Post #10 Dimming sun

Millions of dollars are being spent on the effect of global warming leaving other environmental issues to be over looked. The work of one man, Jerry Stanhill, a biologist that was working in Israel setting up irrigation systems was responsible for determining how strong the sun shown. His study was used to determine how much water was need for the agriculture to survive. 20 years later Jerry thought that it would be a good idea to check his work to determine if there had been changes. To his astonishment there had been a reduction of sunlight by 22% in those 20 years. Jerry tried bringing his information to the public but was quickly out casted because it contradicted the idea of global warming. There are reports of a decrease of sunlight all over the world, 9% in Antarctica, 10% in the United States, 16% in the British islands, and even 30% in some parts of Russia. This decrease in sunlight technically should decrease the temperature on the planet but that wasn’t the case which led many to believe that the “global dimming” phenomenon was fake. Two men, Michael Rodrick and Gram Farquar, studied evaporation rates via the pan evaporation rate in Australia, which measures how much water is evaporated from one day to the next. The idea is that with the increasing temperature in the world that the evaporation rates would increase. This was not the case, over the last 30 years there has been an average of 100 mL difference.  With further studies being done it was determined that it is not the heat that causes evaporation but the overall sunlight that forces the water molecules into the air. This showed a decrease in sunlight that agreed with the idea of Jerry Stanhill. The first idea was to look at the atmosphere and what changes have occurred to it over the last 30 or so years.  Maldives Islands was the home of Endo-X, a study that was to measure the difference in polluted air to clean air. This study showed that there was a 10% decrease in sunlight in areas of polluted skies then the ones not polluted. The cause of this is because the pollution molecules bind to other molecules within the clouds producing a mirror effect bounce the sunlight back to space. Although there are changes taking place to limit the pollution and limit the global dimming effect this could in turn cause more of an issue. The combination between the loss of diming and the ever growing effect of burning fossil fuels is causing a “perfect storm”. This perfect storm could lead to outrageous effects on our environment due to the rapid temperature change that could take place.