From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 08:04:17 MDT
At 01:35 AM 6/7/03 -0400, Rafal wrote:
>### Owners of the Prius, shame on you. Instead of helping the planet,
>burning gasoline to make the world a green oasis, you mutter your 1970's
>mantras of "conservation", " limits to growth" and general doom.
Here's a recent view to the contrary; I have no opinion:
By FRED PEARCE
New Scientist
Smoke is clouding our view of global warming, protecting the planet from
perhaps three-quarters of the greenhouse effect. That might sound like good
news, but experts say that as the cover diminishes in coming decades, we
are in for a dramatic escalation of warming that could be two or even three
times as great as official best guesses.
This was the dramatic conclusion reached last week at a workshop in Dahlem,
Berlin, where top atmospheric scientists got together, including Nobel
laureate Paul Crutzen and Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, former chairman
of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
IPCC scientists have suspected for a decade that aerosols of smoke and
other particles from burning rainforest, crop waste and fossil fuels are
blocking sunlight and counteracting the warming effect of carbon dioxide
emissions. Until now, they reckoned that aerosols reduced greenhouse
warming by perhaps a quarter, cutting increases by 0.2 °C. So the 0.6 °C of
warming over the past century would have been 0.8 °C without aerosols.
But the Berlin workshop concluded that the real figure is even higher -
aerosols may have reduced global warming by as much as three-quarters,
cutting increases by 1.8 °C. If so, the good news is that aerosols have
prevented the world getting almost two degrees warmer than it is now. But
the bad news is that the climate system is much more sensitive to
greenhouse gases than previously guessed. [etc]
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