Damek.

Speaking of global warming & energy sources, the June 18 Science Show had a section on Global Dimming (click for transcript). This is a curious, fascinating aspect of the global terraforming we’ve been unwittingly doing for the past century or so. Basically, some of the particles we put into the atmosphere cause increased cloud cover and reflection of sunlight, rather than, or in addition to the greenhouse effect that causes global warming. This ends up causing some cooling to occur.

The point is that the climate is much more complex than the popular messages tend to convey. Scientists have known about the cooling aspect for a long time, and at first they had thought that cooling would overpower warming. Now we know that global mean temperatures have been going up, but cooling is also still occurring. The fear is that the cooling and warming may have slightly different causes, and dimming may be more immediate, so that if we get rid of all the emissions that are causing cooling, we may open ourselves up to the full force of warming.

Not to mention that all these things happen to different degrees in different parts of the world. Cooling may have no effect on surface temperature in tropical areas, but a great effect in other areas (for an explanation, see the transcript linked above and search for “tropical”). We know the general causes and their effects, but there is much we don’t know about the specifics.

Which brings me to Stephen Schneider’s excellent summary of the situation at the end of the segment, which I wanted to save here for my own information, and to share with others, because it was just so good (emphasis added):

Caroline Campbell: I’m interested to know how you actually react to this kind of discussion that we’re having because I’m sure you’ve had many before. Do you feel that we’re really scraping the surface of our understanding of the climate or do you feel that we’re actually beginning to understand what’s going on?

Stephen Schneider: I think we’ve long understood the basics and the basics are when you use the atmosphere as an unpriced sewer and there’s no incentive for people to conserve and get cleaner, you’re going to dump stuff in there and it’s going to build up. That’s exactly what’s happened. The only time we’ve used control is when there were health threats. We have not used controls for climate threats. Now we’re beginning to realise that the climate part’s coming in on top of the health part and we may also have to deal with that. The problem is we’ve created a world economy based on the kinds of energy systems that create the trouble – burning coal, oil and gas – so naturally you have a ton of special interests out there and they are professionals in denial because they don’t want any controls on their profitability. They prey on the fact the scientific community is honest and frequently says, as Graeme has just done, that we have a lot of disturbing prospects but there’s a lot we don’t know, maybe we’ll be lucky and some of it will be mild, we’ll be unlucky and some of it will be pretty catastrophic and then they say you see, you don’t know anything so let’s not do anything. Well if that were the policy all around the world, we’d never have pre-emptive wars, we’d never cure health problems until where it’s too late, we would never have investments that are strategic hedges so you have to deal with the planetary life support system by a risk management framework, as Graeme said earlier, and that means trying to slow down the rate at which we insult the system.

If we’re going to wait for the scientists to be sure, then the system is going to perform the experiment on us, except we’re talking about a laboratory we all live in and that’s a kind of risky experiment that we need to slow down. That’s why we’ve had international relations and efforts and that’s why there’s a Kyoto protocol, even though my country and yours is not doing it, they are at least beginning to talk about climate policies, even though they’re not even part of the international regime. Eventually everybody will have to be part of an international regime or we’re going to double or triple CO2 and we’re going to threaten really significant and potential changes and if we’re lucky, they’ll only be medium, if we’re unlucky it could be really bad and I think that anyone who wants to take that chance for a planetary life support system when the alternatives to fix it are really not that very expensive, they’re a very small fraction of the projected growth rate in the economies of the world. It seems to me that we better go look in the mirror and find out if we’re looking back at a moral person when we say it’s perfectly okay to commit the future to these high risks so we can get a little bit richer now.

I would add to that only that signs are pointing towards the economy actually getting a boost out of the work that is being done to shift away from fossil fuels. The naysayers are afraid of their own pocketbooks, but the economic health of the world as a whole will only be helped by the new industries, jobs and technology that surround renewable energy markets. This isn’t chicken-little fear mongering, we know what is happening, if not to what precise degree. The fear and lack of courage lies with the head-in-the-sand crowd. Renewable energy is the way of the future, the way of progress, and to turn our backs on it now as a society is really nothing more than childish fear of stepping outside our comfort zone.