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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: miraje who wrote (256749)	7/4/2008 5:29:07 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793975

While it's not a perfectly circular orbit, "closer" isn't enough to make the slightest difference to sun burn on skin: <Are you aware that, due to the variation in the earths orbit around the sun, that during summer in the southern hemisphere, the sun is closer to the earth than during northern summers? Conversely, your winters are farther from the sun than ours..,> But no, I wasn't aware that the orbit put us closer in summer [I have probably read that sometime and ignored it as trivial]. While USA air is cleaner than it was, that's reminds me of peering out into the murk in London in 1986 from high in Britannic House [BP's HQ] and bemoaning the smog. My colleague Charles said it was just mist or some such word. It was perhaps liquid, but it was nucleated on dirty particles of goop which settled all over clothes, got in eyes, accumulated in nostrils and of course lungs and made the white limestone buildings black, though far less so than in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries. Where water had run down, the acid had dissolved the buildings. Water will dissolve limestone anyway, but dissolve SOX in it and it really gets to work. Charles said it was much cleaner than it had been. While true, it was still hideously dirty air. The USA might have less gunk in the air now from engines and industry, home fires and other combustion, but there is still plenty of it there. The northern hemisphere is a soup, circling the globe. I'd say the particulates and condensation has more effect climatically than does the CO2. I took photos in 1987 of the skies over Antwerp which were pure blue, but criss crossed with dozens of vapour trails which expanded subsequent to the airliner going by, as the dew point was just right, so that the sky was covered in a criss cross cloud pattern so that no blue was left, other than a thin blue peeking through the clouds. That meant a lot more reflection of incoming sunlight. I doubt that in the big picture, clouds from aircraft makes a significant difference to total insolation, but it certainly did there on those days. Mqurice