Forget Kyoto and the debate about whether Global Warming is true or not or whether it is observable. Check this out.
NARRATOR: Burning fuel doesn't just produce the invisible greenhouse gases which cause global warming. It also produces visible pollution, tiny airborne particles of soot and other pollutants. These produce the haze which shrouds our cities. So Ramanathan wondered: Could this pollution be causing Global Dimming? The Maldives were the perfect place to find out. The Maldives seem unpolluted, but in fact the northern islands sit in a stream of dirty air descending from India. Only the southern tip of the long island chain enjoys clean air coming all the way from Antarctica. So by comparing the northern islands with the southern ones, Ramanathan and his colleagues would be able to see exactly what difference the pollution made to the atmosphere and the sunlight.
Project INDOEX, as it was called, was a huge multinational effort. For four years every possible technique was used to sample and monitor the atmosphere over the Maldives. INDOEX cost twenty-five million dollars, but it produced results - and they surprised everyone.
PROF VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: The stunning part of the experiment was this pollutant layer which was three kilometre thick, cut down the sunlight reaching the ocean by more than 10%.
NARRATOR: A 10% fall in sunlight meant that particle pollution was having a far bigger effect than anyone had thought possible.
PROF VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: Our models led us to believe the human impact on the dimming was close to half to one per cent. So what we discovered was tenfold.
NARRATOR: INDOEX showed that the pollution particles were blocking some sunlight themselves; but far more significant was what they were doing to the clouds. They were turning them into giant mirrors. Clouds are made of droplets of water. These only form when water vapour in the atmosphere starts to condense on the surface of naturally occurring airborne particles, typically pollen or sea salt. As they grow, the water droplets eventually become so heavy they fall as rain. But Ramanathan found that polluted air contained far more particles than the unpolluted air, particles of ash, soot and sulphur dioxide.
So while Global Warming has been proceeding at a runaway pace, the co-produced Dimming effect has been cancelling out this runaway effect which is why people have been finding it hard to measure the rate of the warming effect. It's extraordinary.
Imagine a guy with a decade long alcohol-abuse problem that makes him a little lethargic at work. He's in denial about it. You fight him all the way to get him to the doctor, who starts treating him, only to uncover the man has been hiding a wild cocaine habit for 15 years that would make anybody else a total maniac, except the alcohol has been keeping him relatively sedate. That is kind of like what the relationship between Global Warming and Global Dimming has been.
'Global Dimming', is now the other climate issue that the world is yet to tackle properly. In fact, until two years ago, nobody was really talking about beyond the circle of climatologists.
NARRATOR: This is the real sting in the tail. Solve the problem of Global Dimming and the world could get considerably hotter. And this is not just theory, it may already be happening. In Western Europe the steps we have taken to cut air pollution have started to bear fruit in a noticeable improvement in air quality and even a slight reduction in Global Dimming over the last few years. Yet at the same time, after decades in which they held steady, European temperatures have started rapidly to rise culminating in the savage summer of 2003. Forest fires devastated Portugal. Glaciers melted in the Alps. And in France people died by the thousand. Could this be the penalty of reducing Global Dimming without tackling the root cause of global warming?
DR BEATE LIEPERT: We thought we live in a global warming world, um but this is actually er not right. We lived in a global warming plus a Global Dimming world, and now we are taking out Global Dimming. So we end up with the global warming world, which will be much worse than we thought it will be, much hotter.
Here's a page of links. Do check it out carefully. We could be in for a heck of a lot of trouble, a Whole World of trouble.
- Art Neuro
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