Last night's Nova and Global Dimming

Last night I watched Nova and it messed with me more than a little. To save you the trouble, the show was about the relatively new discovery that air-pollution particles have a very powerful cooling effect on our atmosphere.

That there is an effect is not news. I remember Carl Sagan talking about how we would have a "nuclear winter" following an H-bomb party with the Ruskies (or an asteroid collision) when I was a little kid. The big news had to do with the impact on global temperatures of the grounding of all commercial airline flights following 9/11. You see, jet exhaust creates contrails, artificial clouds that reflect the Sun's heat back out into space. While the scientists expected a very tiny impact on global temperature ranges from these commercial jet groundings, what they saw instead was the largest spike in global temperature range (hotter days, cooler nights) ever recorded (just over 1 degree Celsius).

There is not much chance that was a coincidence, and it isn't like the research might be in error, because anyone can calculate global temperature range. The data from weather stations around the world is freely available. No this is the real thing: a totally overlooked MAJOR cooling influence on the Earth's climate. And because this effect (called "Global Dimming") is so much more powerful than anyone ever dreamed, then all the atmospheric scientists are having to admit that the warming effect of greenhouse gases is correspondingly much more powerful than anyone has heretofore theorized.

If you want to read about it:

Click Here Dude

So what does all this mean? It means that:

With new polution-scrubbing coal-burning power plants popping up all over India and China, and catalytic converters on all their shiny new cars, global warming is more likely to accelerate faster in the coming years than anyone but the fringe ever thought possible. Sure there remains uncertainty, but in poker-terminology, we seem to have fewer outs. It is less likely that we can just kick back and ignore the problem until fossil fuel reserves run out and we transition to some other source of power (probably nuclear) like the George Bushes and Rush Limbaughs of the world might advise.

There is an upside. I won't have to move to a warmer climate in my old age. It will come to me. Also, I may fund my retirement by short selling Florida real estate and investing the profits in Greenland real estate.

Still, in all seriousness, solutions like this one may start to look a lot less radical in the coming years:

Dude Click Here

What I want to know now is: what conditions are necessary to create a contrail? Since high-altitude jets do it by accident, what would an aircraft be like that was designed for the purpose of creating contrails? It seems to me that a zillion robotic contrail-makers buzzing all over the planet would be a cheaper solution to global warming than making a ring around the equator in space.