Henry Family Blog

I don’t watch a lot of television, because I am a firm believer that most of the shows will suck the brain right out of your head.  One show that I will occasionally watch is called NOVA and it airs on PBS.  Tonight’s show was about Global Dimming.  A phenomenon that has recently been uncovered.

Global Dimming occurs when too much pollution enters the air.  Not the invisible greenhouse gas pollution, but the kind you can see, like factory smoke, smut, car exhaust, etc.  What happens is the pollution builds up into clouds, and water droplets attach themselves to the many floating pollution particles, and then these clouds reflect the sunlight back into space.  In a healthy cloud, droplets attach to natural particles such as pollen, then when the droplet gets too heavy, it falls to earth as rain.  In a polluted cloud, there are so many particles that water can attach to, that it never gets heavy enough to fall, and acts like a huge mirror to the sun.  When this happens, things like the great Ethiopian drought from the 1970’s and 1980’s take place.

Along with the pollutants that we can see that cause Global Dimming, we also produce the greenhouse gasses, the pollution we can’t physically see.  The greenhouse gas pollution is responsible for Global Warming.  Here in lies the larger problem.  Global Dimming, as bad as it is, has also protected us from the Earth warming too fast from the greenhouse gasses.  The United States and leading European countries were mainly responsible for the world pollution in the 70’s and 80’s.  Since that time the U.S. and Europe have cut down on the pollution, but now India and China are producing huge amounts of visible pollution. 

Here is something really scary.   There is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, who has been studying the effects of airplane exhaust on temperature for over 30 years.  After the 9-11 attacks, he was presented with a unique opportunity to study the temperatures in the U.S. without commercial flight.  On 9-11 all commercial flights were grounded for several days.  This allowed the professor to collect some amazing data.  On September 14, just three days after plane free skies, there was a one degree Celsius difference in the range of temperature across the country.  In other words, the days were warmer, and the nights were cooler.  He explained that to the layman, one degree doesn’t sound like much, but it would take almost a million years for nature to do it on it’s own.  The skies were also clearer and more blue.  Pretty scary.

I had a discussion the other day with a friend about the intelligence of humans.  He was trying to explain to me how great the human race was, how intelligent, etc.  I beg to differ.  All of our intelligence is ruining the Earth.  Because of our great inventions, we are killing not only ourselves, but all of the other beautiful creatures too, and ruining the beautiful landscapes the world has to offer.  To me that is not intelligence.  Only if we can figure a way to get out of this pollution catch-22 we have found ourselves in, will we be on our way to intelligence. 

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