Clouds like a semi-transparent parasol
Climate researcher from the program “Make Our Planet Great Again“ coming from the US to the Goethe University
The climate change researcher Dr. Anna Possner is leaving the renowned Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford and will join the Department for Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the Goethe University. Thanks to a one million euro grant, she will start her own research group in Frankfurt. This group will cooperate with the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), where it will also be located.
Anna Possner’s research focuses on layered clouds in the lowest kilometres of the atmosphere, which act as a semi-transparent parasol for Earth’s surface. They reflect a significant portion of incoming sunlight, but only marginally affect Earth’s heat emission. They thus have a cooling effect on Earth’s surface. Any sheet of low-level cloud may span hundreds of kilometres and all together they span around one fifth of Earth’s oceans. Changes in their areal extent or reflective properties can result in significant changes to Earth’s surface temperature.
In some regions of the globe, the mid-latitudes and the Arctic, these clouds consist not only of water drops, but may contain a mixture of ice particles and water drops. The proportion of water drops to ice crystals affects the clouds’ reflective properties. “While we have hypotheses about how the radiative properties may be affected within a single cloud,” Anna Possner explains, “we are limited in our understanding of how the presence of ice crystals impacts the areal coverage and reflective properties on the scale of an entire cloud field.” She will use satellite retrievals and sophisticated numerical models to help answer this question.
Since completing her doctoral dissertation at the ETH Zurich, Anna Possner, who was born in Jena, has studied the impact of particles on the reflective properties of clouds. During this time she focused in particular on low-lying clouds over the oceans, where she quantified and evaluated the impact of ship emissions on clouds. During her postdoc years at the ETH Zurich and the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, she extended her analyses to include mixed-phase clouds.
The German-French program “Make Our Planet Great Again“ seeks to support the creation of solid facts as a basis for political decisions in the fields “climate change”, “earth system research” and “energy transformation”. Of the 13 scientists selected for Germany, seven are in the US, two were most recently working in Great Britain and one each is in Switzerland, Canada, South Korea and Australia. They were selected during a two-stage process out of approximately 300 applications.
Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer has pointed out his book, 
The Great Global Warming Blunder:
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.”
And lo and behold, evidence of this has been found:
In a nutshell, with a −1.6%per decade change in cloud cover during 1954–2005, it becomes a climate forcing. While China is not the world, it bears consideration. The Hockey Schtick reports:
New paper finds significant, natural decrease in cloudiness over past 50 years
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See Figure 11 from my 2017 paper
Fig.11 Tropical cloud cover and global air temperature (29)
“The global millennial temperature rising trend seen in Fig11 (29) from 1984 to the peak and trend inversion point in the Hadcrut3 data at 2003/4 is the inverse correlative of the Tropical Cloud Cover fall from 1984 to the Millennial trend change at 2002. The lags in these trends from the solar activity peak at 1991-Fig 10 – are 12 and 11 years respectively. These correlations suggest possible teleconnections between the GCR flux, clouds and global temperatures”
Here is the abstract. – check Figs 10 and 12.
The coming cooling: usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers.
mail: norpag@att.net
DOI: 10.1177/0958305X16686488
Energy & Environment
0(0) 1–18
(C )The Author(s) 2017
Journals.sagepub.com/home/eae
ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in time in relation to the current phases of those different interacting natural quasi periodicities. Evidence is presented specifying the timing and amplitude of the natural 60+/- year and, more importantly, 1,000 year periodicities (observed emergent behaviors) that are so obvious in the temperature record. Data related to the solar climate driver is discussed and the solar cycle 22 low in the neutron count (high solar activity) in 1991 is identified as a solar activity millennial peak and correlated with the millennial peak -inversion point – in the RSS temperature trend in about 2003. The cyclic trends are projected forward and predict a probable general temperature decline in the coming decades and centuries. Estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling are made. If the real climate outcomes follow a trend which approaches the near term forecasts of this working hypothesis, the divergence between the IPCC forecasts and those projected by this paper will be so large by 2021 as to make the current, supposedly actionable, level of confidence in the IPCC forecasts untenable.
“Anna Possner’s research focuses on layered clouds in the lowest kilometres of the atmosphere, which act as a semi-transparent parasol for Earth’s surface. They reflect a significant portion of incoming sunlight, but only marginally affect Earth’s heat emission”
Umm … LOL! You probably need to be an academic climatologist to claim such nonsense. Otherwise the facts are pretty obvious. Clouds are emitting – or rather reflecting – huge amounts of radiation back to the surface. Just take a look at this video, that has been taken at surface temperatures around 5-10°C (not by myself!):
That means low level opaque clouds will provide almost as much radiation as the surface itself. If the surface (which is mandatory for GHE “fake”-model) emitted like 390W/m2 and the cloud feedback was only 30W/m2 (as in the AR5 of the IPCC) such clouds might only cover like 30/390 = 7.7% of the surface.
You may want to consider all kind of abundances of different kinds of clouds and so on, but you will never get to a mere 30W/m2. And that is exactly the problem with the faked GHE, because it insists on that clouds just “marginally affect Earth’s heat emission”. No, they do not! They have a massive impact! An impact that climatologists wrongly like to affiliate with GHGs.
I find articles of this nature extraordinary as they reveal that the scientists involved have NOT done their homework. The basic thermodynamics of water is well known and if you understand it you will know that it is gravity which determines the mean temperature of the earth and that does not change very much. It is to do with the temperature at which water starts to evaporate depending on the prevailing pressure which in turn is a function of gravity.
Anecdotal evidence shows that water boils at 100 C at sea level and merely boils a bit faster if you turn the heat up. This is a specific point in the curve and remains constant at this 100 deg.C more or less. Those two observations should tell them all they need to know if they then apply the thermodynamics to explain why.
The process is the Rankine Cycle and provides the thermostat for the earth albeit with constraints. Water is very good at cooling things but not so good at warming should temperatures drop too far.
Merely looking at the Steam Tables reveals that some 680 WattsHrs on energy for every Kilogram of water evaporated from the surface winds up being dissipated into the atmosphere and beyond. And all this is done in reaction to variations in enthalpy/heat input.
Some day this might dawn on the green blob and if you doubt what I say ask yourself why in the history of the earth the temperature has remained so remarkably constant.