Global Dimming

You think I meant "Global Warming"??

Yes I have talked about that in a few posts here and again.

But an opposite effect that us humans may have on the planet has caught the attention of scientists for a few years already.

What is "Global Dimming"?

In a nutshell it is the man made result of pollutants being put into the air and those pollutants surrounding our planet in a sort of shroud and thus reflecting a lot of the sun's heat away from the planet back into space. With this effect in place because of various different things we put into our air above us, we have literally created a sort of man made sun shield for our planet. Cool ha?? Well not really. As the article below (plus the entry from the Wikepedia site) will show you.

Wikipedia, an online source that I visit quite a bit, has an interesting entry for what this phrase means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

Read on for an article that I pulled off of a site (and the rights go to the "Los Angeles Daily News" where the article first appeared).
I have reposted it here in it's entirety.

An interesting theory to say the least:
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In case you haven't yet reached your limit on alarmist information, this week's "Nova" report, "Dimming the Sun," should help you surpass it quite handily.

We've all heard about global warming, which suggests that greenhouse gases have made the planet about a degree warmer than it was a century ago.

Now comes global dimming, a phenomenon that ostensibly cools the Earth, but in fact has masked the rate at which global warming has actually been occurring.

Global dimming is the result of pollutants in the air deflecting the sun's rays away from the Earth. One scientist, Gerald Stanhill, wrote about it years ago, but the notion was considered so outlandish that his research was dismissed.

In recent years, disparate other studies have confirmed it, and, in a bizarre twist, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, helped push research along.
David Travis of the University of Wisconsin charted America's climate in the days after 9/11, when all planes were grounded.

With jets' condensation trails eliminated from the country's skies, the temperature range days were warmer, nights were cooler was the largest swing in the past 30 years, he discovered.
So while the greenhouse effect has been warming the planet, global dimming has cooled it a bit, which means that global warming is occurring faster than anyone realized.

And while particle pollutants have been reduced from our skies, amounts of greenhouse gases escaping into the air proceed apace. Which means the world could be 5 degrees hotter by midcentury or, by one scientist's particularly dire reckoning, by 2100, the temperature could be as much as 18 degrees warmer.

And you do not want to know what that would mean.

Nova's "Dimming the Sun" explicates a lot of particularly confusing science succinctly and intelligently, and its message is undeniably sobering. But all this creates a bizarre conundrum: Pollution which causes health problems but does block the sun's rays is somehow good?

© 2006 Los Angeles Daily News. All rights reserved.
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So there is the conundrumm. Global Dimming or Global Warming. Hmm.

I think we haveroyallyy screwed up our planet at this stage in our occupation of it.
Maybe we willextinctt ourselves without help from ameteoritee or any other of the doomsday scenarios that have been put fourth by all the people who enjoy putting all those theories out there.....

That is my thought for Thursday, the27thh day of April in the year 2006 of our life on this planet we all call Earth.

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