What's dimming your globe?

When you look at the challenges facing your organization what are you missing? Are you seeing the actual effect of the challenges or are there other phenomena taking place, forces you can’t see that are altering your perceptions?

Earlier this week I watched a documentary on PBS about a phenomenon called Global Dimming. It has nothing to do with humans getting dumber. Global Dimming is “a gradual reduction in the amount of global direct irradiance at the Earth's surface and it is thought to have been caused by an increase in particulates such as sulfur aerosols in the atmosphere due to human action," Wikipedia. Basically the pollution humans create is causing less sunlight to reach the surface of the earth thereby creating a cooling effect.

But what about global warming? This is where it gets interesting-okay, maybe I'm a nerd.

So basically the Global Dimming phenomenon is cooling the earth while greenhouse gases are causing the earth to warm. The trouble is Global Dimming is masking the actual effects of Global Warming. Imagine the value of green house gases creating a +5 in value and the Global Dimming phenomenon is creating a -3. (Bear with me this will get a little thick but you'll soon see the light at the end of the tunnel).

So when we study humans' effect on the earth it appears we are only creating a value of 2 in warming when however our actual effect is obscured by the masking effect of Global Dimming. Because Global Warming currently has a stronger force than Global Dimming it is easy to miss. As a result most of the scientific models regarding Global Warming are incorrect as they don't reflect the actual effect humans have had on the earth in regards to climate.

As you can maybe imagine the implications are tremendous. I won't get into all the scientific theory but imagine trying to mitigate Global Warming without taking into account the effects of Global Dimming. The results could be unexpected and catastrophic.

So before making drastic changes it is important to ask yourself "What's dimming my globe?"