The Global Dimming Paradox

Global dimming is the idea that as we pollute the atmosphere, many of those pollutants are causing us to warm up greenhouse gases like CO2 or methane. And some of those aerosols actually act to increase albedo, which if you remember from previous episodes is the reflectivity of sunlight. So basically our industrialization is causing simultaneously both warming and cooling to take place in the atmosphere. The net effect is warming. But the paradox of all of this is if we were to stop all industrial activity, we would also lose that cooling effect. We'd end up losing it much faster than we'd lose the heating effect,. Which would actually cause a fairly rapid increase in the overall global temperature