Turns out both were right, but we dealt with most of the atmospheric gunk with the Clean Air laws. Too bad China can't make smog without using carbon.
Global Dimming may have a brighter future
15 May 2005
So what does this all mean? The “dimming” may have lead to a slight negative radiative forcing, somewhat masking the global warming signal; the reversal, Wild et al. suggest, may have removed this masking effect and lead to the signal being more obvious in the 1990s. Aerosol emissions have decreased, particularly in Europe and the US over the 1990s, largely due to clean air legislation. Thus relative to the 1980s there was probably an additional positive forcing from the aerosol decrease. However, as before we cautioned against over-interpreting the importance of the dimming, we offer similar cautions for the brightening. -
realclimate.org
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The idea that Earth Day was Nixon's idea is yours, and yours alone, brought about by an inability to comprehend the written English language. That's not what it says. Monihan just wanted Nixon to use it for his own political purposes.
Earth Day: a simple idea, a world of change
 Gaylord Nelson speaks to an Earth Day crowd in Denver, Colorado, on April 22, 1970. You can view the speech notes by Nelson on this page.
Gaylord Nelson's speeches on Earth Day emphasized that the environment must also include poverty, hunger, and urban blight. Nelson said, "Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human being and all living creatures."
Gaylord Nelson, the ambitious junior senator from Wisconsin, grew accustomed to disappointment in the 1960s. In his first Senate speech, supporting a bill banning phosphates in detergents, he insisted that "we need this...just as desperately as we need the defense against atomic missiles." That did not stop his fellow legislators from voting down the bill, just as similar pleas could not win him a single co-sponsor for his 1966 bill banning DDT. While he was able to lure President Kennedy to take a "conservation tour" of Wisconsin and the West in 1963, he watched helplessly as the President, the press, and audiences preferred to debate taxes and Cold War politics.
To wake up Washington, he would need a new plan.
The idea came to him in August of 1969 after surveying the oil spill in Santa Barbara. For the past few years, college students had been staging teach-ins to educate their campuses about the war in Vietnam. What if, Nelson wondered, students used the same forum to raise environmental awareness, and what if they coordinate their events to fall on the same day, grabbing headlines and sending a strong environmental message to the Capitol? He proposed the idea in front of a small, fledgling conservation group in Seattle on September 20. A short wire story broadcast the idea.
nelsonearthday.net |
