the space-age super-clean factory in which dozens of young women are making screens for notebook computers using a technology that is so advanced that only the Japanese have mastered it.

Companies The U.A.W. agreed to sweeping early-retirement incentives at General Motors. It was not immediately clear how many workers would retire early, but the package is one way the auto maker hopes to shrink its hourly work force about 13 percent by 1995. [ Page A1. ] Boeing will impose a contract proposal rejected by employees. The move set the stage for a strike by engineers and technical employees, possibly as early as today. [ D1. ]

SCIENTISTS may be zeroing in on a tighter estimate of just how much the earth's climate stands to be warmed by industrial waste gases that trap the sun's heat. Such estimates are usually made by computers programmed to simulate the world's climate. These computer models, however impressive, are no better than the assumptions fed into them. Now comes a substantial independent check on the models: an analysis of how the earth's climate responded to changes in atmospheric heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other influences in the distant past, based on geological and geophysical evidence.

The storm that swept across New York on Friday was a reminder that on Wall Street, as on other battlefields, there is an advantage to the high ground. Firms in several low-lying buildings, including 55 Water Street, 100 Wall Street and 2 New York Plaza, were disabled when salty water from the rising tides of New York Harbor found its way into basement vaults holding electrical transformers and telephone equipment.

A QUARTER billion years ago, something so terrible happened on earth that up to 96 percent of plant and animal species were wiped out. The cause of this greatest of all global catastrophes remains unknown, but evidence is mounting that the main culprit was a monstrous volcanic eruption that covered much of Siberia with molten rock, touching off an ice age and a worldwide deluge of lethal acid rain. This mass extinction, which occurred at the end of the Permian period, was the subject of papers presented last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union and in the journal Science.