Posted on 01/12/2005 6:27:48 PM PST by NormsRevenge
LONDON (Reuters) - Cutting down on fossil fuel pollution could accelerate global warming and help turn parts of Europe into desert by 2100, according to research to be aired on British television on Thursday. "Global Dimming," a BBC Horizon documentary, will describe research suggesting fossil fuel by-products like sulfur dioxide particles reflect the sun's rays, "dimming" temperatures and almost canceling out the greenhouse effect.
The researchers say cutting down on the burning of coal and oil, one of the main goals of international environmental agreements, will drastically heat rather than cool climate.
"When the cooling affect goes away -- and it must do because particles like sulfur dioxide are damaging to humans -- global warming will be much stronger," climate change scientist Dr Peter Cox told Reuters on Wednesday.
Temperatures could increase in the worst case by up to 10 degrees by the end of the century, the researchers said -- much more than current estimates.
Scientists differ as to whether global warming is caused by man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases, by natural climate cycles or if it exists at all.
Take away fossil fuel by-products like sulfur dioxide without tackling greenhouse gas emissions, and the extra heat will speed warming, irreversibly melting ice sheets and rendering rain forests unsustainable within decades, Dr Cox said.
"The climate will warm more in the future but the ability of the land to store carbon dioxide will be compromised," he said, adding that warmer soil was less able to hold the greenhouse gas.
Good article; thanks for posting it! Just finished "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton. Only a novelist as talented as he is could tackle the hoax of global warming and make it into a thriller.
EATB, ping for your list.
Looks like europe is lucky they got the camel herders there now.
"I think a new different kind of bowling should be "carpet bowling." It's just like regular bowling, only the lanes are carpet instead of wood. I don't know why we should do this, but my God, we've got to try something!"
--Jack Handey "Deep Thoughts"
Critics might point out that this quote has nothing to do with this thread. But Handey's attitude about bowling reminds me of ecofreaks attitude toward public policy regarding nature.
It is a well established fact that everything causes Global Warming(TM) and Global Warming(TM), in return, causes everything.
All of the computer models prove it!
They ... are not ... Fossil Fuels.
Thomas Gold and a whole lot of Russian geologists have turned this old saw on it's ear.
Let's start with something bite sized first:
Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods
Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning
Modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins
The public-access pages on this site are presently being built to provide easy reference to various publications involving modern petroleum science. Modern petroleum science, - or what is called often the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins, - is an extensive body of knowledge which has been recorded in thousands of articles published in the mainstream, Russian-language scientific journals, and in many books and monographs.However, effectively nothing of modern petroleum science has been published in the U.S.A., and this body of knowledge remains largely unknown in the English-speaking world. For reason of this circumstance, a brief introduction to modern Russian petroleum science has been written separately, and is offered together with a brief indication of some of its immediate economic consequences.
The unfamiliarity with the Russian-language scientific literature has been further worsened by the bizarre circumstance that modern Russian petroleum science has been subject to the most extensive attempt at plagiarism in the history of modern science. This particular aspect of the history of this body of knowledge is taken up in the section dealing with the political and sociological essays.
oh, man.
climatologists have now reached higher levels of contradictory absurdity over global warming than the nutritionists ever managed over the humble chicken egg.
BTTT!!!!!!
Bump!
I thought Algore had the "bridge to the future"?
LMAO!!
I think they were co-builders of the Bridge to the 21st Century.. They always had their heads in the clouds, anyway. ;-)
Thanks for the ping, farmfriend.
The content of this article is somewhat old, but appears to have resurfaced or at least, it's been refreshed for a slow news day.
The original intent of the issue when it first appeared was to bolster claims by doomsayers that the true extent of the "greenhouse" effect was being masked by the cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols. So.. once the aerosols decline, we would see a run-away heating effect due to all the human-made "greenhous gases" (GHGs). This theory was mainly offered up to counter the claims that tropospheric temperature readings do not support a warming trend.
The theory actually blames human activity twice over for the GHGs as well as the aerosols, so this article doesn't really offer any positive view. The true net result of the theory is nonsense as is much of the "global warming" pseudo-science itself.
Barf.
I live in North Idaho, Does that mean that I could grow oranges?
I watched an Horizon program on the BBC last night, and I have to say this does indeed seem to be a very serious issue. The fact that weird data in some entirely different fields now all is coming together, all appearing to lead to the same conclusion, means this should be front page news.
Like many I have been sceptical about global warming, but these global dimming data precisely explain the connections between weather pattern shifts, including droughts, larger clouds with less rain, very large changes in surface solar radiation and in evaporation rates. And they also precisely explain the inconsistencies in the global warming data.
The data and the scientists are in completely different fields, all of whom have for years been collecting seemingly bizarre data that people refused to believe because the changes were too large. But now all the seemingly disconnected facts all come together in a perfect fit. And all the most recent studies are now confirming the connection. This is very important and can no longer be ignored. As a world we must act. Not to will be pure stupidity. I recommend people search for global dimming on Google, and there are some excellent articles.
These findings aren't at all contradictory, it's just the Reuters article is ambiguous in the way it presents them: the title "Fossil Fuel Curbs May Speed Global Warming: Scientists" may make it sound like it's a good idea to keep on burning fossil fuels, but the scientist's point is actually very different.
What he (Peter Cox) is saying is that there is a substantial cooling effect due to other fossil fuel byproducts such as sulphur dioxide (which cause 'global dimming' by increasing cloud formation and so lowering the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface)
This cooling effect is offsetting some of the global warming caused primarily by man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, so effectively, we are not experiencing all of the warming that we should be at the moment.
A fuller explanation can be found in this article from the American Geophysical Union: http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0312.html
So, in short, reducing SO2 emissions (which also cause acid rain) by e.g. fitting SO2 scrubbers to power stations, WITHOUT ALSO REDUCING CO2 EMISSIONS, will make things warmer as the full effect of the warming due to CO2 and other greenhouse gases will be felt.
This is a concern because at the moment reducing sulphur dioxide emissions is a comparitively easy thing to do, whereas so far nobody has come up with an easy way to reduce the CO2 emissions.
Burning more fossil fuels is never going to be a good thing for the climate.
so far I am unconvinced that human-generated emissions from the burning of organic compounds is a significant factor in global mean temperature fluctuations.
warming and cooling trends have occured within pre-industrial recorded history, let alone the shifts we have learned of in prehistory.
I am not inclined to take seriously anything the global warming crowd says.
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