Why WSJ Blows

James Taranto, the font of intellectual excrement that writes for OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web Today”, has tapped an article in Nature.com to bolster his moronic right-wing view of science. Tananto quotes the following:

Our planet's air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

In typical form, Taranto accepts the results of the study insofar as they confirm a reduction of particulate pollutants, but not insofar as such a reduction “may add to the problems of global warming”; a classic example of the right-wing’s capacity to absorb scientific findings. Scientists are so silly! If the air is cleaner, how can there be such a thing as global warming!?

Here’s a snippet from the article that Taranto conveniently ignores:

…black particulate matter in the air has been contributing a cooling effect to the ground. "It is clear that the greenhouse effect has been partly masked in the past by air pollution," says Andreas Macke, a meteorologist at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany.

My point in mentioning any of this is simple: political ideologues (of any stripe) are the wrong place to turn for scientific (i.e. factual) information. They spin it. They convert truth into bullshit and have absolutely no interest in understanding reality. Taranto only understands global warming as a political hacky sack; nothing more. Heat-trapping gases don’t necessarily trap light. That’s a fact.

ADDENDUM: By the way, global warming is a result of heat being admitted into the atmosphere and not being let out.