More "accepted fact" challenged
Just when you were happy with the "consensus."
Quote:
Clouding The Issue
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 09, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: A new study indicates that
poor Asians burning dung for energy may be a major cause of global warming. It may explain why glaciers are really melting — and why climate is more complicated than some think.
It used to be a straight-line theory based on easily connected dots. The Earth was warming due to increased levels of carbon dioxide generated by man, his factories, power plants and vehicles. The U.S. and the industrialized world had to drastically reduce its CO2 levels to prevent the poles from melting and the seas from rising.
But a new study in the Aug. 2 issue of the British science journal Nature suggests that t
he absence of technology, not its reckless use, may be a major factor in raising the Earth's global temperature.
The haze of pollution called the "Asian Brown Cloud," caused by wood and dung burned for fuel, may be doing more harm than the tailpipes of our SUVs.
Researchers led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, launched three unmanned aircraft last March from the Maldives island of Hanimadhoo to fly through the Brown Cloud at various altitudes.
A total of 18 missions were flown to explore the blanket of soot, dust and smoke that at times is two miles thick
and covers an area about the size of the U.S.
They found that the cloud of soot and particulate matter
boosted the effect of solar heating on the surrounding air by as much as 50%.
"These findings
might seem to contradict the general notion of aerosol particulates as cooling agents in the global climate system.. . " concluded the Nature article summing up the study.
Dang. Just when we thought the science of global warming was settled.
These findings also may help to explain the rapid melting among the 46,000 glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau and why the Himalayan glaciers have been retreating since at least 1780.
This phenomenon also might help explain why carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures don't track very well, if at all.
I'm curious as to why they didn't send manned flights through the dung cloud :D
So there you have it, "accepted fact" and "consensus science" takes another hit. It isn't us rich, greedy Americans and our gas guzzling SUV's, it's poor people's poop. Is it looking more and more like poor people and cattle are at the heart of "global warming? Looks like scientists are still stuck on "maybe."