Maybe We Need Another Protocol

Once upon a time there was a great scientific consensus. Pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels was creating a greenhouse effect. The members consensus agreed that the Earth's climate was going to get warmer, the polar ice caps were going to melt and the ocean levels would rise flooding thousands of miles of coastland. It would be an ecological and environmental disaster of biblical proportions. (Despite the fact that the problem was man made - and not an act of god.)

The members of the Scientific Consensus got together with a lot of consenting activists and politicians in the town called Kyoto and there they created The Protocol. The Protocol was to limit the production of pollution by industrial nations in hopes of having an imperceptibly small effect on the predicted climate change.

They even made a movie about it. I hear it was pretty bad in terms of the plot, the science and the acting, but the special effects were supposedly worth half the price of the ticket.

What got left out of all the consenting about Global Warming was its lesser known cousin Global Dimming. Global Dimming is the phenomenon of pollution in the atmosphere reducing the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth. You probably haven't heard a whole lot about the crisis of Global Dimming for a couple of reasons. First the idea of pollution blocking sunlight and limiting warming doesn't fit well with The Consensus and The Protocol. Second, we appear have to have this problem on the run.

That's right, Global Dimming has given way to Global Clearing. And what is the result? 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.

And they don't come right out and say it, but I bet you can guess who is to blame for all of this Global Clearing caused Global Warming: Ronald Reagan.

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.

The researchers argue that this trend, commonly called 'global dimming', reversed more than a decade ago, probably following the collapse of communist economies and the consequent decrease in industrial pollutants.

If Reagan hadn't defeated communism, they would still be polluting. There would be no Global Clearing and therefore less Global Warming. The polar ice caps would stay frozen and the oceans wouldn't rise up and flood every coast on the planet.

At least one scientist is about to be drummed out of The Consensus. I bet they are going to take his name off The Protocol newsletter mailing list too:

Researchers will now focus on working out the long-term effects of clearer air. One thing they do know is that black particulate matter in the air has been contributing a cooling effect to the ground. “It is clear that the greenhouse effect has been partly masked in the past by air pollution,” says Andreas Macke, a meteorologist at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany.

Uncertainties remain part of the game because scientists have only a limited ability to track cloud cover and particulates, says Macke. Increased cooperation in programmes such as the NASA-led International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project should help to close the gaps in our knowledge of how dirty air affects climate, he says. (emphasis added).

We need to get the Consensus people and the Protocol guys back together. We should pick a symbolic location like Detroit perhaps, and come up with a new plan. The Detroit Protocol to Decrease Global Clearing.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 03:28 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment