What is global dimming? Is it a bigger threat than golbal warming? Please explain.?

Question

Global dimming is one of the conflict in climate change. Is it more dangerous than global warming. What is the cvause of global dimming? Global warming?

Answer 1

Bob pretty much summed up the alarmist view.  In reality, global dimming is another example of a ligitimate issue that has been swallowed up by the Global Warming bandwagon.  There was a test conducted on September 11, 2001 when the planes were not allowed to fly that indicated planes caused dimming.  I personally am extremely skeptical of the conclusions.  Most of a planes contrails are actually water vapor.  I think the effects of the contrails were vastly overestimated and became a convenient tool for the alarmist to use to explain why their GW seems to not be as bad as predicted.  Another thing they like to use is reduced sulfur which has a similar effect because sulfur may cool the atmosphere.

Answer 2

Global dimming is not dangerous in itself.  It refers to the fact that pollution has been blocking some sunlight.

What makes it so worrisome is that it means that we've underestimated the effects of global warming because less sunlight means we should have been cooling for many years.

It means global warming is worse than the IPCC says.

Answer 3

Global warming is less dangerous then global dimming because global dimming can attract uv rays and other forms of radiation.

Answer 4

global warming is a blaket of gas that is heating up our earth causing it to act strange. this is caused by us polluting and etc

Answer 5

Global dimming is when particulates in the atmosphere block sunlight.  Because they're blocking sunlight, they also cause the planet to cool.

The 2 biggest sources of these particulates are volcanic eruptions and human emissions (mostly from coal power plants).  Up until about 1970 we were emitting more and more of these particulates, but then a bunch of countries passed Clean Air Acts, and worldwide particulate emissions have actually decreased since 1980 because of that.

So at this point, global dimming is not a concern.  There is still a lot of particulates in the atmosphere and those particulates are helping to slow down global warming a little bit, but they're at a pretty steady level thanks to the Clean Air Acts.

Global warming is a much bigger threat because it's caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2).  Right now we're emitting huge amounts of CO2 by burning fossil fuels like gasoline, and there's nothing like the Clean Air Acts to regulate it.  That's why a bunch of countries signed the Kyoto Protocol.  It was an agreement for all the countries to try and do something to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Theoretically global dimming could be just as much of a threat as global warming, but right now it's not because we've got our particulate emissions under control, but our CO2 emissions just keep increasing and increasing causing more and more global warming.