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Earth lightens up After 30 years of dimming, the planet's surface is brightening, an international collaboration concludes this week in Science magazineEarth's surface has been getting brighter for more than a decade, a reversal from a dimming trend that may accelerate warming at the surface and unmask the full effect of greenhouse warming, according to an exhaustive new study of the solar energy that reaches land.Ever since a report in the late 1980s uncovered a 4 to 6 percent decline of sunlight reaching the planet's surface over 30 years since 1960, atmospheric scientists have been trying out theories about why this would be and how it would relate to the greenhouse effect, the warming caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gasses that trap heat in the atmosphere.
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