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Originally Posted by jaaaman  No... the article clearly states that the sun is responsible for the global warming, as greenhouse ozone and aerosols have thinned significantly and have allowed more sunlight in to warm the earths surface. |
It said all of these things except "the sun is responsible for the global warming."
What it said is this: "Knowing what aerosols are doing globally gives us an important missing piece of the big picture of the forces at work on climate."
It is fact that increased amounts of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere will warm the planet. That is not under debate. The debate is about
how much it will warm the planet. These findings, if anything, indicate that maybe less of the warming is caused by carbon dioxide than previously thought.
Let's take a look at this graph:
Image:Radiative-forcings.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Look at the two bars labelled "aerosols". These bars estimate the amount of cooling aerosols have had on our planet. The article you posted suggests that these bars really should be 20% shorter. If that is true, then we should expect some of those "heating" bars to be shorter too. However, those bars will not be reduced completely: the warming caused by carbon dioxide must still be very high.
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Anyway, (I'm not sure of the exact numbers or dates) the temperature of the Earth has warmed up only about 1 degree in the last 250 years or so. . . that hardly sounds like a case for "global warming" due to environmental pollution.
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I believe the exact number, in Celcius, is something like 0.6 or 0.7 degrees.
Now, a change like this may not seem significant, but take a look at this graph to see how it compares to years past (the colors are explained below the graph):
Image:2000 Year Temperature Comparison.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The current temperature is higher than times before man-made aerosols, which suggests that aerosols are not the primary factor in this change.
I should also say this: the global temperature is not increasing at the same rate everywhere in the world. In land areas, the temperature increase has been greater than over oceans. The temperature increase is especially high over the north and south poles. This means that although the average temperature change may be low, not every place on Earth has experienced such a low change. For most places that people actually live, the change has been high.
Further, this temperature change of less than one degree Celcius is not the real problem. The problem is that scientists think the change is caused primarily by increases in carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is already very high and is only going to keep increasing. So if they are correct, then future temperature increases will be higher than this.
Also, the primary concerns of global warming include a melting of the polar ice caps (which would flood many areas and perhaps shut down ocean currents, causing ice ages on certain continents), a drying up of groundwater which many places depend on, and increased tropical storms. It does not take a huge temperature change to cause these things.