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There has recently been some statements on the influence of airborne polution on Global Warming. It was claimed that this was reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth, thus masking the real impact of Global Warming on temperature rise (and therefore the situation is much worse than we thought etc.)
I've been thinking about my basic Physics and that fact that "Energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely changed in state".
Since the pollution blocking the sunlight is said do so by absorbing it then the nett result must be that there is the same increase in temperature in the Earth's ecosystem (as the amount of solar energy reaching the ecosystem is not changed).
The difference is that the increase will be (initially) in the atmosphere rather than the land / sea mass.
The only way that the heating effect of the influx of energy from solar radiation can be reduced is by reflection and since airborne particulates are absorbing heat they cannot take part in this process as claimed.
Further, it has long been know that the presence of airborne particulates has cause contamination of the snow / ice surfaces of the Polar regions reducing their reflective qualities.
So, reduction in particulates will reduce the amount of heat absorbed by the atmosphere but this will be balanced by the same amount of heat being raised in the land & sea (nett heating effect is thus zero).
BUT as the particulate pollution of the Polar regions clears more heat will be reflected.
So the nett affect will be a REDUCTION in Global Warming not an increase.
Where have I gone wrong?
By buying into global warming as a new phenomenon.
I believe it to be a cycle, in medieval times London and the home counties were covered in vineyards that produced masses of wine for the drunken folk of the UK. By Victorian times the Thames in London froze on a yearly basis and the now not so drunken folk would ice skate on it.
I say bring back the vineyards.
We just understand the process now, however the doom and gloom merchants would have us believe that it's the end of the world.
We probably do more now to protect the environment that ever before. Could this be our downfall by messing with natures cycle??
I know what they said in that programme Meridith but the fact is that they were talking about carbon particulates - soot as the prime contaminant which, with or without hydrocarbon contamination, are close to perfect Blackbody absorbers and are not reflectors. Sulphur dioxide / trioxide aerosols are reflectors but they are present in only very small proportions as a component of aircraft burnt fuel emissions (as aircraft fuels are very low / zero sulphur containing).
All the measurements they took to show the claimed effect were based on ground level devices which measured things like liquid evaporimeters and solar radiation influx.
I fear the presenters were confusing the effect of shading of the Earth from solar radiation by cloud (an absorption of the infra-red from the sun which we feel when a cloud passes over the sun, with reflection of the heat energy back into space as radiant heat.
(Over the past 10 years or more there have been a many studies on the effects of different types of airborne pollutant on temperature increase. Whilst the jury is still out the consensus of opinion is that particulates and aerosols increase the temperature of the atmosphere. There is an Hysterisis effect which means that there is a delay in the atmospheric heat being transferred to the land / sea mass but the total ecosystem still contains that heat)
I don't know too much about climate change and science in general but there appears to be a general consensus amongst most scientists that global warming is the product of human activity.
the "doom and gloom merchants" have an awful lot of science behind their claims. the media distort the truth to serve their corporate backers. When someone comes along with some bad science that claims that things are'nt that bad that the likes of the oil industry (who finance and lobby governments)want to here, their views get taken up and quoted persistently - preventing radical changes to the way we live.
An example is David Bellamy who came out with an argument suggesting that things were not that bad and that the world's glaciers were actually growing.
The envirnomentalist george monbiot, disagreed with this but wanted to check Bellamy's research just in case he was on to something. He phoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamys letter. They sait it was "complete bull****.
As E.F Shuamcher stated back in 1973, "the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting and self-cleansing. Not so with technology".
We are doing more than ever to harm the environment.
The atmosphere is very complex and made up of many strata at different temperatures. Any black particles in the upper atmosphere will absorb some energy that would have otherwise made it to the surface. This slight increase in temperature would quickly be lost to the surrounding atmosphere through convection and a tiny proportion as radiated heat. This radiated heat would be in all directions, some up and some down. A proportion of the upwardly radiated heat will make it's way back into space.
I think the global dimming effect is more to do with vapour trails from aircraft. After 9/11 when the US grounded all planes (except the ones with Bin Laden's relatives on) there was a significant jump in average temperature across the US of about 1.5 degrees. This just doesn't happen naturally across a whole continent in one go. The conclusion was that the water vapour left by aircraft reflects solar radiation back into space.
Bernie, natural cycles do occur, but mankind is totally messing with the Earth's natural systems. Levels of greenhouse gases are higher than ever before, and some greenhouse gases are orders of magnitude higher than they should be naturally.
The public should be kept informed about these things and not bury their heads in the sand. I don't believe the public needs to understand palaeoclimate records and processes of land/sea interaction, but they should be encouraged to help the environment wherever possible.
Statements saying "things aren't as bad as we thought" shouldn't be brought to the public's attention. The public should constantly be encouraged to reduce their consumption of energy, especially energy produced by fossil fuels.
I still believe that nature has it's own ways of biting back and to some extent resetting it's self.
I watched some programme the other week(which one escapes me)about the lost cities in various rainforest's around the globe. The people of that era had started chopping down the rain forests very much like we are doing now to build huge and elaborate cities. Eventually the Eco system was disturbed enough for some kind of natural disaster to strike and these places have now more or less reset themselves to there natural state.
I feel this is the direction we are taking our planet, not to destruction but to the point of many many more natural disasters in order for nature to reset it's self.
Well nature is certainly giving us lots of warnings at the moment. Maybe when the Atlantic conveyor switches off, we'll finally take notice. Quite looking forward to skiing in the North downs . . .
bernie - the programme you watched would presumably have been about peoples that lived along time ago when the earth was less populated and the world had not gone through industrialisation.
this means that they would not have had the means to extract most of the earths resources as we are now able to do creating global warming by using up the worlds petro-chemical resources.
The problem is that Global Warming is the question of who can you trust. For every study showing an increase in global warming, there's another one counteracting it.
We wish that scientists are completely unbiased, but of course they're not - they have reputations and (perhaps more importantly) funding grants to keep, so they are going to be as protective of their field as possible. So if they're pro-global warming, they're going to try their best to rubbish contradictory views. That's human nature.
But the most annoying thing is that Global Warming has become a fad. Every time there's a flood, or a slightly hot summer, or gran's dog dies, it "must be due to global warming" even though it's usually completely unrelated.
As to the original question, I must say I don't have a clue. And I bet no-one really does know the answer anyway - it's too complex.
You don't have to believe the scientists or the politicians - just believe the meteorologists.
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