Tonight, PBS will be airing "Nova: Dimming the Sun" and "Journey to Planet Earth: The State of the Planet's Wildlife." (Check local listings.)
Over in the television section of The New York Times you'll find a review of these two shows, as well as HBO's "Too Hot Not to Handle" that Dave wrote about here.
When television is such a mathematical word problem, it hurts the idle brain. But idling is exactly the problem, and three nationwide Cassandra cries dominate this week's public-affairs programming, with urgent calls for action. "Journey to Planet Earth: The State of the Planet's Wildlife," being shown tonight on PBS, explains the increasingly inhospitable outlook for all earthly creatures. The "Nova" report "Dimming the Sun," also on PBS tonight, complicates matters with the latest findings about how pollution has masked the effects of global warming. And on Saturday HBO declares the whole climate-change crisis "Too Hot Not to Handle."
If you watch any of these, feel free to write your own review here.
It’s no time for change, says ad from Gingrich’s group
Can a lazy environmentalist really change the world?
The digital TV conversion is here—are you e-ready?
Comments
View as Flat
caniscandida Posted 11:55 pm
18 Apr 2006
global dimming
I watched the Nova documentary, "Dimming the Sun." IMHO, it is one of the best shows Nova has ever done. Probably the most frightening, too. I am incompetent to write a true review, since I cannot explain the science involved; nor did I keep a record of the names of the scientists. Anyway, here are some impressions.
The presentation is divided into three parts: how global dimming was discovered; what are its effects; how it has complicated our efforts to understand climate change as a result of global warming.
The kinds of observations used were absolutely fascinating. E.g. there is this simple but ingenious device used for measuring the rate of evaporation of water, called a "pan," basically a pan of water left outside; records go back a hundred years or so; and sure enough, these two amiable and earnest Australians who monitor "pans" tell us the evaporation rates have gone down. That is surprising, perhaps, because temperatures have risen; but in fact the decline is due to the decrease in photonic energy, i.e. sunlight, reaching them. Then, there was an army of climatologists in the Maldives, comparing the climate of the northern Maldives, in the path of polluted air from India, to that of the southern Maldives, which receive clear air from Antarctica. Then, rather poignant for us New Yorkers, a worker in Wisconsin who studies the effect of "contrails," the exhaust of jet aircraft, on climate, looked at the climate records for from 9/11 to 9/13, 2001, when nothing civilian was flying anywhere in the US; and sure enough, he discovered highly anomalous high/low temperature variances on those days.
Global dimming is an effect of atmospheric particulate pollution. (The part about the reflectivity of water droplets in clouds I did not quite understand.) This is much more plentiful in the northern hemisphere. One result is, the oceans in the north are now cooler in the north than in the south. This apparently is affecting weather patterns. The more and more regular droughts across the Sahel in Africa are due to the disruption of the passage of rain-bearing clouds at those latitudes, thanks to the temperature variance in the oceans, thanks to global dimming. Many disturbing images of human and animal corpses were shown. Nova does not go so far as to connect the dots, so allow me: We northern polluters bear a great responsibility for those deaths. (To say nothing of the inequity in distribution of wealth.)
And regarding the "masking" of global warming, Nova does not quite call a spade a spade, though it speaks clearly enough to those with ears to hear. That is, global dimming has caused certain readings to come up cooler-than-normal. As we all know very well, industries and their shills, not referred to by Nova, have picked up those data and run with them, in order to create doubt that global warming is really happening.
The sad conclusion is that, because such doubt could be supported for so long by some genuine scientific data, it has taken far too long to convince most people of the reality of global warming. Is it too late? That scientist whose name I cannot remember, but surely is well known to everyone reading Grist, the one who was/is working for the Feds and has heroically been speaking up to warn us all about global warming, despite threats of censorship, was interviewed by Nova. He gives us ten years to do something really major, really majorly effective. If we do not, which is more likely, we will just start slipping-sliding to a whole new place, one which we are not going to recognize.
Sorry, I am not a scientist, and that is the best I can do. I would have taken notes, if I had known I might be writing a review.
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Chris Schults Posted 2:27 am
19 Apr 2006
More on global dimming
Thanks caniscandida. I didn't watch Nova last night, but did tape it.
For more on global dimming, there is this Grist article.
Vote for Grist in the 2006 Webby Awards magazine category.
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Captain America Posted 3:22 am
19 Apr 2006
Enviro-SCAMS
MORE ENVIRO-SCAMS:
The corn ethanol scam,
North American agribusinesses grow massive amounts of corn, based not on any sane economic rationale but on subsidies they extort from governments. Much of that corn is turned into cheap sweeteners, which make their way into the food system and explain much of the North American obesity epidemic. Since there is still too much corn left, they came up with the ethanol scam:
". . . researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent.
It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to sunflower plants, the study found.
'Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment,' according to the study by Cornell's David Pimentel and Berkeley's Tad Patzek. They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy."
There is even a neocon aspect to this (note the name Frank Gaffney), the thinking being that use of ethanol will reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil and thus remove any political influence that Muslim countries might have on American foreign policy in the Middle East. Fuel from corn is a neocon/agribusiness fraud, and just encourages the agricultural subsidies that are the real reason for much third-world poverty. There is still the possibility that fuel can eventually be produced economically from straw and agricultural waste (cellulose ethanol, the energy for which comes from the plant waste itself), but the research has not yet been done.
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America First The World Second
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caniscandida Posted 7:23 am
19 Apr 2006
contrails
Thanks, Chris, Kip Keen's article of September, 2004, was helpful in explaining the droplets business: condensation of atmospheric water vapor about the particles in air pollution. Clouds are of course naturally caused masses of condensed water vapor, and reflect a lot of sunlight away from the surface of the earth; but the water droplets that condense around particulate pollutants are smaller than those in clouds, and occur in closer proximity, with the result that significantly less sunlight can pass through.
Related to this, I earlier wrongly defined "contrails" as the exhaust left by the engines of jet aircraft. Now I realize that the word is short for "condensation trails," and means not the exhaust itself, but the condensation that forms around the solid particles in the exhaust.
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