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BBC on Global Dimming
linoleo writes "The BBC reports that the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface has declined significantly between the 1950s and the 1990s, apparently due to particulate air pollution. Scientists are worried that this global dimming may be disrupting the pattern of the world's rainfall. Most alarmingly, it may have led us to greatly underestimate the greenhouse effect: with particulate pollution being brought under control, a global temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable." The lengthy transcript of the show is available.
I'm not sure where you live but in the UK the expression is definitely "on the cards".
Great - the UK might be a nice place to live by then! You can keep your Med coasts in France, and Spain - arrid deserts, they'll be in 100 years. Invest in Dorset, I say :)
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Actually, what they're saying is that since we are finally getting pollution under control, the increased amount of sunlight will compound with the current greenhouse effect. At least that's how I read it
Don't you hate pants?
Really, this article jumps to far too many conclusions with far too little data.
And with exactly the same certainty as this statement expresses, if I dance around in a circle every Thursday night, an average rainfall increase of 17 inches could be in the cards!
Global temperature has risen, fallen, and risen since 1880, even though carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen. In fact, for 30 years between 1940 and 1970 the temperature dropped all that it had gained in the past 50 years. Overall in the past 120 years global temperature has risen 1 degree celsius.
One brings into question the level of accuracy from third world countries in the early 1900's. When one looks at the average temperature in America it tells a different story. From 1880 to 1920 temperatures dropped 0.5 degrees celsius. From 1920 to 1934 temperatures rose 0.9 degree celsius. From 1934 to 1976 temperatures dropped 0.8 degrees celsius. From 1976 to present temperatures have risen 0.7 degrees celsius, for a net total of 0.3 degrees celsius in 124 years.
lets all screw up our environment.. we may as well speed it up .. start using more coal and gas based turn off all clean nuclear power stations (yes they are clean until the end product is required). and then we can go and increase the capacity of our engines 10 fold.. no worries.. lets all be selfish and not give a shit!!!..
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Global Dimming Dec 18
Hint to editors: I obtained the links by doing a Slashdot search for dimming. Also checked that a Google site:slashdot.org search also turned up results.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
News at 11.
Seriously folks, non-doomsday research doesn't get as much funding as doomsday research.
I knew buying all that land in the frozen north would pay off!
all those people will be flocking to the tropical shores of wonderful Lake erie!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And at the same time the amount of energy put out by the Sun is increasing.y /sun_output_0 30320.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom
http://www.hypography.com/article.cfm?id=32945
Yes, essentially the program says that we are getting less sunlight and the world is getting hotter.
They say we are getting less sunlight thanks the visible pollution in the atmosphere which encourages cloud formation in a fashion which reflects more sunlight than clouds formed around natural pollutants such as pollen.
We are making big steps to clean up the visible pollution and therefore bringing the amount of sunlight back to normal levels.
However given that the world is still warming up despite the cooling effect of this reduction of sunlight they are supposing this must mean that global warming is in fact a lot more powerful than they first thought since we can still detect noticable warming despite a reduction in sunlight.
As we clean up more and more of our visible pollution without cleaning up our CO2 pollution we may face a much bigger temperature increase than we were expecting.
The program was fairly sensastionalist and towards the end went through some highly speculative "we are all going to die" scenarios. I would have liked them to concetrate more on the evidence they have for global dimming and maybe some contrary evidence or any doubts the scientific community may have about the results of the scientists they did show.
You guys are always so negative. With a global temperature rise of 10 degrees, think of all the places that would become inhabitable... like Canada.
The sunlight is hitting the earth, just not reaching the surface. This has the effect of heating the upper atmosphere, and reducing the power at the earth's surface.
You may now run some atmospheric modelling code to work out what the hell this will do to the climate.
An immediate conclusion made in the article is that this effect is masking the current rate of climate change due to CO2, so that as we clean up the atmosphere due to reduced particulate emissions, the greenhouse effect will get worse, even if there isn't an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.
To suggest that little or no climate changed is being "caused" by something man made without backing it up goes beyond the bounds of irresponsible ...
Excuse me, he's suggesting that both are causing a massive affect, the most noticeable part of both canceling each other out. Let's say we have an egg on a roof. We push it one way, it falls off. We push it the other way, it falls off. He's saying we're pushing it both ways. It's not going to fall off right now because it's balances but if we drop the force on one side, it'll fall off. Incidentally, not suggested by him but by me: It can crack where it stands.
Finally, of course there's more to the story than just particles in the air, but do you really expect a thorough background in geothermal science which touches on all pertinent topics such as ocean currents when you're talking about this? That would be grounds for accusations of poor journalism.
"Waking up" to something simply means to take notice of it. Rejecting the obvious truth has nothing to do with it. It's impossible for scientists to keep track of all the minutiae that comprise the universe.
Secondly, I don't think the journalist came up with that conclusion. Scientists did, and the journalist is just reporting it, which incidentally is his job.
The media can be irresponsible at times, and does make mistakes. But reporting the findings of scientists, like this, is not one of them, even if the conclusions they have reached do not agree with yours. After all, if they didn't report it, and thus did not feed the "pop-sci crap" to the public, others would feel they're not doing their job. So relax.
Kent: Hordes of panicky people seem to be evacuating the town for some unknown reason. Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?
Professor: Mmm, yes I would, Kent.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/1F09.html
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of wes
I saw the actual programme, and it was far from Pop Science. In paticular the 9/11 data was fairly stark in underlining the impact of removal of aeroplanes from the skys for just two days over the US.
But of course, we could all just bury our heads in the sand and claim it is pop science.
The programme went into a "light" amount of detail, but mainly said this was something that required more research but was on the scary side of its implications. They certainly didn't say it was cancelling out the greenhouse effect, they claimed it was MASKING its impact, a very different claim.
The real trouble is that anything that claims there is a global warming problem caused by pollution comes up against one basic problem:
The US Energy Policy.
To my mind these elements equate to the old "the odds of this thing going critical if I drop it are pretty low" school of porting nuclear materials. The odds may be low, but the cost is huge, hence the reason you don't just lob the stuff about.
So it was a lightweight programme, well yes it wasn't the Open University, but "Pop Science", not really. It definately played for some dramatic effect, but there was evidence for those who were watching.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
What odds would you want before taking action?
It's not a question of odds. How do you determine odds on something you don't understand?
This would certainly explain something that has bothered me for some time. I am cursed with a memory that remembors images with clarity I wish I didn't have. I have noticed that images from my childhood, (admittedly decades old now), seem to be 'brighter' than those I have of recent times. It's not a 'hazy' difference as you would expect. It is that the images seem 'brighter' to me. If I revisit the same location, it's not the same, even on a bright sunny day.
I know it probably seems ludicrous to most people. I don't talk about things like that normally, because people just dismiss you as nuts, but it's real to me. I am curious, are there any others out there with long term photo memories that exhibit the same thing as I see?
This may be an interesting read for anyone concerned by scientific coverage in the media [cjr.org]. It basicly says unless you're a scientist it's very hard to determine what's a well thought out theory and what's not, and journalists try so hard to balance the coverage of the well known and unknown that they often will given too much exposure to a theory well understood in scientific circles to be junk.
The premise is this:
We have global dimming, caused by particulate pollution, the world is getting less light than it used to.
Despite this, we have global warming, caused by greenhouse gases, the world is getting hotter.
Therefore, if we clean up the particulate pollution without tackling the greenhouse gas problem, then the global warming could become more pronounced because of the increased sunlight reaching us.
I didn't RTFA but I did WTFP (Watch the program).
As a student of global climate change (the warming part has long since been dropped), a few scientific facts need to be added.
#1 - Global climate change means exactly that - it will get warmer in some places, colder in others. And while idyllic thoughts of long summers around Great Bear Lake might spark a real estate boom, there will be a few downsides to the change. Disease vectors love warm weather, which means that pesky malaria (so, caused by bad air after all!) will become a feature of northern summers.
#2 - The problem of increased warming due to pollution reduction is well known. These are relatively large particles being talked about, the ones that reflect sunlight back out (like after a volcano) - this does not include the smaller particles that have a much larger "green house" effect. Thus as we reduce large particulate pollution, the speed of warming will indeed increase.
#3 - The "wait and study it so we know what is happending" arguement. This arguement has many supporters, including those who love discount rates. The fact is, once a glacier begins to melt (ahem, Greenland), there will be no way to stop it. Mind you, it might take a few hundred to a few thousand years... so maybe 2k'ers get the last laugh?
sig? what sig? i didn't see any sig...
I agree that this is a large jump to make. Just because the solar radiation isn't getting to the ground doesn't mean that the atmosphere isn't getting the full force of the solar radiation. It would seem IMO that the particulates that are absorbing the solar radiation would cause the atmosphere to get even hotter than if the ground were aborbing it, thus this is part of the greenhouse effect and not canceling it. Of course, IANAM (Meteorologist).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If everybody started driving electric/hybrid vehicles today, in 5 years there would be less pollutants/carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists now believe that these ingredients are keeping sunlight out. So if the amount of carbon dioxide etc. decreased so would global warming. Right????? Come on people. Don't let the extremests make you feel guilty for driving your "environmentally unfriendly" vehicle. Our vehicles are maintaining the "delicate balance" of the cooling and warming cycles.
I realize you're being slightly facetious, and it's all very well and fine stating that a proportion of people live in "edge conditions", but think about it this way: increased globalization is driving more and more people to living in heavily populated and/or growing cities.
Throw a ten degree temperature increase at a place (like New York) during the summer and you're in a world of trouble (never mind potentially higher sea-levels from melted Greenland ice boosting Manhattan's previously non-existant boat industry).
Yeah, the fit and the healthy might survive and adapt, but the old and the frail, along with young children can't adapt to the heat. I grew up in South Africa, with average summer temperatures of 30 to 40 degrees (celsius) and I left the first chance I had (the humidity is just deathly). Now we're talking about 40 to 50 degree summers? I'm not sure how most people will really cope, unless we're out to cull a few billion people for "the greater good" or something.
You've seen this, no?
I am myself (as most Slashdotters) often dubious of the spin put on science for main-stream TV, and while the Horizon program did indeed have lots of the usual London flooded/dust-storm enveloping the BT tower/etc. scenes, plus lots of "but then, things get even worse..." sort of narrative - there was still some good science and a genuine warning to be heeded.
Consider the solid data accumulated from such straight-forward measurements as solar energy and pan evaporation, and the reasoning behind cloud reflectance (particulates building more/smaller raindrops). Together with the observations on the effects of contrails taken during the only time aircraft were grounded in the US (after 9/11). Also, the fact that while industrialised nations have cleaned up air quality - their summers have also been getting warming...
OK, so maybe global warming is/isn't held in check by global dimming. But does anyone here really believe that 6 billion people spewing out CO^2 shouldn't have had more effect by now...
This is why I support wind farms (& nuclear) and don't believe in low cost airlines!
Fry: This snow is beautiful. I'm glad global warming never happened.
Leela: Actually, it did. But thank God nuclear winter cancelled it out.
IMHO even over 50 years, we should be able to spot trends of that order of magnitude in our food crops.
At the liklihood of being branded a heretic, it should be said that global warming, its causes, its effects, and its magnitude, if any, are not understood yet and this article just illustrates that. We have been assured for many years that rising atmospheric CO2 levels (which is factual) will cause the earth's temperature to increase due to the 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which reduces heat radiation into space (also factual). Scientists have attempted to create all sorts of sophisticated computer models to predict the magnitude of the warming and its effects on the global climate. Other scientists have attempted to reconstruct the historical climate by looking at tree rings, glacial ice gas bubbles, sedimentary rock layers, etc. to determine what has happened in the past. So far, so good.
The problem with all of this is that we are modeling a very large amount of heat reaching the earth from the sun every day minus an equally large amount of heat leaving the earth every day which leaves a tiny little theoretical residue of heat remaining on the earth to allegedly warm us up. Our current computer modeling techniques are just too crude to be used to draw any conclusions from. This article points out that the amount of heat reaching the earth has decreased significantly due to particulates in the atmosphere but also from increased cloud cover, caused by the particulates, or occuring independently of them. It is also possible, even likely, that the output from the sun is declining, which happens to be the currently-popular theory for explaining the cause of recent, and periodic, 'ice ages.'
What we are seeing is that even with a significant decline in solar radiation, the effect on temperatures has been relatively small. The fans of the global warming models will, of course, claim that the carbon dioxide effects have almost exactly balanced out the solar radiation decline but another, much more likely, conclusion, is that the earth's climate has a feedback control in the circulation of ocean currents, the amount of water evaporated, and the degree of cloud cover and that the computer models we currently have are not nearly sophisticated enough to give us any idea at all of what will happen in the future due to changes in solar radiation or carbon dioxide levels.
The next ice age might be just beginning or we might be on the verge of catastrophic warming but we simply do not know.
depending on all the factors, more of the heat is lost to colder "space" in one situation as opposed to another. We get heat from three sources, internally from the planet itself, man made burning and normal large scale surface burning (lightning strikes to forest for example), and solar radiation. The atmosphere acts as an insulating blanket and keeps it more moderate than not, but it's not a *perfect* insulator, and tiny variables cause profound changes. In one situation with the increase in greenhouse gasses-including water vapor-the heat stays trapped longer, resulting in higher over all median temps. In another, because of a higher level of reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, we have less heat gain from solar radiation, but the heat loss is about the same, so it gets colder as a median. The point in the research is that the particulate matter tends to partially cancel the effects of "more" gasses in the atmosphere, suggesting that if we over reduce just one component in the atmosphere while the others are increasing, we could actually make it worse, not better. an interesting concept that is logical though. In this case we are getting more of the gasses and reducing the particulate matter lately due to enacted controls on how we burn things on purpose, so it would tend to then again increase the median surface temp because the envelope would be receiving more heat again.
It's a dang yo yo in other words.
The effects are profound though, about all the scientists agree that even small temp variances taken as an average over some years duration tend to then cause shifts in localised/regional climate some places much colder or drier than normal, others hotter and wetter, sea levels go up and down with how much of the water vapor is trapped as sea ice or glaciers as opposed to free flowing, etc.
We as humans get used to relatively short geological time spans and adjust and adapt our society around our surroundings obviously, so if it changes radically one way or the other it can cause any number of what to us are adverse conditions.
I think the main point is that it doesn't take extreme variables to get profound changes, and that said changes can happen rapidly, more rapidly than they used to think. We are seeing it now, there is absolutely zero doubt the poles are getting warmer and the ice is melting there. And the more that melts, the faster the remaining ice will melt because of the albedo effect. That will continue until such a time as it is "too much" for the planet to absorb in that direction, and it will start to refreeze. Back and forth, been going on for millions of years, just now they think we could be real dang close to a tipping over point in this yo yo travel.
The planet seems to have a remarkable ability to self regulate towards a median, it's the swings back and forth that are the worry and the extrmes in the travels back and forth make it "less inhabitable". We as humans tend to like it better in the middle regions there, that's how we can even handle it and thrive.
We are sort of spoiled now being in the middle of a relatively temperate time as far as the needs of humans are. With the polar caps melting, this will greatly reduce the "averaging" effects and cause some pretty dramatic temp variances in places now that are considered more moderate, and those areas are where the bulk of the humans live.
I think the real main problem that we are having in these sorts of discussions is that there is no single one noun to describe it, and various people tend to pick one or the other and try to make that data fit that noun, and it can't be done.
It is *both* a global cooling and a global warming phenomenon that occurrs,simultaneously, just that the actual perceived results are felt differently depending on where anyone "you" is standing geographically. To arctic and antarctic dwellers, they are experiencing "warming", to others in the more temperate zones, it will be getting colder. And areas that are used to x-am
I believe you have a point, but here`s the other side of the story:
To state things the way the media state them is indeed quite pulling the umbrella because they themselves did not cover this news when it was presented to the world for the first time in 2001, 4 years ago. Media themselves did not do the effort to go far on this topic, or to understand the scope of the research. (I actually wanted to post this story 3 days ago, when I discovered the topic had allready been covered in 2001, 2003 and may 2004, so here you`re right about that brick wall.)
But! As for the topic itself, Global Dimming, I have no problem accepting the theory of more reflection of sunlight by denser clouds (particles) in the atmosphere. And I also have no problem accepting that this evolution is even worse to nature than global warming would be. If both effects go hand in hand, and the atmosphere is covering up, it could get dark and cold quite fast here. China hasn`t even begun fully transforming into a capitalistic low-cost no-eco-concerned mass producing country. Half of the world lives there. And Kyoto is constantly being bashed by them smart yankees driving their roaring SUVs. I`m really concerned, and if you think that`s because the media paint it wrong, I leave that judgement up to you.
When I look at factories with their chimney`s, I can`t wonder but think where all that black stuff goes.. isn`t it time we invent something better to get rid of waste, even if it`s just carbon oxides.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
...but not today.
Fortunately, the models & supercomputers are just slightly more complex than your fallacious argument. Merits of the BBC presention nonwithstanding, the theory that is advanced is not inconsisent with the observations at all. (Any of those could might be wrong, but that's a different story.)
... errr... well, greenhouses and shading/clouds. They may may have opposite effect on temperature, but they are not matter & antimatter. The theory of global shading has two major implications:
Replace the common useage of' 'Global warming' as 'greenhouse effect', and then park GW for the time being. If you don't understand this, consider that a car with windows rolled up acts a like a greenhouse. Sit in the shade and you might get a little uncomfortable, but not seriously so. Move out of the shade and... toast. In both cases there was complete Car Warming, but you can easily see the two major and independent factors. The make of the car does *not* matter...
So, greenhouse effects and shading are as different as
1 - Our models are wrong. Shading deducts X amount of energy which means that our estimate for the strength of greenhouse-effect is probably off by X.
2 - Ironically, shading helps, in the sense that we get less total increase in temperature - but it isn't all good, and it isn't that simple. Most importantly, reducing shading by without reducing the greenhouse effect would is tantamount to raising the temperature - which is a big no-no.
Incidentally, the particles are doing exactly what you suggest, but the implication is not what you understand it to be. One of many observations was that during flight-less days post 9/11, it didn't just get "warmer", energy flow & flux (both ways!) increased. Warmer days, cooler nights.
"The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950,"
r _1 6.shtml
No, it has increased by about 2 weeks in that period.
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/media/press_releases/p
It's true that popular media accounts of the holocaust tend to include some apocryphal material -- the soap story, the lampshades, sometimes lumping all the camps together as if they were run the same way. It's also true that the weight of the evidence has convinced every credible historian on the planet of the fact that the holocaust occurred. No one smoking gun is going to demonstrate conclusively that it did, and it's possible that any given fact might be questioned -- but the big story is there and cannot be wished away.
I think there's a danger, when we start laying into vague targets like "the media," that we'll confuse the quality of the messenger with the truth of the message. And that ain't always inadvertent; holocaust deniers consciously manipulate the slightly-off pop news stories to question the whole history.
I'd agree completely with your basic mutterings about, oh, newspapers, and the 10:00 local news, and to some extent magazines like Discover. But behind Discover's "Top 100 Science Stories of 2004" article, which chose global warming as its number 1 story by the way, there is a truth: the overwhelming majority of scientists today are convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that global warming is now occurring. Get just a nudge away from the low pop sources -- to Scientific American, which is a little more highbrow among the pop stuff, or then to Nature -- and you'll see that, loud and clear, with less boneheaded news manner to the narrative. The evidence is so overwhelming that even the Bush administration, laden with energy industry biases as it clearly is, has conceded that the warming's happening.
For anyone to wish the actual phenomenon away with a "this is a big complicated phenomenon, and the pop media's suggesting it has simple explanations" would be an exercise in wishful thinking. It'd be on that level of silliness we're bemoaning in "the media," wouldn't it? At that point we're talking tortuous self-deception at the level of creationism -- speaking (indirectly) of another overwhelming truth that people try to dispel by "debating" at a pop-cultural level...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Global warming is a train-wreck towards which we're all headed, and I guess Big Bro' wants to downplay it to avoid panic.
YOU CAN (AND SHOULD) READ THE ARTICLE YOURSELF AT http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon
Mad poster wrote: "I like when news outlets use this type of language. 'Woke up'."
The article does not try to imply scientists are closed-minded or doddards. The portion of the article "mad poster" is referring to is simply pointing out that light-meter measurements indicating the Global Dimming pattern did not receive much attention until they had been corroborated by a completely different method of measurement: water evaporation rates.
Global Dimming required corroboration by multiple methods of measurement because it was very surprising, very surprising for two reasons: (1) the effect was so large that scientists found it hard to believe nobody had mentioned it before (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), and (2) it seems to contradict Global Warming.
These two kinds of measurements, light-meter, and water evaporation rates, have been made at least back to the 1950's, and both indicate that the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface has declined by 10 to 30 percent, depending on location, from the 1950s to the early 1990s.
Mad poster wrote: "To suggest that little or no climate changed is being 'caused' by something man made without backing it up goes beyond the bounds of irresponsible journalism
I'm not even sure what the first sentence means. The article didn't give evidence why humans aren't causing climate change? What? He was in a hurry to be one of the first posts, I suppose -- before a TRULY informative post was submitted, which would make it harder for the slashdot disinformtion network to manipulate the modding process.
The article actually presents the following evidence that Global Dimming has been caused by pollution particles in the air:
Project INDOEX found a 10 percent reduction in sunlight reaching the Earth's surface due to pollution particles in the air. This was attributed to pollution particles making clouds more reflective. Clouds are formed by water vapor condensing on the surface of airborne particles. The presence of air pollutant particles causes these droplets to be smaller and so more reflective. The droplets are smaller because there are ten times as many particles for droplets to form about. Why smaller droplets are more reflective the article does not say.
We were wrong! It's more people moving towards the use of solar powered homes! We're using up the sun!
This article is probably the one that will turn people from "concerned" to "worried." We are talking about making the planet uninhabitable. On any continent. It's amazing that people are talking about this as "pop science garbage." How comforting it is to take such a position, because otherwise you'd actually have to be worried about this issue.
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
The US Energy Policy is an example of localized dimming...If someone buries their head in the sand (or in some other dark place...), their vision is limited.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
BBC EXCLUSIVE: Scientists have acquired evidence that the Earth will be absorbed by the Sun in approximately 7.7 billion years.
"No one will survive this catastrophe," claims experts. "All life on planet Earth will be extinguished. If we don't take action now, this atrocity will claim every living man, woman and child on this planet."
Environmentalists are asking for trillions of dollars for research grants and book advances with which to shriek about the coming apocalypse.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
The programme claimed that the worst case scenario - melting of the methane clathrates - would be an uncontrollable massive acceleration in the greenhouse effect, leading to temperatures not seen on Earth for billions of years. That is geological time changes, compressed into 100 years or less.
That's not certain to happen, but I think we should be very concerned about that possibility, if it is a possibility, however small the probability.
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