The Future's Getting Brighter

... and I might have to wear shades.

Our planet's air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

I've gotten this in email many times today (thanks!), and as I work in the oil industry, legions of fans are clammoring for my commentary.

Allow me to preface my statements. As a supporter of big business, free-market economic controls and especially a supporter of capitalism, I do not endorse wanton environmental destruction.

I do not see being anti-Kyoto, as being pro-pollution.

Drinking water quality was not an issue until the previous President made it one in his final days. That doesn't make me pro-arsenic.

I'm not pro-pollution, I'm pro-common sense.

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A couple of things strike me as funny.

"Our planet's air has cleared up," Damn. Big polluters burn less, or burn we burn it cleaner, or cars don't spew like they used to.

Who do we have to blame for that?

The environmental movement!

We can also blame Ronald F'ing Reagan. Perhaps the last century's greatest President.

The researchers argue that this trend, commonly called 'global dimming', reversed more than a decade ago, probably following the collapse of communist economies and the consequent decrease in industrial pollutants.

Maybe in this light, liberals will finally give the man the credit he's due.

Equally interesting is the admission of "cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict."

That's good to know. Because, if I didn't know any better, and believed the environmental litany, if we didn't act now (and in a big way) we were going to be +2 degrees in year X and plus +5 in year Y and plus +10 in year Z, if we didn't ratify Kyoto. Think of the children!

Now we listened to the greenies. They got their way. In fact, we listened so good, that now we're going to be +2 in year X-a, in +5 in year X-b.

The level of arrogance of the environmental movement and their models is astonishing. With the tens or hundreds of thousands of data points in a climatological model, to think that they can provide an accurate forecast of climate in 25 or 50 or 100 years is simply staggering.

"I can't tell you the weather next week, but f*ck, it's going to be hot in 2037."

I'd like to see a study of climate models from 1970, 1980 and 1990.
How did 2000 and 2005 compare to the models? Where they right? Where they wrong?
How do you know you're right this time?
Yes, the technology has gotten better, but won't it be even better tomorrow?

Based on the previous forecasts, I reckon we're overdue for an ice age.

A second study found a similar trend by looking at satellite data, although their research suggests the extent of the brightening is smaller. Unlike ground stations, satellites can sample the whole planet, including the oceans. However, satellite data are difficult to calibrate, and so are considered less accurate than measurements from the ground.

Whoa.. whoa... whoa... the satellite data is less accurate? Doesn't that feed the modeling? Won't the models be less accurate?

Researchers will now focus on working out the long-term effects of clearer air. One thing they do know is that black particulate matter in the air has been contributing a cooling effect to the ground. "It is clear that the greenhouse effect has been partly masked in the past by air pollution"

I'll have two cigars tonight. Maybe I'll light 'em with a smokey oil fire. After all, we've just "accelerated" global warming, I gotta do my part to slow it back down.

To finish. Everyone knows the dinosaurs lived in a tropical clime, and we all know that man found his way into the New World on a land bridge caused by receding water being frozen by glaciation during our last ice age.

More recently, ice covered Greenland was named so, because the Vikings discoverers farmed on it. Unlike now, it was green. Elizabethian Britain witnessed the "little ice age."

This planet's temperatures have moved up and down for a myriad of reasons unrelated to humanity.

Maybe it's happening now, and we have nothing to do with it.

Maybe it's happening now because an industry of chicken-littles would be out on their asses eating granola in the woods if they weren't getting money for "ongoing research."

If the environment got better, these people would be out of work. It's in their interest to scare us. It keeps them with steady work.

The future's supposedly getting brighter. But that's ok. I've always been an optimist.

Posted by AlexC at May 6, 2005 12:00 AM