We have been warned. Last Friday, we watched a documentary about Global Dimming.

The film tackled the possible causes, effects of it and how scientists arrived in such conclusion. So what is global dimming? It is a recently recognized phenomenon of the gradual decrease of the amount of sunlight and direct radiation entering the Earth. This creates a cooling effect global cooling, that may have partially covered the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming. It is said to be the reverse of the Global Warming phenomena. Global dimming is said to be caused by all the Greenhouse gases that can be found in our atmosphere, which cause dense clouds to make the suns rays to be reflected back out into space and the Earth become much colder. Consumption of fossil fuels, burning of crude oil and diesel are also one of the contributing factors for the increase in global dimming. It is most likely caused by the increase of aerosol particles in the atmosphere, which are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These by-products, on the other hand, also change the properties of clouds. Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds, make those clouds more reflective. More of the suns heat and energy is then reflected back into space.

The pollutants that cause global dimming can also cause serious health and environmental problems. One of the effects that were shown in the documentary is the famine in Africa. Climatologists studying the global dimming believe that the reflection of heat have made waters in the northern hemisphere cooler. Thus, less rain has formed in key areas and crucial rainfall has failed to arrive over the Sahel in Northern Africa. According to their global dimming models, they concluded that whatever came out of our power stations, exhaust pipes and etc resulted to the deaths of million people in Africa. This is not only seen in Africa, even Asia is likely to be affected. The Asian monsoons bring rainfall to half the worlds population. Billions of people could be affected if this air pollution and global dimming has unfavourable impact on the Asian monsoons.

Though cleaning up emissions can be the simplest solution to global dimming, if global dimming is the only one addressed, the effects of global warming will increase even more. The documentary film marked that the impacts of addressing global dimming only would increase global warming more rapidly.

These could lead to an increase of 10 degrees centigrade in temperature over the next 100 years, not the standard 5 degrees which most models currently predict, and there could be a rapid warming.

The purpose of this documentary is not a prediction. It is an admonition of what might or will happen if we will just ignore these and doing nothing with the greenhouse gases. We have been warned for several times. There are a lot of movies and films about these environmental phenomena that served as warnings. We should change our way of living, and that should be done now because we are running out of time. Lets do this now, for it will be for our future generation.