Resumen de The darkening earth.
This article discusses the amount of sun that reaches the surface of the Earth due to the atmospheric conditions. Much to their surprise, scientists have found that less sunlight has been reaching the earth's surface in recent decades. A separate analysis by climatologist Beate Liepert of Columbia University and her colleagues has found a 1.3 percent per decade decrease in solar radiation over the period from 1961 to 1990, with especially strong declines in North America. At the May American Geophysical Union meeting in Montreal, Michael Roderick and Graham Farquhar of the Australian National University presented results that extend the finding across the Southern Hemisphere as well. By the conventional wisdom, higher global temperatures mean that more water evaporates from the seas and falls as rain on land. Shabtai Cohen notes that the dimming effect could have consequences on farming--as a rule of thumb, agricultural productivity of light-loving plants such as peppers and tomatoes declines by 1 percent for each 1 percent decline in sunlight.
