We're getting 10% less sunlight than 30 years ago

www.guardian.co.uk...


In 1985, a geography researcher called Atsumu Ohmura at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology got the shock of his life. As part of his studies into climate and atmospheric radiation, Ohmura was checking levels of sunlight recorded around Europe when he made an astonishing discovery. It was too dark. Compared to similar measurements recorded by his predecessors in the 1960s, Ohmura's results suggested that levels of solar radiation striking the Earth's surface had declined by more than 10% in three decades. Sunshine, it seemed, was on the way out.
The finding went against all scientific thinking. By the mid-80s there was undeniable evidence that our planet was getting hotter, so the idea of reduced solar radiation - the Earth's only external source of heat - just didn't fit. And a massive 10% shift in only 30 years?

Ohmura himself had a hard time accepting it. "I was shocked. The difference was so big that I just could not believe it," he says. Neither could anyone else. When Ohmura eventually published his discovery in 1989 the science world was distinctly unimpressed. "It was ignored," he says.

It turns out that Ohmura was the first to document a dramatic effect that scientists are now calling "global dimming". Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade. It's too small an effect to see with the naked eye, but it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis. In fact, global dimming seems to be so important that you're probably wondering why you've never heard of it before. Well don't worry, you're in good company. Many climate experts haven't heard of it either, the media has not picked up on it, and it doesn't even appear in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).



[Edited on 23-12-2003 by dexxy]

Interesting...Very interesting. I don't suppose that it makes no sense or anything, because we all know the sun is cooling anyhow...

If the percent of sunlight is decreasing by 3% a decade, it is very very much out-pacing the temperature rise of the alledged Global Warming pattern.

hmmm...once again Newton may be proven right.

that can't be good news for any S.A.D. sufferers out there. I wonder how long it will take before it would be noticeable to the human eye then.

whats newton have to do with this?

Wouldn't this fall into the "expanding universe" theory, Earth included?



regards
seekerof

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