PrintCleaner air contributes to global warming
Now cleaning up our air and reducing carbon emissions is contributing to *shudder* global warming!
Our planet's air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.
Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.
That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock—on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.
The results suggest that a downward trend in the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, which has been observed since measurements began in the late 1950s, is now over.
Either everything causes global warming or we should admit that at this point our scientific knowledge on the subject is insufficient to understand the weather well enough to either know if the globe is getting substantially warmer or whether we can affect that. It's time to acknowledge some humility instead of impoverishing the industrial world to no end.
Clarice Feldman 6 06 05
