Good-by Sunshine

[coberst]

Good-by Sunshine

Recently I watched the documentary “Dimming Sun that was played by Nova on PBS TV.

This show described the nature of a problem in which the sunlight reaching the earth’s surface is being diminished by air pollution.

A researcher from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1985 discovered strong evidence that the sunlight reaching the earth’s surface had diminished by more than 10% of that recorded in the 1960s.

Most scientists ignored this evidence and it is only recently that science has become focused on this problem and has developed further evidence of this phenomenon called ‘global dimming’.

A particular alarming aspect of this phenomenon is that global dimming acts opposite to global warming and there is the conclusion that because of this opposition that the greenhouse effect causing warming is far more rapid than concluded because the effects of air pollution, which would cause global cooling, have balanced out a great part of the warming effects.

Two forces operating in opposition have masked the rapidity of the effects of the greenhouse effect.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/ ... 53,00.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/about.html

“The good news is that pollution controls have slowed and possibly even halted global dimming during the last decade. The bad news—and the ironic twist in Nova's story—is that without pollution, more sunlight is reaching Earth, revealing the full impact of global warming. Although all climate models have important uncertainties, the unsettling implication is that, with dimming fading away in many regions, global temperatures may rise even faster than most models have predicted.