RP355 Is It Getting Darker in Here?

 RP355 Is It Getting Darker in Here?

In the mid-1980s, a Japanese researcher named Atsumu Ohmura made a stunning discovery. According to his data, the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface had declined by 10 percent over the past 30 years. He had discovered what the science community now calls "global dimming."
Global dimming is the reduction of overall sunlight reaching the earth's surface, and less sunlight means less heat. Scientists believe that certain pollutants in the earth's atmosphere, like carbon and sulphates, cause global dimming. These pollutants create clouds that are bigger and more absorbent, which means they can reflect more sunlight back into space. Simply put, harmful pollution in our atmosphere may have also been cooling down the planet for hundreds of years.
Governments around the world have restricted these pollutants over the past decade, reversing the process of global dimming. Climatologists observing this transition have discovered that global dimming impacts global warming more than we previously thought.
Think of global dimming and global warming as two different processes that occur at the same time. Global warming heats up the planet and global dimming cools it down. As global dimming slowly disappears, the true extent of global warming is gradually revealed.
So, does this mean we should actually increase the amount of these pollutants in our atmosphere in order to combat global warming? Some scientists believe that this is exactly what we should do. It's not even a new idea. In 1974, Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko suggested that we burn sulfur in the atmosphere in order to create a haze that will protect us from global warming. However, several other scientists believe that an increase in these pollutants would cause too many health problems, like asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
The discovery of global dimming shows us how little we know about how our climate works. After all, solar radiation had been falling steadily for decades before anyone even noticed. Given the fact that most global warming predictions don't even take global dimming into account, is the world about to get a lot hotter, a lot faster than we think?