Clean Air Speeds Global Warming say Government Scientists. No, really

Pollution May Slow Warming; Cleaner Air May Speed It, Study Says

By BLOOMBERG NEWS
Published: December 22, 2005

Pollution may be slowing global warming, researchers are reporting today, and a cleaner environment may soon speed it up.

Writing in the journal Nature, an international scientific team provides evidence suggesting that a reduction in haze from human causes may accelerate warming of the earth's atmosphere. The researchers said pollutants had held down the rate of global warming by absorbing and scattering sunlight.

"If people clean up the air, more warming will come blazing through," Jim Coakley, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis, said yesterday in a telephone interview. Nature selected Dr. Coakley to write a commentary on the study.

The scientists, who work for government agencies in Britain and the United States, made the finding after adding satellite-based measurements of haze to computer models estimating the consequences of industrial emissions of aerosols, or airborne particles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/science/earth/22climate.html?ex=1292907600&en=4622349a6a10229c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

if carbon levels weren't at a 500,000 year high?

I can hear Rush and his ilk now, crowing about how we need to go out and continue to spew ever more pollutants into the air in order to save the planet:eyes: Don't these dumb fuckers realize that if the sky is hazy from pollution, it is also holding more heat in the atmosphere whether than allowing it to radiate out to space? Geez, what a dumb fucking piece of propaganda. Sadly, the sheeple will fall for it, like they always do.

the scientists seem to be the run of the mill quacks, but I expect we'll get to see the person behind the curtain eventually. I want to know who put them up to it.

the problem is the greenhouse effect

whose payroll is this quack on??

Particulates in the upper atmosphere reduce/reflect sunlight before it penetrates lower and is absorbed as heat. It's not bullshit, it's a fundamental factor in climate science and meterology and has been an established theory for decades. Those particulates can come from natural sources, or from manmade pollution.
However, CO₂ warming problems are no excuse for not working to clean up what else we are pumping into Earth's atmosphere. For example some of the emissions that block the absorption of sunlight, which thus tend to cool the atmosphere, also are involved in the formation of "acid rain". Global warming is no excuse for not doing more to curb sulfur dioxide emissions, a pollutant that cools the atmosphere but which produces acid rain, although global warming seems to be a much more serious threat to the environment in the longrun.

Reality is complex, republicans are simple.

I think it makes sense, that the ozone layer is gone and the pollution acts as protection from the sun.

that comes from the government these days. Cure poverty by cutting off aid to the poor, create peace and democracy through war and conquest, make you free by spying on you . . .

Now we are to be told, I guess, that we'll be putting ourselves in danger if we don't pollute.

there was NO SUCH THING as global warming! Or, uh, were those OTHER govt. scientists?!?!111