Human activity has been releasing large masses of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for two centuries now, and yet meteorologists have recorded only a mild warming trend for most of that period – until the idea of anthropogenic global warming was widely introduced two decades ago. At that point, “evidence” of a drastically increased rate of warming began pouring into the scientific and mainstream media.

The most famous example is the controversial “hockey stick” pattern for the mean global temperature alleged by some, which refers to the sudden increase in the rate of warming in the years just after people began looking for sudden increases in the rate of warming. Graphing this drastic upswing onto the tail end of the mild increase of the past few hundred years produces a line resembling a hockey stick.

Al Gore then turned the hockey stick into a nascent jai-alai racquet with his claims of a tipping point to global climate change. Unless Earth surrenders to Al now, the sudden increase in the rate of warming will suddenly increase – possibly because he intends to look really hard for an increased increase.

At first, I thought such effects might be the climatological equivalent of the popular “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” wherein the simple act of observing a phenomenon changes it. But now there is a more scientific explanation being offered for the recently found increase in warming: global dimming.

Upon first hearing of global dimming, it seemed a certainty to me, given the state of our public education system. But then I found out the term refers to altered levels of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth, and I had to reassess.

Global dimming is a frightening worldwide change in climate that occurred for over a century before it ebbed; yet, it went totally unnoticed because no one was carefully looking for it. Now, that’s frightening. The effect was caused by pollution – specifically, particulate matter suspended in the atmosphere from the burning of coal and other “dirty” fuels following the Industrial Revolution. These small particles acted as seeding centers for the formation of condensed water vapor droplets, sometimes known as “clouds.” These “clouds” then reflected a substantial part of the sun’s energy back into space, resulting in a slightly dimmer Earth.

This could have resulted in a global chilling, but thankfully the carbon dioxide being emitted by the same industrial fuels initiated a greenhouse effect that carefully canceled out the cooling threat by trapping more heat from the anemic sunlight that did make it through the “clouds.”

The climate looked stable, but that’s just because it was so screwed up with simultaneous global dimming and warming. This resulted in global diddly.

Like so much else in history, everything was fine until the 1960s, when environmentalists began looking for things and found particulate pollution in the atmosphere. They then passed clean air laws that, over the next twenty years, resulted in the removal of the protective layer of soot that coal had so long provided the Earth’s fragile atmosphere. This ended the global dimming, gave free reign to global warming, and quite possibly increased the incidence of melanoma around Pittsburgh as the Sun’s harmful rays shone unfiltered onto an unsuspecting public.

So now we can perceive why things have gotten so out of control on the global warming front: clean air laws. We’re practically naked now.

However, don’t despair. There is good news ahead. Since environmental laws are forcing more and more development toward China and the rest of the emerging economies – all of which are heavy users of natural unfiltered fuels such as coal – the balance of nature could soon be restored.

Perhaps this explains why the environmental patients are so adamant that nations such as China and India should be exempted from the punitive Kyoto Protocol on global warming, despite the fact that overall carbon dioxide emissions cannot be curtailed without including so much of the world’s population. Kyoto proponents know that – unlike the West’s pure, clean, and dangerous carbon dioxide emissions – the developing world’s carbon dioxide is safely amalgamated with healthy, protective soot.

Ah, soot... Nature’s sunscreen.