The Blog of Harald

Interesting. According to “an article in The Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1108853,00.html, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface has decreased by 10% over the last three decades.

bq. “Unlike many of the other symptoms of Global Warming, the evidence for Global Dimming is quite clear: there has been a marked and quantifiable decrease in solar radiation striking the earth every year since records have been kept, there have also been tests on the evaporation rate of water in metal pans and the Dutch (much of whose specialized farming is done in greenhouses) have noticed a definate decrease in their productivity.

The ties to global warming are interesting. The sun’s output has not dropped over those decades, so the missing radiation has to be going somewhere. “Recent NASA studies”:http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/stories/20030513/ have shown that atmospheric soot is a major source of climate change and potentially related to global warming. If atmospheric soot is absorbing sunlight (and converting it to heat), that could tie Global Dimming and Global Warming to each other.

Oh, and incidentally, drive another nail into the Kyoto coffin, since Kyoto is focusing on CO2 emissions. Much as I hate to admit it, CO2’s connection to global warming is still relatively tenuous…

(via “Plastic: Goodbye, Sun”:http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/12/21/07534647)