Quote:
Originally Posted by MelBridgeman
and it wasnt that long ago that they were all warning us of global cooling...
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We actually have Global Dimming as its popularly called. The quick version is airborne pollutants which reflect sunlight cause a cooling effect, this is most recently seen when all planes in North America were grounded and the results showed a rather huge difference in high/low temps for those days.
There is also evaporation tests that have been done for many decades showing that evaporation was slowing, it was found that the intensity of sunlight was a key factor in evaporation and not a few degrees of temperature change.
There is now evidence that the massive drought in Africa (Ethiopia) in the late 80's was in fact because of European pollution causing a dimming and change of the monsoon latitude that caused the yearly rainy season to shift northwards, causing havok on northern africa.
So what you have is a competing problem, global greenhouse gas warming and global dimming which slows the warming. In another form of fun/irony global dimming is decreasing as our visible/refractory pollutants have decreased a lot in the last few decades so the effect of global dimming is in fact decreasing (yay!) but that means global warming will affect us a lot more without this other bad pollution refracting the sun's rays (not so yay.)
But its ok, Al Gore and the damn liberal elite are at it again convincing the vast majority of scientists from tons of different fields to believe his hype that somehow humans could affect the global temperature and cause a climate shift which could dramatically affect this world in the next 100-200yrs.
Its amazing to me how when we debate this, people are either fully on one side of the issue, much like what the paid spokespeople for the 'global warming is a overhyped issue' wanted to achieve. They win, considering the fact for every 10 scientists 1 (usually paid by the oil and pollutant lobbies) speaks out and turns it into a partisan debate.
I'm all for healthy skepticism, and I am not 100% convinced at the severity of how bad things will be in the next 50-100 years will be because of human pollution. I am however not stupid enough to ignore science and the obvious fact that such huge ammounts of polution effect the planet in un-natural ways that will be a detriment to it.
Far as I'm concerned the debate is not IF global warming is happening because of human activity, but rather how severe are the affects of it. Thats the key question, and we better stop the silly partisan back/forth that seems to occur since Gore is Democrat and therefore anything he says must be liberal elitist scare tactics.
