News Revisited

Earth & Sky has a few interesting articles about recent developments in our understanding of how aerosols affect our weather.

I saw this one which explains a little more about haze first.  It turns out that the bulk (2 thirds or so) of haze is not caused by the visible particles you can see in exhaust but is instead caused by the invisible aerosols which quickly merge with other compounds in the air to cause the haze.  After reading that article I looked through some of their older related articles. 

I’ve heard of this before but it is something good to keep in mind.  Aerosols cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space.  This means that as we clean up the pollution we spew into the atmosphere we have to consider how reducing the aerosols will affect the global climate.  Michael Mishchenko at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York has performed a study that shows that aerosols have reduced by 20 percent since 1991.  That could explain why the Earth is warming faster than climate models had predicted.  At least, if they didn’t take into account the effect of reducing the aerosols.  Another article at Earth & Sky mentions that scientist Lorraine Remer of the Goddard Space Flight Center has shown that aerosols counteract 20 - 30 percent of greenhouse gas warming.

Mark Jacobson at Stanford University has stated that aerosols also tend to slow down the wind which reduces evaporation and therefore rain.  He says that in California the aerosol pollution reduced the water supply by about two to five percent.

Every time I read about a study that tries to explain some quirk of quantum mechanics or gravity by using more dimensions I get a little smirk on my face.  I just can’t help it.  It seems to me that a lot of theories  (such as parts of string theory) are based on people just making crap up and saying, well that sort of works as long as we tweak these values over here and adjust those formulas over there and insert this new constant here.  Ok, yes, they could very well be right.  Yes, they are far smarter than me and know way more.  I’m not saying that I don’t think there aren’t other dimensions.  It just twists my brain when I see people inventing new dimensions to solve a problem.  While it may be absolutely logical to do so it seems like a bit of a cop out to me unless your theory is testable or at least based on some real evidence.

The latest example is a possible explanation of dark energy.  Dark energy is that force we can’t seem to identify that is pushing the universe apart.  So, what is it?  I don’t know.  NewScientist reports Brian Greene and Janna Levin of Columbia University in New York have sketched out a possible solution involving quantum vibrations contained within 0.01 millimeter sized dimensions.  The most interesting thing about this idea, unlike so many others, though is that it should be testable.  According to their theory gravity would become stronger at distances of less than 0.01 millimeter.  So, if they are right we should be able to tell.  So far they have demonstrated that gravity is not any stronger in the 0.1 millimeter range so they are getting close.  It’ll be interesting to see where this leads.

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