The Speculist

Is It Getting Darker, or Is It Just Me?

One of the reasons I love reading FuturePundit so much is that Randall Parker frequently introduces startling ideas that either completely refute conventional wisdom or that depart from it in totally unepected ways. First it was global cooling, now it's global dimming.

How anyone can be glib or confident in trying to explain the impact humanity has on climate is beyond me. As Randall eloquently says:

The scale of human activity has gotten so large that we inevitably change the climate to some extent. We do not know yet just how much we are changing the climate because we do not know what the climate would be like in our absence. Since the human population is growing and parts of the world are rapidly industrializing human influence on the climate looks set to grow even further. But since there are so many human activities that cause climate effects and since some of those effects cancel each other out (at least to some extent) any effort to reduce only a single pollutant or to reduce the impact of only a single method of modifying our environment will have the effect of strengthening the impact of other things that we do.

Indeed and indeed.