Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Global Dimming

Caught the tail end of an interesting show here last night, a doco about what is termed "global dimming". The after show online chat was quite interesting, you can check it here ( http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1325819.htm ).

Apparently in Australia we are reeiving 37% less photons than we used to 50 years ago! Ouch.

Yes I believe Global dimming does have an effect upon climate. The micro particles being so small that nobody took any notice of them. Its the larger particles that get washed out of the atmosphere. No such thing as 'clean air' anymore.
Micro particles clog up your lungs, and get deposited upon the surface of the Artic and Antartic ice, unnoticed. The latter adding to their melting speed.
A percentage of Micro particles might stay in the Stratosphere almost indefinately, becoming a nutrient broth for Cometary Panspermia to live and mutate upon, and make us very ill?
I am taking the above para a stage further than Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who suggested that Alien germs and influenza from space could kill us

( http://www.panspermia.org/panfluenza.htm ) and
( http://www.panspermia.org/panfluenza.htm )

i dont know, but the people that study this stuff are really jumpy. its almost like they're looking for a doomsday senario.

Not saying im not worried about it. but i think that scientists are still stuck on the balance of nature being "delicate". Species by speices this may be true. nature itsefl however has lived trough ice ages and all that and likely worse. As for us, we are at least supposed to be the most adaptable lifeform on the planet. If we are unprepared, sure the climate changes will kill us bad, but i dont think that The Day after Tommorow will happen like in the movie. Now, if we drop a nuke in the San Andreas fault, THAT would be a sudden global disatster. Humans are quite capable of a nuclear disaster, but not every drop or increase in temp is a sing of the apocolypse. Still though, all this fossil fuel stuff is not good for the enviroment, hopefully we will find a better way. But i dont think that we shoudl be so paniky, becuase its not woring to get us better energy solutions. People would be better convinced by large, short term benefits of alternative energy, rather than senarios that are, like many things in science, notoriuosly hard to believe, and to prove.

Tronix, I disagree. Although a few degrees temperature increase is not going to cause mass extinctions, our civilization will be destroyed by it. It's not that different from collapse of other civilizations, like the Mayan civilization.


Our civilization (like the Mayan etc.) depends on agriculture. Billions of people depend on it. Climate change could easily cause agriculture to fail and that would be the end of our civilization.

Tronix, you need to take better aim with your nuke for the best effect.

Something shaking the San Andreas fault, worse case, only effects So.Cal to San Fran. Big deal. America isn't the whole world.

Put that same nuke down in the methane hydrate regions off the continental shelf and lets outgas a couple of tetratons of that stuff if you really want to cause a global disaster.

Guesstimate 6-10 degree C temp spike for a few hundred years and then a plunge to an ice age due to the mass extinction of land and plant life this methane burst would cause.

That is a doomsday scenario. Such a thing has occured at least twice in the geological record even without nukes so don't say it can't happen. But back to the mundane ...

To correctly guage the impact of global warming, you show consider the impact of famine and disease on a wide scale. Think antiquity when the Huns came across the Roman boarders but with higher tech weapons and tools.

Research the social destruction the Hun/Goths/Visagoths/et all invasions caused and the disease that traveled with them. Because of these invasions and global trade routes they brought with them, came a thousand years of plague (starting in the Roman Times and continuing to the Black Death that followed in the 1400's) which took more than half of the European's to their graves.

Sure, humanity in some form would survive anything short of the methane pulse I described above, but what would rise from the ashes of a 50% culling of our species?

Take the Roman example (which American is compared to so frequently anyway), the dominate culture/military power/religion fell. If another thousand years of plague and famine cycle occurs, which dominate culture/military power/religion stands to be overthrown? We all should be concerned.

This is not hair-pulling nillist apocoplyptic nut-jobbing. Climatic predictions of possible effects on human society are attempts to look at the earth and human history and calculating if bad things occur again.

and btw, climate scientist worried that "The Day After Tomorrow" would be taken literally. The changes shown in that thriller would take centuries or more to actually occur.

It is good that you are coming on board with the alternate energy ideas. Maybe there is time to avert major global destruction, but mark this one down - by the end of this century, New Orleans will be devastated and abandoned because of rising waters and increased strength hurricans.

Tronix, the following is not aimed at you. I do not know your politics. but please comment on them if you wish ...

I find it interesting that people who want to believe "worst case senerios" when deciding action against human enemies will refuse to accept the same approach in forecasting potentially extinction level threats to the whole eco-system and the human race.

Why is one worse case scenario a reason to curtail our rights and freedoms while another isn't even worth putting a 25 cent tax a gallon on fuel? Which is more valuable, some stock options or our independence? The answer is clear to see by our actions.

Like the tragedy of 911, I believe the inability to graple with global warming is a failure of the imagination to grasp the deadly threat that grows within out midst.

I thought "global dimming" referred to the use of grey matter by the population at large.