| johnathonmerritt said: You make a good point with the smog warnings. It seems to me that the pollutants in the atmosphere should be making it thicker, blocking the sun. That should create a cooling effect. Our ice ages have been created by natural pollutants blocking the sun, so why wouldn't our current pollutants have the same effect? |
Many of those pollutants are too heavy to float all the way up to the ozone layer. Many of them stay in the trophosphere. Not to mention you are completely missing the distinction between the initial solar energy that enters the atmosphere and the resultant heat produced because of that energy.
The hottest spots on the earth are closest to sea level. The sun's rays strike the earth, and are absorbed by the earth, which raises the temperature of the earth. The earth re-radiates the energy at a wavelength dependent on the temperature of the earth. The air is able to absorb the infrared radiation, and becomes warmer. Heat is simply the movement of molecules. And not all molecules absorb energy in the same way.
So what you are saying may hold some truth, but infrared radiation being re-radiated (or trapped) in the atmosphere has a major effect as well. Not to mention there is a high concentration of water on the surface of the earth that absorbs and keeps that heat near the surface of the earth.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
