So Laura and I watched Nova on PBS tonight and it was really interesting. It turns out that global warming is only half of what's going on, global dimming is the other effect. Global warming is caused by the invisible greenhouse gases in pollution holding heat in our atmosphere, while global dimming is caused by the visible particles of dust/ash/soot/etc from pollution cooling our atmosphere. The particles change the atmosphere to reflect a large portion of the sun's energy back to space before it gets to Earth. Over the last 20 years we've done a pretty good job of drastically decreasing the particle pollution in the US, but not the greenhouse gases, which researchers now believe means that we underestimated the effect of greenhouse gases since it was partially masked by the unknown, but increased, cooling created initially by global dimming, and as particle pollution decreases, if greenhouse gas doesn't decrease with it, we'll be making the situation worse than it is already. Scientists thought it was reason for serious concern when the global climate rose about 1 degree over the last 100 years, but now taking global dimming into account, it is estimated that the global climate could increase by 25 degrees over the next 100 years. FUCK!
Check out the website and hopefully they'll rerun the program sometime soon.
Dimming The Sun
flex your head,
-D