WORLD MAY BE DARKENING AS CLOUDS, AIR POLUTION DIM THE SUNS RAYS (ECO BARF)

Miami Herald ^ | May. 09, 2004 | Robert S. Boyd

[JesseHousman]

WASHINGTON - Scientists call it "global dimming," little-known trend that may be making the world darker than it used to be.

Thanks to thicker clouds and growing air pollution, much of the Earth's surface is receiving about 15 percent less sunlight than it did 50 years ago, according to Michael Roderick, a climate researcher at Australian National University in Canberra.

"Global dimming means that the transmission of sunlight through the atmosphere is decreasing," Roderick said.

"Just look out the window when you fly into New York or to California - it's dimmer," said Beate Liepert, a climatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

Researchers say global dimming, also known as solar dimming, partially offsets the global warming that most scientists agree is produced by "greenhouse gases" such as auto exhaust and emissions from coal-burning power plants.

The solar dimming effect is "about half as large as the greenhouse gas warming," said James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

In global warming, gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, trap some of the sun's heat and keep it from radiating back out to space, thereby raising the Earth's temperature. Clouds and air pollution, on the other hand, block a portion of the heat energy that's coming from the sun, just as it's cooler sitting under a beach umbrella than under a bright sky.

Although global warming has been widely accepted, global dimming remains controversial. The theory has been advanced in recent years by a handful of researchers who measure the decline of solar radiation a hundreds of sites around the globe.

Liepert, Roderick and several other scientists will discuss their findings at an international geophysical conference in Montreal later this month.

"Initially, people were very skeptical, but now there's other pieces of evidence that all fit together," Roderick told a radio interviewer last December. Reductions in sunlight of 10 percent to 20 percent have been observed in many places over the past 50 years, he said.

"We still face a lot of controversy, but it's (solar dimming) getting accepted," Liepert said in a telephone interview. "We've found it in the United States, Europe, Israel and Asia. Already, major research institutions are changing their point of view."

NASA, the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a university-sponsored organization in Boulder, Colo., among others, are showing interest in global dimming.

"The conclusion that, on average, there has been a reduction in surface solar irradiance over the past half-century is pretty clear," NASA's Hansen said in an e-mail.

Support for the theory comes from two types of data collected in recent decades:

_Radiation meters - black metal plates that absorb the sun's rays - aren't heating up as rapidly as they previously did.

_The rate at which water evaporates from special measuring pans placed in the sunlight has slowed over the years.

Roderick, for example, measures the height of the water in his pans at 9 a.m. each day, subtracts any rain that may have fallen and calculates how much has evaporated from the day before.

"There's less evaporation out of pans of water all around the world, and that's consistent with global dimming," he said

The measurements indicate that the amount of energy from the sun - solar radiation - is shrinking by about 3 percent per decade, according to Gerald Stanhill, a biologist at Israel's Agricultural Research Organization.

According to Liepert, about two-thirds of the dimming is caused by more water vapor in the clouds, a byproduct of global warming.

Less sunlight reaches the ground, she said, because "the clouds are optically thicker. As global warming increases, clouds can hold more water. There's not more rain; it just stays up there."

The rest of the dimming is due to increasing air pollution - minute particles in the atmosphere known as aerosols. This problem affects the world, not just smoggy cities such as Houston and Los Angeles.

For example, NASA scientists reported in early May that air pollution can travel on high-speed winds from the Indian Ocean clear across the Pacific and into the southern Atlantic.

"When I fly from New York to California, I see very high brownish layers. That's old aerosol layers hanging on," Liepert said. "As we get more aerosols and more warming, we get more dimming."

She said she expects to see the dimming trend continue in places such as China and the Western United States, where population and industry are increasing. In contrast, economic decline in the former Soviet Union has begun to clear the air somewhat in Eastern Europe.

[JesseHousman]

"Just look out the window when you fly into New York or to California - it's dimmer,"...

The vapor-minded Beate Liepert doesn't recognized tinted glass when he looks through it.

[dead]

I feel dimmer for having read that.

[xrp]

So would this lead to global cooling?

[yankeedame]

WORLD MAY BE DARKENING AS CLOUDS, AIR POLUTION DIM THE SUNS RAYS

Well, time to bail out of Coppertone stock!

[snooker]

Dims in fog, blame global dimming for loses.

[Triple Word Score]

"There's less evaporation out of pans of water all around the world, and that's consistent with global dimming," he said ...

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Bracing for the next ice age....

[bmwcyle]

It seems to get darker every night. /sarcasm

[spodefly]

Summary: Evil Republicans and their SUVs are ruining the planet. Give me money.

[gathersnomoss]

The Future's So Bright, I've Got To Wear Shades.

Make up your mind.

[Tribune7]

Guess we better start building those nuke plants, right Greenies?

[dfwgator]

Women and minorities hit hardest.

[dirtboy]

Scientists call it "global dimming,"...otherwise known as publik skool edukation...

[GungaLaGunga]

I printed out this article to line my cat's litter box with. Because that is precisely the only thing that it is good for.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Beat me to it. That's tinted glass in your airplane window, dummy !

[Always Right]

So would this lead to global cooling?

It should be, but the computer models always ignore things that counteract their globalony warming theory.

[Pikamax]

Nice to see the Miami Herald finally got their subscription to the London Guardian and now ripping off months old stories not worth a damn.

[OrioleFan]

And today's weather from the Hippy Dippy Weatherman (George Carlan) is "Light followed by ... Dark".

[smith288]

Ray ban stock plunges!!!

[commish]

OK, lemme see if I get this straight global Warming is causing more clouds etc etc which is leading to Global Dimming --- which will lead to Glbal cooling which will lessen the clouds and such which will lead to Global Brightening -- which will lead to global warming which will cause more clouds which will lead to Global Dimming .....

Or the buffoon that wrote this can just yell out the window "YO NADLER, GET OFF THE ROOF YOU'RE BLOCKING THE LIGHT!!!!"

[The_Victor]

Support for the theory comes from two types of data collected in recent decades:

_Radiation meters - black metal plates that absorb the sun's rays - aren't heating up as rapidly as they previously did.

_The rate at which water evaporates from special measuring pans placed in the sunlight has slowed over the years.

I don't suppose it has occurred to the twits to actually MEASURE/MONITOR THE ENERGY OUTPUT OF THE SUN

[CaptRon]

Now that there is some indication that people are starting to question man's role in 'global warming' the left needs to come up with a new crisis so they can start moving that money around and, of course, so they can save humanity.

[dufekin]

Of course this will negate global warming. Let's explain.

"Global warming" theory states that an anthropogenic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will make the Earth slightly warmer. This slight warming will increase evaporation from the oceans enormously, resulting in considerably more water vapor in the atmosphere. As a polar molecule with complex geometry, water vapor is a substantially more effective "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide.

That's where any pretense of science ceases and all the fear-mongering begins. Yeah, they run numerical models to give it some scientific backing, but the scenarios and physics in the models makes them rather unrealistic, at best of purely academic interest.

Were the science to continue, here's what would happen: adding more water vapor to the atmosphere yields more clouds, which generally tend to reflect sunshine (although their net effect on the radiative balance varies considerably from cloud to cloud). They also tend to produce precipitation. If the precipitation falls as rain over land, solar radiation will cause it to evaporate rather than heating dry soil, resulting in lower temperatures. (The converse explains the torrid summers of the 1930s, when most states set their all-time record highs.)

If the precipitation falls as snow over land, it cools the land surface because snow reflects both solar and terrestrial radiation to space rather than absorbing such radiation. In addition, the energy required to melt it otherwise might have gone to heating the atmosphere or the surface below it.

So someone's finally realizing that all that water vapor eventually precipitates from the atmosphere--not necessarily over the ocean. Pretty soon, we'll all be talking about global warming inducing global cooling. Interestingly, global cooling once was purported to cause global warming. I wasn't alive then, so I don't know exactly how that came to be.

[trebb]

Cool - I thought the dimming was due to my eyes starting to age. I guess that my reading glasses amplify the light so I can see despite the dimming.

Why isn't this good news? If the "global warming" also causes "global dimming", won't it cause things to cool down again? Seems like the problem is solved for the indefinite future. Unless we decide to really stop all the warming trends, in which case an ice age is imminent.

I think PETA may be on to something though - they protested the releasing of thousands of butterflies because it was cruel - I think the other agenda was to keep them from blotting out the sun and causing more dimming.

Anyway, that's my 4 Lire worth...

[Eastbound]

It's Hillery's fault!

[El Gran Salseron]

But.....but.....but I thought the Earth is supposed to be getting HOTTER. Dimmer would thrwart the warming whackos, wouldn't it? Uh-oh! I see a rift in the ranks of the eco-nuts!

[Post Toasties]

The sky is falling! The seas are rising! We're all doomed!

[Rytwyng]

WORLD MAY BE DARKENING AS CLOUDS, AIR POLUTION DIM THE SUNS RAYS

The sky is falling, the sky is falling.... And we no longer have to worry about global warming or the increase of UV causing skin cancer... oops...

Watch this issue die a swift death.

[Rokurota]

But.....but.....but I thought the Earth is supposed to be getting HOTTER. Dimmer would thrwart the warming whackos, wouldn't it? Uh-oh! I see a rift in the ranks of the eco-nuts!

Surely if some of these guys can say with a straight face, "Global warming is melting all the ice caps...and that will lead to the next ice age," then they can just easily say global warming is causing global dimming.

When you don't need facts, anything can make sense. I think the real dimming is in their brains.

[Eastbound]

" . . . dhimmmitude . . . "

Heh heh. Good one.

[BadAndy]

Haven't you been paying attention. Nothing (other than abandoning capitalism)will negate global warming according to the Greenies. Furthermore, ALL of the effects are catastrophically negative, there is no possible upside anywhere on the planet. Remember a few years ago when some group of scientists seriously proposed altering the orbit of the Earth to combat Global warming? Maybe we should try increasing the diameter of the sun to increase ambient light?

[capt. norm]

What they are really trying to promote is:

"Global Dumbing"

[Eastbound]

Relevant report here detailing some strange remedies.

And here's a picture of some the persistent crud that always seems to be on the horizon. At least around this area it is.

[WideGlide]

Global Cooling??? Ohhhh the HORROR......

[SandyInSeattle]

I've been feeling dim all day. Now I know why.

[Eighth Square]

Possible connection to the eastern Sierra 'hot water well'? the moon-sized diamond?

[Bogey78O]

Meteorologists refer to that phenomenon as "weather."

[commish]

weather huh? wow, that's what it is called. Isn't that that stuff that like goes in cycles where the earth like gets warmer and then cooler again?

[CyberAnt]

ROTFLOL! Is he sure it isn't the sun burning out ..?? ROTFLOL!

[paleocon patriarch]

Wow! Looks like the aerial geoengineering proposal that was put forward in 1997 by Edward Teller entitled ‘Global Warming and the Ice Ages: Prospects for Physics-Based Modulation of Global Change’ subsequently popularised in the Wall Street Journal in an article entitled ‘The Planet Needs a Sunscreen’ is really working.

The US Air Force, whose KC-135R and KC-10 tanker planes have become a familiar sight in many different parts of the world as they engage in the daily particulate scattering operations of the ‘sunscreen’ programme, are really doing a great job. Looks like they are well on their way to realizing the vision layed out in Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025

An interesting article for those curios about the program.

[Sicon]

In a related story, scientists have determined that it gets lighter in the daytime and darker at night. Film at 11:00...

[Sicon]

Roderick, for example, measures the height of the water in his pans at 9 a.m. each day, subtracts any rain that may have fallen and calculates how much has evaporated from the day before.

In a related study, Roderick squeezes the sweat from his socks at 9 a.m. each day, subtracts any drool that may have run down his chin, and calculates how much money he wasted on his "science" education.

[hgro]

Al Gore alert!! He is passing his dimness to the atmosphere.

[cubreporter]

Ha,ha...that was funny.

Well, coulda fooled us today as we were enjoying bright, warm sunshine in Colorado.

Maybe the window of the airplane was dirty Think? I just had cataracts removed...now everything is bright. Maybe he should have his eyes checked. Think? :)

Have a great day in the nice, warm, bright sunshine!

[Rokurota]

The same group of scientists immediately filed suit against Jimmy Cliff, claiming, "No, Jimmy, it won't be a bright, bright sunshinin' day."

[inquest]

Alright, that's it. I'm moving to the desert. I figure, if the global warming crowd is correct, there'll be more evaporation, and maybe some rain. If the global dims are right, it won't be so blasted hot all the time.

And if they're both wrong, well, at least I'll be far enough away that I won't have to listen to their yammering.