Friday, May 06, 2005

A brighter and warmer future

This must be an environmentalist nightmare.

It seems that the push for clean air is contributing to global warming. At least so reports Nature.com. Maybe GW is anthropogenic after all.

Our planet's air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great blog. In case you care to know, I was searching for american companies complaints on the clean air act and your blog came up. I am glad I found it though.

Very nice.