Global Dimming
Tuesday night I watched Nova on PBS TV. The title of the documentary was “Dimming Sunâ€.
This show described the nature of a problem in which the sunlight reaching the earth’s surface is being diminished by air pollution.
A researcher from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1985 discovered strong evidence that the sunlight reaching the earth’s surface had diminished by more than 10% of that recorded in the 1960s.
Most scientists ignored this evidence and it is only recently that science has become focused on this problem and has developed further evidence of this phenomenon called ‘global dimming’.
A particular alarming aspect of this phenomenon is that global dimming acts opposite to global warming and there is the conclusion that because of this opposition that the greenhouse effect causing warming is far more rapid than concluded because the effects of air pollution, which would cause global cooling, have balanced out a great part of the warming effects.
Two forces operating in opposition have masked the rapidity of the effects of the greenhouse effect.