Global Dimming

Now I know why global warming isn';t really showing it affects.

Read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssu...obaldimming.asp

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/...2/keen-dimming/

someone watched that special on it on saturday/friday night...

It is a serious concern though, i've been looking up lately and for the past 2 days the only clouds in the sky were purely caused by vaportrails.

strange this should come up now...

the BBC have been supporting a Distributed Computing project (http://www.climateprediction.net). which recently found flaws in it's programing, when users finally started to submit finished models (they thought it would take at least twice as long ).

anyway, cut a long story short, some dumb ass had cut down one of the files to make it easier to download, neglecting the fact that it was a vital part of the global dimming side of the simulation, thus causing the entire batch of simulations completed to warm up far more than reality has shown (the project was simulating from 1920 to 2080 btw, so a lot of the time it could be compared to history for accuracy purposes).

i just find it humorous that such a vital part would have been cut .

Dang there are a lot of those distributed computing things out there.

Yeah, that's because distributed computing really works. FAH, if nothing else, has shown that much.

And if global dimming is present, then I guess that we just got lucky. Keep on heating people! I don't want to live through another ice age (even being from Canada )

it's not sustainable. and it certainly isn't good for the planet.

it's the reason we're not seeing the full effects of global warming, but that doesn't make either go away. the high sulphur in the atmosphere isn't good for the ecosystem. and the high carbon isn't good either. and if CO2 keeps rising, one day the balance will tip. that was the original point of ClimatePrediction, to estimate how long we've got left and how bad it's going to get. unfortunately they messed up and got a stat of what it would have been like (but they say it's not that bad a cock-up as they can use those results later on).

the whole big issue is that global dimming is masking the effects of global warming. Developed nations such as the US are cutting down on the amount of visable pollution, which would lower the global dimming effect while the amount of CO2 still rises speeding up global warming. This will cause the temps to shoot up killing lots of animals and plants in the world while also melting the ice caps causing the ocean levels to rise up drowing all costal areas, some entire countries and states such as florida. Also the melting of the ice caps would disrupt the jet stream and el nino, potentially causing them to stop, which would cause much of the world to freeze kicking off a new ice age in which most humans would not survive.

pretty much sums it up.

The way I see it, we only have 30 some odd years of fuel reserves left anyways, so once that's gone, effects will begin to dissipate. We won't stop polluting until we have no choice. And you can hold me on that one, too.

Furthermore, plants love CO2. As a matter of fact, its required for photosynthesis, since they take in CO2 and use energy from the sun to keep the carbon and expel the oxygen. Plants should be pretty happy right about now.

Face it, we have lost the global warming war, and it will only end when fuel is depleted. It's unfortunate that we are too cowlike to stop being complete consumers, but what can we really do?