The Urban Permaculture Farm Magazine

I am a voracious viewer of all things media in relationship to our environment and the natural world and I recently watched the PBS show Nova on global dimming. Now we have all heard of Global Warming, that human activity on the planet is responsible for global tempatures to rise, but global dimming is a study that shows that as we have been raising the temperature we have also been reflecting a large percentage of the sun's energy back into space.

Most human activity can help create clouds, from contrails from our airplanes to the vapor and wastes from our cars and industrial activity that hang in the atmosphere causing sunlight to reflect back into space. What this has done is mask the true effects of global warming, in fact, It is off setting a large percentage of the effects.

Sounds great, at first, except that as we get more effiecient and cleaner in terms of our air pollution, the "protective" elements of global dimming will be reduced. A seemingly once in a life time study was done during the week that air travel was grounded in the United States (September 11, 2001). Scientists tracked the temperature and found that there was a startling spike during that brief period that Jets weren't covering the sky with contrails. This has dire implications for all of us. Please check it out and learn more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/