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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (19337)	1/1/2008 10:39:11 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

PB I personally witnessed and took photos of the effect on the weather of human actions in Antwerp in 1987 as part of my later studies into the Greenhouse Effect, Global Freezing, ozone layer etc. Antwerp is a cross-roads in the sky and in the right weather conditions, the completely blue sky can be obscured by dozens of contrails forming, spreading and remaining, running in parallel and criss-crossing each other. <To say we don't have an effect on the weather is kind of daft though. > Perhaps you weren't referring to me. But it's annoying to be an old geezer who has been twice around the block, seen a lot, to be lectured on how to suck eggs by breathless youngsters who have recently got out of nappies and learned some polysyllabic words and who know less than I have forgotten. This is amusing: <The finding went against all scientific thinking. By the mid-80s there was undeniable evidence that our planet was getting hotter, so the idea of reduced solar radiation - the Earth's only external source of heat - just didn't fit. And a massive 10% shift in only 30 years? Ohmura himself had a hard time accepting it. "I was shocked. The difference was so big that I just could not believe it," he says. Neither could anyone else. When Ohmura eventually published his discovery in 1989 the science world was distinctly unimpressed. "It was ignored," he says. It turns out that Ohmura was the first to document a dramatic effect that scientists are now calling "global dimming". EDITOR: Not quite the first. Our son [with my help] had documented it and the effect on clouds, climate, Greenhouse Effect, snow, desert and chlorophyll cover two years before. Maybe Ohmura plagiarized our work. Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade. It's too small an effect to see with the naked eye, but it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis. In fact, global dimming seems to be so important that you're probably wondering why you've never heard of it before. Well don't worry, you're in good company. Many climate experts haven't heard of it either, the media has not picked up on it, and it doesn't even appear in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "It's an extraordinary thing that for some reason this hasn't penetrated even into the thinking of the people looking at global climate change," says Graham Farquhar, a climate scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. "It's actually quite a big deal and I think you'll see a lot more people referring to it." That's not to say that the effect has gone unnoticed. Although Ohmura was the first to report global dimming, he wasn't alone. In fact, the scientific record now shows several other research papers published during the 1990s on the subject, all finding that light levels were falling significantly. > In 1987 I had conducted scientific studies and published the results with an 11 year old in a children's school project at Antwerp International School. So for them to say it is unheard of and to have it pointed out to me as something new is amusing. Mqurice