Global Dimming

Health and environmental effects

The pollutants that lead to global dimming also lead to various human and environmental problems, such as smog, respiratory problems, and acid rain.

The impacts of global dimming itself, however, can be devastating.

Millions from Famines in the Sahel in the 70s and 80s

The death toll that global dimming may have already caused is thought to be massive.

Climatologists studying this phenomenon believe that the reflection of heat have made waters in the northern hemisphere cooler. As a result, less rain has formed in key areas and crucial rainfall has failed to arrive over the Sahel in Northern Africa.

In the 1970s and 1980s, massive famines were caused by failed rains which climatologists had never quite understood why they had failed.

The answers that global dimming models seemed to provide, the documentary noted, has led to a chilling conclusion: what came out of our exhaust pipes and power stations [from Europe and North America] contributed to the deaths of a million people in Africa, and afflicted 50 million more with hunger and starvation.

Billions are likely to be affected in Asia from similar effects

Scientists said that the impact of global dimming might not be in the millions, but billions. The Asian monsoons bring rainfall to half the world’s population. If this air pollution and global dimming has a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoons some 3 billion people could be affected.

As well as fossil fuel burning, contrails is another source

Contrails (the vapor from planes flying high in the sky) were seen as another significant cause of heat reflection.

During the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, all commercial flights were grounded for the next three days.

This allowed climate scientists to look at the effect on the climate when there were no contrails and no heat reflection.

What scientists found was that the temperature rose by some 1 degree centigrade in that period of 3 days.

Addressing global dimming only will lead to massive global warming

Global dimming can be dealt with by cleaning up emissions.

However, if global dimming problems are only addressed, then the effects of global warming will increase even more. This may be what happened to Europe in 2003.

In Europe, various measures have been taken in recent years to clean up the emissions to reduce pollutants that create smog and other problems, but without reducing the greenhouse gas emissions in parallel. This seems to have had a few effects:

• This may have already lessened the severity of droughts and failed rains in the Sahel.
• However, it seems that it may have caused, or contributed to, the European heat wave in 2003 that killed thousands in France, saw forest fires in Portugal, and caused many other problems throughout the continent.

The documentary noted that the impacts of addressing global dimming only would increase global warming more rapidly. Irreversible damage would be only about 30 years away. Global level impacts would include:

• The melting of ice in Greenland, which would lead to more rising sea levels. This in turn would impact many of our major world cities
• Drying tropical rain forests would increase the risk of burning. This would release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further increasing global warming effects. (Some countries have pushed for using carbon sinks¹ to count as part of their emission targets. This has already been controversial because these store carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere when burnt. Global dimming worries increase these concerns even more.)

These and other effects could combine to lead to an increase of 10 degrees centigrade in temperature over the next 100 years, not the standard 5 degrees which most models currently predict.

This would be a more rapid warming than any other time in history, the documentary noted. With such an increase,

• Vegetation will die off even more quickly
• Soil erosion will increase and food production will fail
• A Sahara type of climate could be possible in places such as England, while other parts of the world would fare even worse.
• Such an increase in temperature would also release one of the biggest stores of greenhouse gases on earth, methane hydrate, currently contained at the bottom of the earth’s oceans and known to destabilize with warming. This gas is eight times stronger than carbon dioxide in its greenhouse effect. As the documentary also added, due to the sheer amounts that would be released, by this time, whatever we would try to curb emissions, it would be too late.

This is not a prediction, the documentary said, it is a warning of what will happen if we clean up the pollution while doing nothing about greenhouse gases.