Issue Of Today's Concern : Global Dimming

Day 1,617, 11:35 • Published in India India • by Ruldo

This article is meant for addressing and dealing the issue of Global Dimming.Some may have heard of it , but others may not have.It only brings some more information about the phenomenon around the world.

Burning of fossil fuels is creating two effects

Two effects of fossil fuel productions are:

•Greenhouse gases that cause global warming
•By-products which are pollutants that cause global dimming
What is global dimming?

Fossil fuel use, as well as producing greenhouse gases, creates other by-products. These by-products are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These pollutants however, also change the properties of clouds.

Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles, such as pollen. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. This then makes those clouds more reflective. More of the sun’s heat and energy is therefore reflected back into space.

This reduction of heat reaching the earth is known as Global Dimming.
Impacts of global dimming: millions already killed by it?

Global warming results from the greenhouse effect caused by, amongst other things, excessive amounts of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. It would seem then, that the other by-products which cause global dimming may be an ironic savior.

A deeper look at this, however, shows that unfortunately this is not the case.


Health and environmental effects

The pollutants that lead to global dimming also lead to various human and environmental problems, such as smog, respiratory problems, and acid rain.

The impacts of global dimming itself, however, can be devastating.
Millions from Famines in the Sahel in the 70s and 80s

The death toll that global dimming may have already caused is thought to be massive.

Climatologists studying this phenomenon believe that the reflection of heat have made waters in the northern hemisphere cooler. As a result, less rain has formed in key areas and crucial rainfall has failed to arrive over the Sahel in Northern Africa.

Billions are likely to be affected in Asia from similar effects.

Scientists said that the impact of global dimming might not be in the millions, but billions. The Asian monsoons bring rainfall to half the world’s population. If this air pollution and global dimming has a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoons some 3 billion people could be affected.

As well as fossil fuel burning, contrails is another source.

Contrails (the vapor from planes flying high in the sky) were seen as another significant cause of heat reflection.

This allowed climate scientists to look at the effect on the climate when there were no contrails and no heat reflection.

What scientists found was that the temperature rose by some 1 degree centigrade in that period of 3 days.
Root causes of global warming also must be addressed

If we were to use global dimming pollutants to stave off the effects of global warming, we would still face many problems, such as:

•Human health problems from the soot/smog
•Environmental problems such as acid rain
•Ecological problems such as changes in rainfall patterns (as the Ethiopian famine example above reminds us) which can kill millions, if not billions.

Climatologists are stressing that the roots of both global dimming causing pollutants and global warming causing greenhouse gases have to be dealt with together and soon.
Somewhere down the lane , there will be a point where heat beats cold , cold beats heat , global warming beats global dimming or global dimming beats global warming.Whosoever be the winner , the ultimate sufferer is the human being.

Hope you have liked it !!