The Sun??

[LIBRA]

I think somethings going on with me, I have been outside since its warmed up here and yesterday I was outside at a lake swimming and laying around all day with no sun block or anything, and I didnt burn or tan, nothing at all!

Not that I wanted to burn or tan I just think its weird that the sun is doing nothing to me, I am Italian and normally I tan when I walk outside for a 1/2 hour but this year, nothing.

I push mow my property, it takes like 3-4 hours and I never have anything from that either, no lines from my shirt no pink cheeks, its starting to worry me, anyone have any thoughts on why my skin is blocking the sun, I am not sure what to call it?

[nappydread]

....that sounds pretty strange libra...
maybe your body is producing chemical sunblock somehow :confused:
i got this from google...

The most well-known chemical sunblock is zinc oxide. Other common chemical sunblocks are talc, titanium dioxide, and red vetenary petrolatum

...are you taking any zinc supplements?

peace

[LIBRA]

Nope no zinc, I am not sure what is going on.........I havent even been taking my vitamins lately, who knows my body must be producing something it wasnt before, I looked it up but I didnt find much on the net.

[unclejoe]

any mediterranean heritage in your family?
melanin is nature's sunblock.

[Pedata]

When I start getting outside more it takes a while for any tan to show up. I think the body has to adjust a bit, then finally get in gear.


Peace

[LIBRA]

My grandparents on both sides came here from Sicily, so I am full blooded Sicilian and I am usually brown the first or second time in the sun and I am not getting anything now, I am sure its ok its just odd. Or maybe its a sign I am getting older, my body is changing.

[treehugger]

Libra, I have never, lifelong, had much of a reaction to the sun. Either burning or tanning.

I'm wondering if there's just more pollution in the air bringing down UV levels????

Kath

[toman]

I have pretty pale skin thanks to my more or less half Irishness. I don't get tan, I just stay white until I burn, which takes a bit of doing. I think this year I might go to a tanning place as an experiment to see if it's actually possible for me to get tan, because while I don't mind being not tan, I don't really like being either super pale in the summer or sunburned all the time.

[toman]

Oh, and the sun is going to 'splode soon, and we'll all be vaporised instantly. :D

[Azrael]

I'm wondering if there's just more pollution in the air bringing down UV levels????

Haha not a bad guess, tree is right. Pity you didn’t come up with that one 30 years ago m8

Indeed there has been a loss

I watched a BBC documentary about it some time ago, the phenomenon
is called Global dimming :nature-sm



Global Dimming
Horizon producer David Sington on why predictions about the Earth's climate will need to be re-examined.


We are all seeing rather less of the Sun. Scientists looking at five decades of sunlight measurements have reached the disturbing conclusion that the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface has been gradually falling. Paradoxically, the decline in sunlight may mean that global warming is a far greater threat to society than previously thought.

The effect was first spotted by Gerry Stanhill, an English scientist working in Israel. Comparing Israeli sunlight records from the 1950s with current ones, Stanhill was astonished to find a large fall in solar radiation. "There was a staggering 22% drop in the sunlight, and that really amazed me," he says.

Intrigued, he searched out records from all around the world, and found the same story almost everywhere he looked, with sunlight falling by 10% over the USA, nearly 30% in parts of the former Soviet Union, and even by 16% in parts of the British Isles. Although the effect varied greatly from place to place, overall the decline amounted to 1-2% globally per decade between the 1950s and the 1990s.

Gerry called the phenomenon global dimming, but his research, published in 2001, met with a sceptical response from other scientists. It was only recently, when his conclusions were confirmed by Australian scientists using a completely different method to estimate solar radiation, that climate scientists at last woke up to the reality of global dimming.

Dimming appears to be caused by air pollution. Burning coal, oil and wood, whether in cars, power stations or cooking fires, produces not only invisible carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas responsible for global warming) but also tiny airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and other pollutants.

This visible air pollution reflects sunlight back into space, preventing it reaching the surface. But the pollution also changes the optical properties of clouds. Because the particles seed the formation of water droplets, polluted clouds contain a larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. Recent research shows that this makes them more reflective than they would otherwise be, again reflecting the Sun's rays back into space.

Scientists are now worried that dimming, by shielding the oceans from the full power of the Sun, may be disrupting the pattern of the world's rainfall. There are suggestions that dimming was behind the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1970s and 1980s. There are disturbing hints the same thing may be happening today in Asia, home to half the world's population. "My main concern is global dimming is also having a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoon," says Prof Veerhabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world's leading climate scientists. "We are talking about billions of people." http://www.happyhippie.com/vb/images/smilies/music-smiley-012.gif

But perhaps the most alarming aspect of global dimming is that it may have led scientists to underestimate the true power of the greenhouse effect. They know how much extra energy is being trapped in the Earth's atmosphere by the extra carbon dioxide (CO2) we have placed there. What has been surprising is that this extra energy has so far resulted in a temperature rise of just 0.6°C.

This has led many scientists to conclude that the present-day climate is less sensitive to the effects of carbon dioxide than it was, say, during the ice age, when a similar rise in CO2 led to a temperature rise of 6°C. But it now appears the warming from greenhouse gases has been offset by a strong cooling effect from dimming - in effect two of our pollutants have been cancelling each other out. This means that the climate may in fact be more sensitive to the greenhouse effect than thought. :eek:

If so, then this is bad news, according to Dr Peter Cox, one of the world's leading climate modellers. As things stand, CO2 levels are projected to rise strongly over coming decades, whereas there are encouraging signs that particle pollution is at last being brought under control. "We're going to be in a situation, unless we act, where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up. That means we'll get reduced cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's a problem for us," says Cox.

Even the most pessimistic forecasts of global warming may now have to be drastically revised upwards. That means a temperature rise of 10°C by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable. That is unless we act urgently to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases.


Here's all the interesting stuff if you want to read on, be warned it's quite long but V interesting - Click me (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_trans.shtml)

[LIBRA]

I see your sig is a mark twain quote, I work in Elmira NY, his home town.

Anyway, I am now thinking maybe its not me, which I am glad that theres not something wrong with me, but the sun dimming that SUCKS!!! I wish there was more to be done, how could it possibly be reversed now?

I have never seen smog, I couldnt imagine it must be sick, I have never waited longer then a few minutes in traffic either, YA for country living!!

[Azrael]

Ground all the airlines permanently it seems would be a good start.

The main problem however, with fixing the problem is very strange.
God must be looking out for us or something,.
We seem to have struck a very strange balance between Global dimming and global warming that is preserving the planet at reactively the same temperature it was a few decades ago.

Think about it a bit like a bullet plugging a wound

If we stop global dimming tomorrow the real effect of how much of a problem, we actually really caused with global warming would become apparent ( think day after tomorrow material )

DR DAVID TRAVIS: The nine eleven study showed that if you remove a contributor to Global Dimming, jet contrails, just for a three day period, we see an immediate response of the surface of temperature. Do the same thing globally we might see a large scale increase in global warming.

NARRATOR: This is the real sting in the tail. Solve the problem of Global Dimming and the world could get considerably hotter. And this is not just theory, it may already be happening. In Western Europe the steps we have taken to cut air pollution have started to bear fruit in a noticeable improvement in air quality and even a slight reduction in Global Dimming over the last few years. Yet at the same time, after decades in which they held steady, European temperatures have started rapidly to rise culminating in the savage summer of 2003.

Forest fires devastated Portugal. Glaciers melted in the Alps. And in France people died by the thousand. Could this be the penalty of reducing Global Dimming without tackling the root cause of global warming?

DR BEATE LIEPERT: We thought we live in a global warming world, um but this is actually er not right. We lived in a global warming plus a Global Dimming world, and now we are taking out Global Dimming. So we end up with the global warming world, which will be much worse than we thought it will be, much hotter.

NARRATOR: This is the crux of the problem. While the greenhouse effect has been warming the planet, it now seems Global Dimming has been cooling it down. So the warming caused by carbon dioxide has been hidden from us by the cooling from air pollution. But that situation is now starting to change.

DR PETER COX (Hadley Centre, Met Office): We're gonna be in a situation unless we act where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up, CO2 will be going up and particles will be dropping off and that means we'll get an accelerated warming. We'll get a double whammy, we'll get, we'll get reducing cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's, that's a problem for us.

NARRATOR: And that's not all. Climatologists like Peter Cox have begun to worry that Global Dimming has led them to underestimate the true power of global warming. They fear that the Earth could be far more vulnerable to greenhouse gases than they had previously thought.

DR PETER COX: We've got two competing effects really, that we've got the greenhouse effect, which has tended to warm up the climate. But then we've got this other effect that's much stronger than we thought, which is a cooling effect that comes from particles in the atmosphere. And they're competing with one another. And we know the climate's moved to a warmer state by about point six of a degree over the last hundred years. So the whole thing's moved this way. If it turns out that the cooling is stronger than we thought then the warming also is a lot stronger than we thought, and that means the climate's more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we originally thought, and it means our models may be under sensitive to carbon dioxide.

NARRATOR: The models that everyone has been using to forecast climate change predict a maximum warming of 5 degrees by the end of the century. But Cox and his colleagues now fear those models may be wrong. Temperatures could rise twice as fast as they previously thought with irreversible damage just twenty-five years away.

DR PETER COX: If we don't do anything by about twenty thirty we could have a global warming of exceeding two degrees, and at that point it's believed the Greenland ice sheet would start to melt in a way that you wouldn't be able to stop it once it started it, it would melt. Take a long time to melt but ultimately it would lead to a sea level rise of seven or eight metres.

NARRATOR: Once the Greenland ice cap begins to melt, nothing will stop it. Many of the world's major cities will be living on borrowed time. Decade by decade, the risk of catastrophic flooding would increase inexorably. But unless action is taken it won't stop there. Because after Greenland, the world's tropical rainforests will start to wither in the heat.

DR PETER COX: 2040 it could be four degrees warmer, the climate change could have led to big drying particularly in the Amazon Basin, that would make the forest unsustainable, we'd expect the forest to catch fire probably, turn into savannah and maybe ultimately even desert if it gets really really dry as our model suggests.

NARRATOR: And as the rainforest burnt away, it would release vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, driving global warming still further. Cox calculates that in just a century, the world could be 10 degrees hotter, a warming more rapid than any in Earth history. If this were to happen, the landscape of England would be utterly transformed.

DR PETER COX: We're talking about a change from er a lush, moist climate, environment like this, to a North African climate in just a few decades or a hundred years.

NARRATOR: Most British plant species could not survive a North African climate. With vegetation dying everywhere, soil erosion would become a severe problem. From a green and pleasant land, England would become a country of extremes, with winter flooding giving way to summer dust storms. And it will be far worse elsewhere.

DR PETER COX: You can imagine ten degree warming in the UK in a hundred years is catastrophic. Ten degree warming in a hot country already makes it essentially uninhabitable.

NARRATOR: And just when one might think things could get no worse in the far North a ten degree warming might be enough to release a vast natural store of greenhouse gas bigger than all the oil and coal reserves of the planet.



This global dimming is a huge environmental problem in itself it's believed to have caused billions of deaths already and been responsible for the Asian Tsuami - However at the moment it's negating the effects of global warning

Without it we could already have experienced an extinction level event.

[nappydread]

...seems to be a perfect balancing act to me
:bandit:

peace

[Azrael]

lol apart from the billions of deaths caused by dimming :rolleyes:

[Dead Fan]

So pollution is causing global warming by trapping uv rays, and global dimming by not letting uv rays in. Damn thats some magic pollution.

[artisticphantom]

I think somethings going on with me, I have been outside since its warmed up here and yesterday I was outside at a lake swimming and laying around all day with no sun block or anything, and I didnt burn or tan, nothing at all!

Not that I wanted to burn or tan I just think its weird that the sun is doing nothing to me, I am Italian and normally I tan when I walk outside for a 1/2 hour but this year, nothing.

I push mow my property, it takes like 3-4 hours and I never have anything from that either, no lines from my shirt no pink cheeks, its starting to worry me, anyone have any thoughts on why my skin is blocking the sun, I am not sure what to call it?

you've got the new hybrid hippie skin and the government wants to end your existence because too many of your skin typed friends could ruin the coppertone corporation! lol( just kidding):mixed-smi