This entry was posted on 6/11/2007 10:02 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
What is global dimming? - particulate matter in air pollution is reflecting energy from the sun away from the earth, cooling it.
According to a study published in the journal
Nature and Cecil Adams author of the syndicated column
The Straight Dope, every day global dimming is
reducing the effects of global warming. As a result, as we clean-up air pollution, global warming will accelerate. Wonderful - huh?
Another reason we need tax shifting now. Click
here for the
Nature article - (you need to be a paid subscriber for access).
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Who is Cecil Adams? - he "can answer any question." He certainly does his research and backs up statements with facts. Excerpts from Cecil's column
We know about global warming, but what about global dimming? below -
"What concerns scientists is that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface has markedly decreased, a phenomenon English scientist Gerry Stanhill dubbed global dimming in 2001."
"Examples from history abound, one of the most dramatic being the eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1815. The powerful blast took off the top mile of the mountain, killed tens of thousands of people, and released so much sulfur and ash into the air that 1816 was known as the "year without a summer." Crop failures, famine, bitter winter cold and record snows, and a strange dry summer fog made 1816 a bad year for most of North America and Europe -- New England got heavy snowfall in June and Virginia allegedly had frost on the Fourth of July."
"Pollutants released at ground level may not be the only contributor to global dimming. A 2002 study published in
Nature analyzed the impact of the reduction of jet contrails after the mass grounding of U.S. flights following the 9/11 attacks. Reviewing weather data from some 4,000 reporting stations, researchers found temperatures from September 11 to 14, 2001 were two degrees higher than the 30-year average, and three degrees higher than during the three-day periods before and after the grounding."
"The good news is that global dimming seems to be reversing itself, mainly because we've been cleaning up the environment. Measurements show that since 1990 or so, more sunlight has been reaching the earth's surface, with about a 4 percent increase in the last decade. The bad news is that, because dimming threw off the measurements, global warming may have been underestimated and projections of long-term temperature increases may be too low. This has provoked at least one brainiac to propose an antiwarming strategy using artificial volcanoes to send clouds of sulfur into the air."
