Doom de doom doomies doom-doom-doom dooooooom doom.

[avacon]

This BBC program transcript on "Global Dimming" is one of the scariest things that I've read in a long, long, long time:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_trans.shtmlIt is worth reading all the way through to the end. If the data cited there is accurate (and much of it sounds to be fairly robust and easily verifiable),

Comments

Global Dimming

[fanw]

I sat there and read about 2/3 of it, and it seems like nothing terribly new. I mean, it is certainly interesting. Climatologists have known for quite some time that clouds would be a major determinant of the effects of global warming. The likelihood was that the water cycle would be accelerated: warmer oceans, more evaporation, more clouds, more rains, more hurricanes, etc. And with that comes less direct sunlight. The albedo of water vapor (reflectivity of clouds) is very high, higher than any other greenhouse gas, so they certainly will have some effect. And given that cloud particles require soot or dust to condense around, having pollution contribute to cloud layers is no surprise. I guess the real surprise here is the scale, that it could affect up to 10% of sunlight reception. But does it really require a new name? "Global Dimming"? I think they're just trying to re-brand global warming because people have gotten tired of hearing about it, but to any climatologist this should not be a surprise.

Re: Global Dimming

[avacon]

It sounded more like the point they were trying to make was that this phenomenon has been locally counter-acting the effects global warming. Clouds have a few roles here: they both insulate heat radiated from the earth, but they also can reflect sunlight back into space. Their hypothesis is that the reflection of sunlight into space has actually been saving us from noticing the brunt of global warming (due to the cooling effect) and as we clean up soot and particle pollutant emmissions we'll start to notice global warming at a faster rate than has been measured to-date

Re: Global Dimming

[bluepapercup]

I am inclined to agree with you on this.

Re: Global Dimming

[abce]

Reading the programme summary is more helpful than reading the transcript itself to figure out that Dimming is reducing the impact of Warming, and that since we are apparently getting Dimming under control, Warming should get really bad really fast.

[bluepapercup]

too late to save human civilization as we know itI would like to insert a bit of slightly nihilistic realism here. At some point, human civilization as we know it is going to end. It might end catastophically like the snuffing of the dinosaurs, or it might end gradually, beset by failing crops, world-wise energy crises, and disease. In any case, at some point, we lose. Whatever we've done by that point to the earth and the moon (or even Mars, who knows) is a moot point. We will die off, the earth will persist, and one day, things will return to stasis, without a by-your-leave to the human race

[bluepapercup]

I think you're just echoing the more ranty side of what I was getting at :)

Are you a geoscientist too?

surveillance

[pauldf]

5. Preventing the drift into a "Surveillance Society".

I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that odds are high it's inevitable, partly from an ACM article that points out that computing power is growing far faster than population itself, meaning that computers will inevitably get far better at correlating information about people. One key question is who controls the cameras. David Brin provides an interesting insight into two possibilities. A third possibility, that corporations control them (grocery customer loyalty/discount cards taken to a huge extreme) actually worries me much more than the government-controlled scenario.