The articles about the global climate are frequent on this blog - there are many reports in the media. This one is pretty interesting: it is now argued by some British scientists who were featured on BBC ("Horizon") that the fossil fuel cuts - such as those planned by the Kyoto protocol - will cause or accelerate the global warming because of reduced production of SO2 and similar by-products that otherwise cool down the atmosphere. Parts of Europe, if the Kyoto-like strategies continue, will become desert by 2100. ;-)
The statement is supported by an interesting comment that the solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface decreased roughly by 20 percent during the last 50 years. This sentence itself sounds very suspicious to me because I don't know how could have people measured the solar power above the atmosphere 50 years ago. Cannot this decrease of solar energy reaching the Earth be simply a real decrease of solar power, an effect argued to be important by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, Harvard's leading astro-climate scientists?What about the proposed 10 degree heating resulting from removal of the aerosoles? Of course, I am skeptical about these statements as much as I am skeptical about the "conventional" fearmongering - especially if someone proposes a theory in which two large contributions with opposite signs are supposed to cancel each other. Nevertheless these examples demonstrate how different conclusions one obtains depending on the choice which effects she emphasizes (in this case, the cooling effect from aerosoles). One must take all effects that are likely to be important into account before she makes her conclusions.
I am always amazed by the apparent lack of rational thinking of those who propose various policies based on this kind of science. If we really knew that the UK would become another Sahara by 2100, we would try to stop it - and there would definitely be more intelligent algorithms to do so than to reduce the civilization as such. For example, if the aerosoles were as powerul as they say, we would simply double or triple the SO2 emissions. We could easily burn the coal in areas with no population - e.g. we could build the power plants at various small islands. Today, the concentration of SO2 in the atmosphere obviously does not cause any significant problems, except for the industrial zones where it may be too concentrated.
Different problems have different solutions. The people who propose "cutting the industry" as the universal solution to all problems - cooling or warming - are simply stupid people, and I think it is very important to emphasize that they are stupid because they often like to picture themselves as intelligent scientists.
I wonder what those who believe in "scientific consensus" will think about this new theory of global dimming and how they will manage to preserve their consensus. Will they believe the new paradigm? On one hand, it is a step towards the global cooling theory once again, which is a heresy according to the new global warming religion, but on the other hand, it contains the "chance" that the temperatures will grow 10 degrees by 2100 if we remove the aerosoles, which seems as an even "better" religion than the previous one, better by 4-8 degrees. :-)
