The Breaking Views blog is administered by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at NZCPR.com. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
I’ll begin with two graphs put out in previous articles.
First, the familiar graph going well back in geological time of the Earth’s temperature and the Carbon Dioxide levels. This graph has been assembled using proxies- physical characteristics such as tree rings which give and idea of temperature at the time and ice cores which can give the Carbon Dioxide content.
It’s all to do with Aerosols. In the atmosphere, aerosols in general, block the sun’s radiation from reaching the Earth. Aerosols are actually small particles or droplets, that float in the air. They come in many forms, both natural and industrial and include, sea salt, mineral dust, ash, sulphates, nitrates and black carbon (soot). So we are talking about wildfire smoke, volcanic gases, and many human activities. Soot has a warming effect but this is well overshadowed by the cooling effect of the other aerosols. In fact no one has taken much note of the cooling effect of aerosols, but scientists lately have found that their cooling effect may be greater than realised.
One of the things we’ve learnt about climate change politics over the years is that their predictions are always wrong.
