The recent paper by Tselioudis et al., titled “Contraction of the World’s Storm-Cloud Zones the Primary Contributor to the 21st Century Increase in the Earth’s Sunlight Absorption”, is a fascinating—and deeply problematic—addition to the climate science canon. It offers yet another reminder that so-called “settled science” in climate modeling is anything but settled. In fact, it inadvertently illustrates how fragile the predictive power of climate models is, especially when fundamental atmospheric processes like cloud coverage are shown to be both more dynamic and less understood than previously claimed.
Not that any of this is news to WUWT readers. Dr. Roy Spencer has been noting almost identical observations for over a decade as noted here,
Now let’s look at the broader scientific community catching up to Dr. Spencer.
Abstract
Recent Earth energy budget observations show an increase in the sunlight absorbed by the Earth of 0.45 W/m2 per decade, caused primarily by a decrease in cloud reflection. Here we decompose the solar radiative budget trends into general circulation and cloud controlling process components. Regimes representing the midlatitude and tropical storm zones are defined, and the trends in the areal coverage of those regimes which are potentially induced by circulation changes are separated from trends in the cloud radiative effect within each regime which are potentially induced by changes in local cloud controlling processes. The regime area change component, which manifests itself as a contraction of the midlatitude and tropical storm regimes, constitutes the largest contribution to the solar absorption trend, causing decreased sunlight reflection of 0.37 W/m2 per decade. This result provides a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of the 21st century increase of the Earth’s solar absorption.
Key Points
- Satellite observations show that in the past 24 years the worlds storm cloud zones have been contracting at a rate of 1.5%–3% per decade
- This contraction allows more solar radiation to reach the Earth’s surface and constitutes the largest contribution to the observed 21st century trend of increased solar absorption
Plain Language Summary
Analysis of satellite observations shows that in the past 24 years the Earth’s storm cloud zones in the tropics and the middle latitudes have been contracting at a rate of 1.5%–3% per decade. This cloud contraction, along with cloud cover decreases at low latitudes, allows more solar radiation to reach the Earth’s surface. When the contribution of all cloud changes is calculated, the storm cloud contraction is found to be the main contributor to the observed increase of the Earth’s solar absorption during the 21st century.
To understand the full implications of this study, we need to parse its findings in plain terms. The paper concludes that the Earth has absorbed significantly more solar radiation over the past 24 years—0.45 W/m² per decade. The primary culprit? A reduction in cloud cover, specifically a contraction of the midlatitude and tropical storm-cloud zones. This change has resulted in less solar radiation being reflected back into space and more being absorbed by the Earth’s surface. Crucially, 0.37 W/m² of this uptick is attributed solely to this contraction in cloud coverage, a result of large-scale atmospheric circulation changes:
“This cloud contraction, along with cloud cover decreases at low latitudes, allows more solar radiation to reach the Earth’s surface. When the contribution of all cloud changes is calculated, the storm cloud contraction is found to be the main contributor to the observed increase of the Earth’s solar absorption during the 21st century.”
Let’s pause there. Climate science has long emphasized the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases—especially CO2—in trapping outgoing longwave radiation, contributing to surface warming. Yet here we have empirical satellite observations showing that changes in shortwave radiation absorption, due to cloud dynamics, dominate recent trends in Earth’s energy imbalance. That revelation alone should be enough to shake the very foundations of climate policy, which has funneled trillions into carbon control with scant attention paid to cloud feedback mechanisms.
More damning still is the admission that these changes are likely tied to “general circulation shifts,” specifically poleward movements of storm tracks and contractions of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). These are phenomena long suspected in model projections but never given such a central, quantifiable role in the planetary energy budget. And here’s the kicker: these circulation shifts are said to have emerged gradually, to the tune of 1.3% to 3% per decade:
“In all three zones, the area coverage of the L‐TCC regime shows statistically significant decreases with extremes of 1.84 ± 0.38% to 3.20 ± 0.97% per decade… indicating a contraction of the midlatitude storm regions and a narrowing of the ITCZ region.”
These aren’t theoretical projections—they are based on hard satellite data from the MODIS and CERES instruments. Models, by contrast, have only roughly hinted at these changes, and often fail to reproduce them with consistency.
The paper outlines that most of the shortwave cloud radiative effect (SWCRE) change—the key measure of how much solar energy is reflected by clouds—comes not from changes in cloud properties themselves, but from the shrinking geographic area of major cloud regimes:
“In all zones, the dominant trend is the SW cloud radiative warming that is coming from the contraction of the S‐SWCRE regimes and the corresponding expansion of the W‐SWCRE regimes.”
That’s the kind of subtle, high-leverage feedback mechanism that models tend to get wrong or underrepresent entirely. And that’s a problem. Because if your model can’t accurately simulate cloud regime shifts—which appear to contribute more than 80% of the increase in solar absorption—then your forecasts for future warming are at best incomplete, and at worst, wildly misleading.
Tselioudis et al. even admit this shortcoming, noting:
“It is imperative to test the skills of climate models in simulating the observed storm‐cloud area contraction, and to use both modeling and observational analyses to understand the interactions between atmospheric dynamics shifts and storm cloud changes.”
That’s bureaucratese for “we didn’t see this coming, and we’re not sure our models can catch up.” It’s reminiscent of NASA’s Gavin Schmidt’s recent handwringing over 2023’s “unexplainable” heat spike, suggesting that “we could be in uncharted territory.” Now, we have the chart. And it doesn’t point toward CO2 alone—it points to dynamic, cloud-driven changes that no carbon tax will stop.
What this paper also inadvertently confirms is the unreliability of using long-term climate models to dictate aggressive, disruptive policies like Net Zero. The models are missing key physical processes—cloud behavior, aerosol effects, and large-scale atmospheric shifts. As the paper notes:
“The general circulation shift component constitutes the dominant term of the recent increase in absorbed solar radiation and provides a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of the 21st century radiative warming and the large heat anomaly of 2023.”
Yet these shifts are only just beginning to be understood, and their driving forces—whether natural variability, solar activity, ocean cycles, or some interaction thereof—remain far from nailed down.
Worse still, the authors openly speculate that low-latitude cloud reductions could be driven by aerosol changes—particularly the decline in ship emissions:
“This component shows a significant cloud radiative warming of 0.21 W/m²/decade that can be attributed to aerosol indirect effects on clouds including effects from the reduction of aerosol ship emissions.”
That’s right: the same well-meaning efforts to reduce pollution from ocean-going vessels may have accelerated warming by allowing more sunlight to hit the surface. Climate mitigation whack-a-mole strikes again.
In sum, Tselioudis et al.’s paper is a quietly revolutionary work—not because it introduces a new alarmist narrative, but because it destabilizes the prevailing one. It shows that:
- Cloud feedbacks, especially those driven by circulation shifts, have enormous and previously underestimated impacts on Earth’s radiative balance.
- These changes are driven by complex, poorly understood dynamics that current climate models struggle to replicate.
- Policy decisions predicated on “settled science” have been made in the absence of understanding a major component of the Earth’s energy system.
If climate science were a functioning scientific discipline rather than a priesthood, this paper would trigger a major course correction. It would cast doubt on the simplistic link between CO2 and warming, redirecting focus toward cloud physics, ocean-atmosphere interactions, and circulation dynamics. It would foster humility in the face of atmospheric complexity—not arrogance born from model outputs.
But don’t expect that anytime soon. Instead, expect the usual suspects to spin this as evidence of “even worse than we thought” warming, conveniently omitting the part where their models didn’t predict it and their policies had nothing to do with it.
In the meantime, this paper should serve as ammunition for any skeptic pointing out the absurdity of building trillion-dollar policies on the backs of incomplete and overconfident simulations. The cloud regimes are shifting. The models aren’t keeping up. And neither is the narrative.
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For some reason, I am humming an old Joanie Mitchell song.
Warning from the attribution police: make that song author and performer Joni Mitchell.
Side note: some on the squad much prefer the cover by Judy Collins.
Yeah, I forgot the alternate spelling some fifty years later.
Was that the song about looking at clouds from both sides?
Maybe a more appropriate song would be the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”.
Well maybe, more appropriately, “I Can See Clearly Now”, composed and sung by Johnny Nash, released 1972 . . . interestingly shortly before the meme of “global warming” replaced the fear of a coming ice age.
You know the lyrics:
“Look all around, there’s nothin’ but blue skies
Look straight ahead, nothin’ but blue skies
. . .
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day”
BTW, “Here Comes the Sun” was released in 1969, while climate scientists were still “certain” of an impending ice age. /sarc
Big yellow Taxi:
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot
Shoo, bop, bop, bop, bop
Shoo, bop, bop, bop, bop
They took all the trees
Put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see ’em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot
Shoo, bop, bop, bop, bop
Shoo, bop, bop, bop, bop
I dig Joni. Amazing voice. A couple days ago we tried to see the trees around Crater Lake. The Smokey Bear-hatted gate guard demanded $30 per car. Gouged by my own gubment! Literal highway robbery! It was a beautiful, cool 60’s summer day so we took the sunny road home.
I would like to see that receding cloud cover come to Ireland…and stay there.
This agrees with earlier work (below).
There is a real possibility that human activity really did cause recent warming: by reducing aerosol pollution, not by increasing CO2.
Human emitted aerosols are cloud nucleating particles, so less pollution leads to less cloud.
Dübal, H.-R.; Vahrenholt, F.
Radiative Energy Flux Variation from
2001–2020. Atmosphere 2021, 12, 1297.
https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12101297
McLean, J. (2014) Late Twentieth-Century Warming
and Variations in Cloud Cover. Atmospheric and
Climate Sciences, 4, 727-742.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/acs.2014.44066
Goode, P. R., Pallé, E., Shoumko, A.,
Shoumko, S., Montañes-Rodriguez,
P., & Koonin, S. E. (2021). Earth’s
albedo 1998–2017 as measured from
earthshine. Geophysical Research
Letters, 48, e2021GL094888. https://doi.
Coincidentally, significant reductions in fuel (gasoline and diesel initially) sulfur reductions began to take place around 1990. Sulfur in jet fuel naturally fell also as a result of feedstock desulfurization. The global limit on sulfur content in bunker fuel oil was reduced from 3.50% to 0.50% by mass on January 1, 2020.
Exactement.
The original Clean Air Act, passed in 1970, required significant reductions in SO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants in the USA, in response to claims of “acid rain” (rain falling through air polluted with sulfur oxides, producing dilute sulfurous acid).
Several years were required for power plant owners to install SOx scrubbers on their stacks, so that the actual reduction in SOx emissions probably did not occur until the mid 1970’s.
Incidentally, the GISS temperature records showed a decreasing trend between 1944 and 1976, followed by a steady increasing trend since 1976.
It’s possible that the reduced SO2 content of the air could have resulted in slightly less clouds since the 1970’s, which may have affected temperatures more than the increase in CO2 content.
“There is a real possibility that human activity really did cause recent warming: by reducing aerosol pollution, not by increasing CO2.”
Any theory that tries to explain the current warming beginning in 1980, also has to explain the equal warming that occurred from the 1910’s to the 1930’s and the equal warming that occurred from the 1850’s to the 1880’s.
The Northeast United States today is close to breaking temperature records set back in 1888, according to Janice Dean, the Weather Machine, of Fox News. So up to today, it was hotter in 1888, than it is today. And it’s that way all over the world.
So, a cyclical movement of the Earth’s climate that warms for a few decades and then cools for a few decades, staying within about a 2.0C boundary between warmest and coolest is what we actually have, and is what must be explained. The current warming since 1980, is just one part of that cycle.
The U.S. regional temperature chart shows this cyclical movement (Hansen 1999):
Tom Abbott:
I have already explained the causes of the apparent cyclic behavior to you.
Have you lost your short-term memory?
You haven’t shown me that SO2 is the control knob.
What level of SO2 turns a cooling period into a warming period? I asked that question before and you did not give an answer. You cited two different periods of the beginning of a warming period where each period had a different amount of SO2. So what’s the SO2 formula?
The CO2 promoters claim a certain amount of CO2 results in a certain amount of warming. So what certain amount of SO2 amounts to a certain amount of warming?
Don’t expect an answer from climate science. They don’t even recognize that it was just as hot a century ago.
Not only that, but “climate science,” while telling us what the temperature will be 100 years from now if we don’t do as they say, can’t even make up their minds about what the temperature WAS 100 years ago, even though that has actually been measured. They are still “adjusting” history.
Tom Gorman:
The high temperature a century ago was a TEMPORARY spike due to very strong El Nino, not representative of our climate.
Except pikes are part of the climate.
El Nino is part of the climate.
Climate is not a thing. It is a statistical construct, averaged weather over a period of time.
“They don’t even recognize that it was just as hot a century ago.”
I know. It’s difficult to get some people to deal with reality.
“Any theory that tries to explain the current warming beginning in 1980, also has to explain the equal warming that occurred from the 1910’s to the 1930’s and the equal warming that occurred from the 1850’s to the 1880’s.”
There is an embedded assumption that both eras were affected by the same physics. While that may be true, it is not settled. Until each is separately explained (orbital mechanics, etc.), then no correlationships can be established.
Good points Tom. Ocean currents driving cloud changes is one of my current favorite explanations. But the rapid grown of human aerosols, followed by a strep decline, might explain part of the cooling after the 1930s and the warming since the late 1980s.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the Earth’s biosphere is by far the most complex artifact in the known universe, and complex systems behave in unpredictable ways.
Even a trend line of a series of random numbers will rise and fall on a quasi-periodic basis. But there is no cause for the ups and downs in the trend line. I’s just random noise.
Thomas:
NO, not random noise.
100% of the ups and downs in the trend lines are due to changing levels of SO2 aerosols in our atmosphere
Possibly but not proven. There are other factors and no single factor is a “control knob.”
The climate alarmists are almost guaranteed to try to suppress these findings or attempt to attribute the receding cloud cover to an over-abundance of atmospheric carbon emissions. All the more reasons to introduce carbon pricing, reduce air travel, mandate EVs and above all ban the consumption of red meat except for those who attend COP conferences.
You beat me to it, bravo. Don’t forget, give up your gas stove also.
I put mine in a couple of months ago. Beats the heck out of electric.
https://www.costco.com/ge-profile-30-inch.-6.7-cu.-ft.-smart-slide-in-front-control-gas-double-oven-convection-range-with-no-preheat-air-fry.product.100722706.html
Couple of months ago I replaced my gas stove with induction. Not because gas is bad, but because the induction stove is so much easier to clean. A single flat glass surface that wipes clean in seconds. In terms of cooking, it is at least as responsive as gas.
My home heating though is gas with a condensing boiler. A heat pump, if it could manage my house at all, would be way more costly to run, despite that I am charged over 150% tax on the base cost of gas in my country.
Love our induction stove
Yes we put an induction cooktop to replace our conventional electric cooktop when we redid our kitchen. Never been able to boil water faster and it adds less of a heat load to the interior space during the hot summer months. Less chance (next to none) of getting burned by the cooktop burners either.
No gas lines in my area – too much rock. To do a gas stove we would have to use propane, and that wouldn’t be easy to pipe in given the configuration of our house.
And the heat pump won’t work when it is bitter cold, thereby requiring *another source* of heat for those times.
Now what does that remind me of?
Gas stoves are much more efficient than electric stoves. Even if the electricity is generated using natural gas, even the best combined-cycle power plants are only about 65% efficient.
Also, when a gas burner of a stove is ignited, it starts heating any food in a pot or pan on the burner immediately. The heating element of an electric stove needs about 15 to 30 seconds to heat up to the required temperature, which wastes energy.
Induction directly makes the bottom of the pan heat up with less heat escaping along the side like with gas. In terms of efficiency it is not clear cut, as it is possible to find widely varying numbers on-line. This paper makes it clear that the size of the pan is an important factor in cooking efficiency. As always, the conclusion is that more research is necessary.
I can see it now. The “positive feedback” between CO2 and clouds they were pushing for a while until an field experiment proved that was nonsense.
“If climate science were a functioning scientific discipline rather than a priesthood, this paper would trigger a major course correction.”
This paper is in fact from GISS. The effect of albedo reduction has been well known for a long time – the question is what causes it. Cloud feedback has been considered for a long time – see, for example,
Cloud Feedback Processes in a General Circulation Model, by R. T. Wetherald and S Manabe, 1988.
The IPCC Ar6 had a FAQ 7.2, “What is the role of clouds in a warming climate?”
They gave this diagram
Note the conclusion – the reduction in low level clouds dominates, reflecting less energy and so increasing absorbed SW. This has been known for many decades.
Yes Nick, it has been, see the papers I cited above, but what you show is speculative, “scientists expect.” This paper, and the papers I listed, are based on actual measurements. Also, FAQ 7.2 doesn’t say why an enhanced greenhouse effect would cause less lower cloud. Why would it?
Warming means fewer clouds. Ch 7 (with the FAQ) sets this out. There is a lot written recently, as they say:
But here is the AR4 laying it out in 2008
Ironically, the authors of the last reference in 1994 are also authors of hte current “bombshell” paper from GISS. Nothing much has changed, except the general progress of science.
Nick says “Warming means fewer clouds.” That’s mixing cause and effect. Fewer clouds means more warming….is rather obvious if you walk outside on a cool variable cloudy/sunny afternoon….The question is why we have a little bit less cloud causing the planet to be a little bit warmer ?
It’s complicated. Ceteris paribus fewer clouds by day means more warming, fewer clouds by night means more cooling, fewer clouds down low means more warming, and fewer clouds up high means more cooling.
According to Tselioudis it is because of the warming catalyzed by GHG emissions. [1]
Jeezuz Christ!
That’s not even the alarming part. For me the alarming part is that he thinks human emissions have already committed us to 10 C of warming.
Increases in GHG emissions occurring with the same radiation being absorbed (no change in clouds) will not change the warming trend. The only change will be a reduction in the degrees/CO2 molecule.
Additional “heat” in the system arises from more absorption of incoming radiation. Unless CO2 has a major effect on absorbed radiation, the most logical phenomena is fewer clouds.
Unless you and others here change your tune about CO2 heating the oceans, which should result in more water vapor, i.e., more clouds, you’ll never be able to make a correct conclusion.
“That’s mixing cause and effect.”
That is what feedback does. Warming reduces clouds, which then causes more warming.
Daily warming in tropics INCREASES clouds.
Especially around afternoon tea time, a.k.a. beer o’clock.
Please God, make it stop.
You heard it here first folks, Clausius-Clapeyron has been repealed. /s
No, C-C is the driver. Warmer = higher vapor pressure – water droplets turn to vapor. So less clouds.
So water vapor accumulates in the atmosphere because it no longer rains? Something amiss here.
Clausius Clapeyron is very much in play. That’s the principal that explains why specific humidity increases. But specific humidity is not what modulates clouds; at least not directly. Clouds are modulated by relative humidity. Specific humidity can increase simultaneously with a decrease in relative humidity. I have boldened the types of humidity to drive home the point that they are different.
Specific humidity tells you how much water vapor is in a volume of air. Relative humidity tells is an indicator of how much water vapor that volume of air *could* hold. The actual heat content of that volume of air is based on the specific humidity. So if the specific humidity goes up it means there is more heat content in the volume of air. If that volume of air is rising, it’s temperature should be falling – meaning the relative humidity should go up. More water vapor (higher specific humidity) should produce *more* clouds as the temperature drops along with the release of the larger latent heat content associated with higher specific humidity.
It’s not obvious to me how this all gets turned on its head that higher specific humidity means fewer clouds.
Relative humidity WHERE in the atmosphere? Relative humidity is temperature related. It changes with respect to altitude.
And WHERE over the continents because C-C gives an upper-bound for a parcel of air, where it is often limited by the availability of water vapor.
The MET office? bwahahahaha
The specific humidity of air at near-STP conditions can range from near-zero to a maximum of about 30 gm/1.28 kg. Therefore, to assert that anyone (including the Met Office) can measure “specific humidity differences” to a resolution of about 0.02 g/kg, as indicated in your first graph, would be equivalent to asserting a measurement precision as good as 0.09% . . . just ridiculous!
Likewise, asserting that relative humidity differences were measured by the Met Office to a resolution of 0.025% or better, as indicated in your second graph, would be equivalent to asserting a measurement precision as good as 0.025% . . . equally preposterous!
I need not even comment on how the measurement accuracy of either type of humidity is certain to be less than the measurement resolution (i.e., precision).
The uncertainty envelope in the graphs is about 0.15 g/kg and 0.25% so I’m not sure where you are getting the 0.02 g/kg and 0.025% figures.
Given that these values are global averages it is likely that the degrees of freedom are high meaning that the propagated uncertainty would be significantly lower than that of any one individual measurement. 0.15 g/kg and 0.25% are not unreasonable uncertainties.
If you know of rigorous uncertainty analysis that is significantly different than that of the Met Office then we can take a look at it together.
The usual climatology abuse of metrology to get the tiny numbers desired.
Doesn’t really matter although estimating the values on the top graph would lead one to a precision of one-hundredths of a percent value.
That is far below the specs of USCRN stations for relative humidity. See the CRN specs from the CRN manual. (±3% minimum accuracy and a minimum resolution of 1%.
I would point out that the Davis Vantage Pro weather station has a resolution of 1% and an accuracy of ±2%.
You might do everyone a favor by explaining how the MET increased their values far beyond the both the accuracy AND resolution of CRN stations. In other words, having values with two sig figs and arrive at a value with 4 sig figs (2 decimal places).
Well, I once again examined the specific humidity and relative humidity graphs you posted above and can’t find anywhere a reference to “uncertainty envelope”.
If you are meaning to refer to the shaded envelopes encompassing the three solid lines (which ARE identified on each graph) how do I know that they aren’t representing the min/max range of humidity differences over the identified time periods instead of ranges of uncertainties?
Furthermore, it’s very strange that—if what you asserted is correct—the uncertainty range for the “blended” values (light grey shading) is at any point in time always smaller along the y-axis than the combined uncertainty ranges associated with both the “land” measurements (light green shading) and the “marine” measurement (light blue shading). That is the opposite of what would mathematically expect, and is thus illogical.
Even furthermore, with the passage of time, the vertical extent of the shaded envelopes rapidly grow then reduce then grow in an apparently random fashion, even being greater for both SH and RH in 2019 than in 1973 . . . not at all what one would expect for the characteristic of measurement uncertainty, especially considering improvements in instrumentation and measurement methodology over those intervening 46 years!
Methinks you don’t even know the meaning of the data contained in the graphs you presented.
bdgwx and many others have no incentive to quote accurate measurement uncertainty.
The dispersion of values attributed to the measurand is of no significance. Only the smallest interval of sampling error that defines the estimated mean is the goal.
Because it is documented that it is the uncertainty.
It is exactly what you would expect mathematically because blend is a combination of land and marine which means it has more degrees of freedom.
Improvements in instrumentation (lower uncertainty) would result in a lower uncertainty of the average ceteris paribus. However, instrument uncertainty is not the only thing that effects the combined uncertainty. Spatial and temporal sampling also effects the combined uncertainty as well. It turns out that sampling is more sparse later in the period as compared to earlier in the period.
BTW…we see this behavior with the temperature record as well.
If that is true, then it is documented horseshist.
WTF? Degrees of freedom associated with any given parameter in no way determines the actual uncertainty in measuring that parameter.
Hmmm . . . I take that to mean you are asserting that climate scientists have lost interest in tracking humidities in Earth’s atmosphere from 1973 to 2019. Boldly stated, but completely unsubstantiated and illogical given the increased attention being given to “climate change” over the last 40 years! Dare I mention the tremendous increase in use of weather satellites during the last 20 years, the deployment of the worldwide Argo floats (started in 2000), and the deployment of the land-based USCRN (started in 2001)?
Still waiting on you to address why the grey, green and blue shaded areas in your two graphs—that you claim represent the degree of uncertainty in measurements—are seen to vary by a factor or two of more along the y-axis over time intervals as short as three years. You really think this would be due to “blending” or to “sampling” differences? You really don’t have much faith in the competence of the Met Office, do you? . . . /sarc
We don’t have to speculate. It is true. The creator of those graphs told us.
Yes it does. Refer to [JCGM 100:2008]. You can also prove this out for yourself with the NIST uncertainty machine.
I doubt it was because they lost interest. They don’t even get to control that. It could be a loss of funding or some other reason. Either way the observations are more sparse today than they were in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
Irrelevant.
You never told me I was supposed to address it because you keep moving the goalpost. You claim it isn’t the uncertainty. I show that it is the uncertainty. You’re then incredulous because it is larger in 2019 as compared to 1973. I explain why that is. And now you’re incredulous because it’s not constant. It’s not constant because the factors that go into it aren’t constant. Where is the goalpost going to land next?
I didn’t say that. What I said is that uncertainty of the blended timeseries is less than that of the land or marine timeseries because the blended one has more degrees of freedom.
BTW…based on your question I’m not even sure you understand what the graph is showing since “blended” just means the combination of land and marine. It’s not unlike UAH breaking out the land and ocean series separately while simultaneously providing the global series.
No more or less than anyone else.
If you think specific humidity declined while relative humidity increased or some other result then post the evidence and we can review it together.
“Yes it does. Refer to [JCGM 100:2008]. You can also prove this out for yourself with the NIST uncertainty machine.”
Neither of these prove that sampling error is measurement uncertainty. Again, degrees of freedom have to do with sampling error. The degrees of freedom determine the divisor of the standard deviation of the sample standard deviation when determining the SEM. The SEM is not, let me repeat – NOT, the measurement uncertainty.
This has been explained to you over and over again. How precisely you locate the population average tells you NOTHING about how accurate that so precisely located average is. That average could be off by 100% and the degrees of freedom could indicate an SEM of 0 (zero).
One-sigma or two? It doesn’t state explicitly, nor does it indicate if any standard is being followed.
It is 2σ.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-investigating-climate-changes-humidity-paradox/
Averaging does *NOT* decrease measurement uncertainty.
Averaging uncertainty values of individual data elements results in a value where some individual uncertainties will be greater than the average uncertainty and some individual uncertainties will be less than the average uncertainty. So using the average uncertainty as the propagated uncertainty can *NOT* give a value lower than any one individual measurement.
You are apparently falling back on the old meme of “all measurement uncertainty is random, Gausian, and cancels” so you can use the SAMPLING ERROR as the measurement uncertainty. The SAMPLING ERROR does get less with a larger sample size – but SAMPLING ERROR *adds* to the propagated measurement uncertainty of the individual elements. It doesn’t replace the propagated measurement uncertainty nor does it make the propagated measurement uncertainty smaller.
Measurement uncertainty is the dispersion of values that can be reasonably assigned to the measurand. There is no way to make that dispersion smaller by averaging or sampling. Degrees of freedom have to do with SAMPLING and sampling error, not with measurement uncertainty. Degrees of freedom are a metric for how precisely you have located a statistical descriptor of the parent population, e.g. the population average or standard deviation. Degrees of freedom have NOTHING to do with being a metric for accuracy of any value in the parent population including the average value. A large number of degrees of freedom means you can very precisely locate an average value whose value is highly inaccurate because of inaccurate measurements. It is the propagated measurement uncertainty that is a metric for the accuracy of the average and that propagated measurement uncertainty simply can’t be assumed to be random, Gaussian, and canceled, at least not for temperature measurements.
Typical mathterbation of data to maximize how well they KNOW what is going on!
What happens to CO2 when it is heated? More water vapor maybe?
So, CO2 causes increased evaporation, but a decrease in relative humidity.
CO2 causes an increase in rain, but a decrease in clouds.
Yes, all those things are possible.
Possible? Lol.
lol…magic
FM!
Anything is possible with a theory that cannot be falsified. Such is the nature of magic.
A theory that predicts an increase in ASR can be easily falsified by showing that ASR did not increase.
Not if it can be rescued ad hoc by simply saying “…yet.” This “theory” has been so rescued ad infinitum. It is designed to fit any contingency.
Nick says “Warming means fewer clouds.”
Indeed. Warming means fewer clouds which means warming which means fewer clouds etc. A clown show in other words.
Sounds like a tipping point has been reached.
Nick says “Warming means fewer clouds.”
Indeed. Warming means fewer clouds which means warming which means fewer clouds etc. A clown show in other words.
That is what a feedback does. It works the other way too. For example cooling means more ice which means more cooling.
The question isn’t whether feedbacks are real. It’s to what extent they play out before braking and clamping forces slow and eventually exhaust the effect.
Obviously. The point is that feedbacks cannot be measured because we do not understand contributing factors. Let’s just stick to observation shall we?
Your hypothesis, that braking effects prevent thermal runaway, is unfalsifiable and therefore worthless scientifically.
At least in terms of the Planck response it can be falsified by showing that the 4th power relationship between the radiant exitance and temperature is wrong. There is a lot more in play than just the Planck response though so I don’t want you to get the idea this is the only thing that matters in the context of thermal runway. For a brief introduction to the topic I recommend [Goldblatt & Watson 2013]. I should mention that my statement wasn’t referring to thermal runaway. It was more generalized to any type of feedback.
Handwaving.
The Stefan-Boltzmann law isn’t handwaving. It is a real relationship between radiant exitance and temperature. Specifically temperature increases proportional to the 4th root of radiant exitance. And since radiant exitance increases in proportion to the energy imbalance that means the rate at which temperature increases is significantly braked (slowed). Again…this is just one example of a braking factor. An example of a clamping factor is the exhaustion of ice mass. Once all of the ice melts the ice-albedo feedback instantly stops. Again…it’s just one example that is, hopefully, intuitive enough that most people can understand.
What “energy imbalance”? As the atmosphere warms, i.e. the temperature goes up, the temp difference to space goes up. Thus heat transport goes up as well. NO BRAKING! You are implying the temp gradient is either constant ir decreases.
As water vapor goes up atmospheric ice at altitude will give up as well.
Everything you are posting is either contradictory or not comprehensive.
The Stefan-Boltzmann law of radiation only relates radiated power per unit surface area (e.g., W/m^2) to the absolute temperature of the emitter raised to the 4th power . . . it says nothing about other radiating bodies being present or absent, nor about there being any sort of “energy imbalance”.
F ≈ T^4 which means T ≈ F^(1/4).
First…that’s not true. When combined with the 1LOT it says F = Q/A = εσ(Ta^4 – Tb^4). Which means Ta = (F/εσ + Tb^4)^(1/4).
Second…that doesn’t invalidate what I said which is that radiant exitance increases are proportional to the energy imbalance. And I standby that statement because I accept the 1LOT.
You are analyzing the net radiation between two bodies. Your analysis doesn’t disprove the fact that a body radiates solely based on its own temperature. In fact, it validates that law.
The original statement of the Stefan-Boltzmann law says that for a single body:
I = εσT⁴
That law can be used to calculate the net radiation between two bodies, each radiating based on its own temperature.
You should also note that to calculate a single temperature from this equation you must know two variables, that is one temperature and the radiance. If you only know the ΔI, you can not calculate the temperature combinations that generate the difference.
Exactly!
You can’t unless you are a CAGW supporter.
That “sleight of hand” verbal trick might fool some, but not me. But please do carry on . . . I’m enjoying the show.
The 1LOT is not a sleight of hand.
And I’ll remind you this conversation is about the hypothesis that there is no braking (slowing) factors in regard to temperature increase. The SB law absolutely falsifies that hypothesis since it says, in no uncertain terms, that temperature is proportional to the 4th root of the radiant exitance. In other words, given a body with a linear increase of incoming radiation flux (W.m-2) balanced by its radiant exitance (W.m-2) its incremental temperature (K) rise will itself decrease such that T’ > 0 but T” < 0.
I just want to make sure you are aware that this is what you challenging.
This is nothing more than a simplistic description of a runaway positive feedback mechanism. If it were truly this simple the Earth would have been scoured clean of life at any time in the past where conditions existed with low cloud coverage.
Exactly *what* braking and clamping forces would slow and eventually exhaust the effect? Are these braking and clamping forces detailed in the model algorithms? If so then when do the climate models predict they will kick in to limit warming?
Tselioudis is also one of the authors of the provocative [Hansen et al. 2023] publication.
Thanks, Nick. The second reference states, “Two dominant factors are identified for the subtropical low-clouds: a thermodynamic effect due to rising SST that acts to reduce low-cloud by enhancing cloud-top entrainment of dry air, and a stability effect accompanied by an enhanced inversion strength that acts to increase low-cloud (Qu et al., 2014, 2015; Kawai et al., 2017).”
Interesting, but not very convincing. I think observations show that more cloud always forms when SST are higher, and higher clouds also reflect sunlight.
You’ve also skirted the main point of the paper. Quoting from the abstract,”Recent Earth energy budget observations show an increase in the sunlight absorbed by the Earth of 0.45 W/m2 per decade, caused primarily by a decrease in cloud reflection.”
And, “Less cloud is the “primary cause” of recent warming.”
Quoting from the first of your references above, “the feedback due to decreasing land clouds is assessed to be 0.08 ÷ 0.08 W m-2 °C-‘ (one standard deviation) with low confidence.” But the new data show that a reduction of cloud cause 5.6 times more “feedback.”
Do you now think that CO2 caused a little warming, but a lot of decrease in cloud? That seems to be different than your normal position that CO2 enhances the greenhouse effect and clouds play a feedback roll. I put words in your mouth, correct me if I got it wrong. : )
That is what Tselioudis thinks. This has been hypothesized since the 1960’s.
Quoting from the paper:
So it seems that the authors think the reduced cloud cover is due to a enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 that caused a shift in general atmospheric circulation. Specifically a contraction of the midlatitude storm cloud zone and a narrowing of the ITCZ zone,
It doesn’t seem like a “bombshell” game-changing paper after all. But I would not expect such a paper to be published by the AGU.
It’s also possible that a reduction in human-caused aerosol pollution caused less cloud, which caused the shift in circulation. Or that the shift is due to some other cause, like long-term ocean oscillations. Probably it’s a collection of very complex interrelated causes.
In any event, if the global warming of the next 100 years is as “bad” as it has been in the past 100 years, my grandsons, grandkids will live in a slightly warmer and much greener world.
“So it seems that the authors think the reduced cloud cover is due to a enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 that caused a shift in general atmospheric circulation. Specifically a contraction of the midlatitude storm cloud zone and a narrowing of the ITCZ zone,
It doesn’t seem like a “bombshell” game-changing paper after all.”
Yes, you’ve got it!
How does increased back radiation cause ocean heat waves, Nick?
True. Unless the prevailing belief was that clouds would a negative feedback (like Lindzen’s Iris theory) in which case this might be considered a “bombshell” as it really upsets the negative feedback narrative.
Well, as long as CO2 is in the equation as an important factor it doesnt really matter if it adds up or not. Because a foregone conclusion leads to a kind of forcing on its own. A weird sort of reverse engineering where the outcome creates the initial conditions and one parameter forces the trajectory.
Mr. ballynally: “Yes, you’ve got it!” H/t N. Stokes.
“…Warming means fewer clouds…”
Yes Nick, and more fire engines showing up causes larger fires.
Scientists went into the field and made measurements that totally disproved that nonsense.
And who were they?
I have checked several sources, including several editions of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and the estimates for albedo are quite variable. Yet, everybody (including you) cites a value of “about 30%” with no formal uncertainty quoted or even any attention paid to the number of significant figures. This is surprising considering how sensitive warming seems to be to an uncertain albedo.
Then there is the issue of albedo only providing a lower-bound on reflected sunlight because everyone ignores the specular reflection at variable angles of incidence, and seems to use an average value for a nadir view of the surface, which is a composite of specular and diffuse reflectance.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/12/why-albedo-is-the-wrong-measure-of-reflectivity-for-modeling-climate/
I don’t claim it is 30%. I showed an excerpt from the AR4.
Nick you are contradiction machine, you have argued here many times that clouds are a positive feedback mechanism and more clouds are predicted by AGW theory, as has the IPCC.
I’m not sure what the contradiction is. Clouds being a positive feedback are a prediction of modern climate science theory.
[Manabe & Wetherald 1967] [Wetherald & Manabe 1988] [Donohoe et al. 2014] [Hansen et al. 2023]
I’m not surprized. The contradiction is that Nick just told us that GHGs cause fewer clouds through warming but more clouds from warming. Is it fewer or more from warming? Maybe it’s both because we all know that in models, CO2 can do anything. Lol.
Their world salad explanations hurt my brain 🙁
Maybe I missed it. Where did he say more clouds? I’d like to review the context.
You’re the only one that doesn’t understand. It’s all good that’s what is expected from you.
Perhaps. I’m always willing to learn and better understand so maybe you can explain it to me. What is the contradiction in the publications I cited and that from Tselioudis discussed in this article?
A week ago you told me that the ”warming” was caused by GHGs.
You know, like increased back radiation or some such crap. In fact, CO2 has nothing to do with it. Does it.
The IPCC AR6 WG-I assessment report also had a section 7.4.2.4.3, “Synthesis for the net cloud feedback”, which included Table 7.9 (on page 975).
It also included a summary of all “climate feedbacks” in Table 7.10 (on page 978), which quantified what the IPCC assessed “Clouds” contributed overall.
Screenshots of both tables are attached below.
Note the “Very likely” range the IPCC ended up with has a negative minimum value for “Clouds” …
.
The IPCC’s summary of the net warming and cooling effects of “clouds” at the planetary level is slightly more nuanced than yours.
The crucial part here is WV+LR = 1.3W/m2. The IPCC explains hereto:
Feedback parameters in climate models are calculated assuming that they are independent of each other, except for a well-known co-dependency between the water vapour (WV) and lapse rate (LR) feedbacks
This co-dependency is not a real thing in the first place, but a misinterpretation of variations in the dOLR/dTs relation. This is also the reason why “climate science” erroneously believes WV+LR was a positive feedback overall, which it is not.
Most of all however, it is self evident how negative(!) LR feedback easily dominates all other feedbacks in terms of magnitude, as in the chart below. It is an inevitable consequence of the shrinking of the lapse rate, as to be expect with warming.
For the pure reason that “climate science” wants positive, not negative feedbacks, they have to get around this reality, by simply coupling WV and LR together, and hard-code they have to be a positive feedback combined. Against all logic and physic.
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/the-climate-kill-switch-why-feedbacks-are-actually-negative
“The IPCC’s summary of the net warming and cooling effects of “clouds” at the planetary level is slightly more nuanced than yours.”
It isn’t mine. I was quoting the IPCC.
But this GISS paper, featured by WUWT, is about storm clouds. Clouds overall, the figure you have highlighted, includes high altitude clouds (negative) Arctic etc.
Overall, the very likely range you highlighted has to allow a very slight chance of negative. The likely range is all positive.
Very nice. We should not sit back and hope those we know are wrong will suddenly see the error of their ways. We need to take this study and others like it and relentlessly wave them in the CAGW cultist’s faces. Force them to show how this is wrong. We need to be just a little unkind to draw them out.
As Mark Twain mused: “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled!”
“If climate science were a functioning scientific discipline rather than a priesthood, this paper would trigger a major course correction. It would cast doubt on the simplistic link between CO2 and warming, redirecting focus toward cloud physics, ocean-atmosphere interactions, and circulation dynamics.”
The modelers (ERA5 reanalysis for example) already know that the radiative influence of incremental CO2 is vanishingly weak as energy conversion in the general circulation completely overwhelms its “warming” effect. There has never been a good reason to attribute observed warming to CO2 emissions, or to even think that *some* contribution to warming must be expected.
[kinetic energy] –> [internal energy + potential energy] (positive values)
[internal energy + potential energy] –> [kinetic energy] (negative values)
Read the full text description at this time-lapse video of plots from ERA5. Lorenz described this concept, and the model computes a “vertical integral of energy conversion” hourly parameter.
https://youtu.be/hDurP-4gVrY
And more here, with modified histograms of this parameter from various latitudes from 2022.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PDJP3F3rteoP99lR53YKp2fzuaza7Niz?usp=sharing
Papers such as this one help focus attention on some obvious reasons that the climate models possess no diagnostic or prognostic authority concerning incremental CO2, CH4, N2O, etc. But even an imaginary perfected model cannot overcome the unresolvable problem of the buildup of uncertainty as the time-step-iterated simulation proceeds.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/11/open-thread-143/#comment-4071246
“the radiative influence of incremental CO2 is vanishingly weak as energy conversion in the general circulation completely overwhelms its “warming” effect”.
Spot on, as usual..
It is not enough to just say clouds caused the warming of the 21st century and omit the sun’s role.
Clouds are not an independent variable nor are cloud variations particularly mysterious.
Since the 1935-2004 Solar Modern Maximum ended, lower solar activity reduced ENSO activity and cloud cover, with the induced lower albedo from La Niña providing a force multiplier when solar cycle activity became high in SC24 and SC25, driving the ocean temperatures upward in two steps.
Solar cycle activity provided both the conditions and the power for these step-changes, and solar cycle 25 has produced 0.4285 W/m^2/mo higher TSI by the 66th cycle month than SC24.
0.4285 W.m2.mo-1 * 66 mo = 28.281 W.m-2.
TSI did NOT increase by 28 W.m-2.
If you’ll remember we’ve already had this discussion. And although the significant police will flay you alive I could care less. I just request that you fix your math mistakes.
“I just request that you fix your math mistakes.”
As far as I am concerned you were/are simply gaslighting me Brian Gideon.
I was not allowed to respond to you at Spencer’s site, I was literally ‘forbidden’.
I didn’t say “TSI increased by 28.281 W/m^2”. However, if I said the sun emitted 28.281 W/m2 more in 66 months for an average of 0.4285 W/m^2/month more, it wouldn’t be wrong.
I see you didn’t object to me calculating the annual TSI numbers in my first plot. Why not?
Did you notice the CERES TSI was 0.4095 W/m2/yr higher in 2024 than in 2022?
That was computed by adding the daily TSI and dividing by number of days in those years.
If you don’t have a problem with my annual calculations then you shouldn’t have a problem with me comparing TSI during any other time period in monthly calculations.
Your objections and the others’ comments there were ridiculous, out of context, like now.
How much more CERES TSI was there in SC25 than in SC24 by the 66th month Brian?
But I do love every number given to 3 or 4 significant figures with no error bands. Amazing.
True that TSI data is given to 4 decimal places. The original data used for most of the post-2000 CERES TSI composite is from SORCE and TSIS-1, from LASP. The uncertainites are provided in the LASP datasets. NASA would do better by including those uncertainties in their CERES composite data file.
The CERES TSI handles the instrumental offset between SORCE and TSIS-1.
I don’t think the significant figure rules apply to you so you probably don’t need to worry about it. If Clyde (and the other significant figure police) felt they applied to you then I’m sure they would have already said something.
Yes, it is well known that you don’t believe significant digits have any utility in handling data properly.
Same. I struggle to post on his site as well. I’m good for 1 or maybe even 2 comments on post and then I’m locked out.
You said the increase was 0.4285 W/m^2/mo by the 66th month of the cycle.
The Sun emitted about 0.4 W.m-2 more at the 66 month mark; not 28 W.m-2.
Brian, I said “by the 66th month” (inclusive) not ‘at the 66th month’.
The silly part you are playing games with Brian is the part where the irradiance numbers must be added together over time to 28.281 before dividing by time units to get the average TSI per unit time, over the 66 months in this case.
You’re trying to say summing the numbers to find an average is wrong.
Let’s see if you can find the average of this series: {2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16}.
How can you do it without adding them up?
He also refuses to acknowledge than when adding a series of measurements together, the measurement uncertainty increases.
I’m not challenging that. I’m challenging your claim that the sun emitted 26.3 W.m-2, 27.1782 W.m-2, or 28.281 W.m-2 depending on which month in the cycle you were speaking of. That’s just patently false.
And if there is any doubt about what you originally meant I’ll remind you of your statements:
“Let’s see how significant the SC#25 TSI really was – in February, the 63rd month of this solar cycle, the sun had emitted 26.3 W/m^2 more than the last solar cycle #24 in 5.25 years, or 5.0 W/m^2/yr”
and
“This result is then divided by the canonical 4 to get 1.25 W/m^2/yr in average solar climate forcing over each of the last 5.25 years.”
TSI has not increased by 5.0 W.m-2.year-1.
The solar forcing was not 1.25 W.m-2.yr-1.
I absolutely did not say that or tried to say that…ever. Not even remotely close.
What I said here is that TSI did not increase by 0.4285 W.m-2.mo-1 or 28.281 W.m-2.
This is so childish. (2+4+6+8+10+12+14+16)/8 = 9.
Do I win a prize?2+4+6+8+10+12+14+16
I don’t know. You tell me. This is your absurd argument. I’m going to tell you what I tell everyone else. Don’t expect me to defend your manufactured arguments especially when they are absurd.
I’m not challenging how averages are calculated. I’m challenging your statements above.
Uh-oh, OLR and ASR both increasing? Cue the Narrative Defense Team:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/16/cloud-reduction-global-warming-crgw-101-a-competitive-theory-to-co2-related-global-warming/#comment-4024342
Tselioudis is an “alarmist” by any definition I’ve seen here on WUWT by such a wide margin that I suspect many would actually label him a “doomer”.
He is so much an alarmist that even I would consider his position alarmist. He has indicted the IPCC of gradualism and reticence in regard to their evaluation of climate sensitivity and its consequences.
He also works at GISS which WUWT recently said has “become a climate modeling hub pushing speculative scenarios about Earth’s future, often far removed from observational reality”, that their data manipulations are equivalent to alchemy, dispense “alarmism masquerading as science”, and are dysfunctional. [1]
And Tselioudis’ position is unequivocal and he doesn’t mince words. His position is that the cloud feedback is the result of GHG emissions and that the Earth system sensitivity for today’s GHG amount is 10°C. That’s 10 C for today’s emissions. [2]
Given all of this I’m obviously dumbfounded by WUWT’s decision to post this publication or any publication by Tselioudis and his peers.
Mr. x: Perhaps WUWT editors are willing to post articles by CliSci cultists and let the chips fly. Of course you are dumbfounded, that happens to folks who have no bs meter.
Maybe. But the article presents Tselioudis’ work in a positive light and as being contrary to the prevailing understanding of the science. The problem is that it is contrary in the opposite direction of what the article here is suggesting. This leads me to believe that it is more likely that the article author and editors didn’t fully understand Tselioudis’ work. I mean…think about it…had they known they probably would have undermined it as opposed to venerating it.
The cloud reduction has been known for many years. I was first made aware of the details by the Dubal/Varenholt 2021 paper based on 2 decades of CERES data.
It’s the same effect which led to Willis finding the greenhouse effect strength has been unchanged during the CERES period.
This hasn’t got a lot of traction with many skeptics because it not only falsifies AGW, it also falsifies any luke warming claims. The increase in solar energy explains all the warming we have seen.
Climate activists/pseudoscientists have been trying to find ways to counter this obvious falsification of their religion for years. They are working hard to come up with ways our emissions are causing the reduction.
Of course, this climate change falsification isn’t plainly laid out even in this paper. Most likely because the paper would never be published if it was even hinted at.
The shortwave feedback is a prediction of modern climate science theory. As a result an observation showing an increase in ASR does nothing to falsify that theory. In fact, it would support the theory. [Manabe & Wetherald 1967] [Wetherald & Manabe 1988] [Donohoe et al. 2014] [Hansen et al. 2023]
‘The shortwave feedback is a prediction of modern climate science theory.’
Oh no it isn’t, and this isn’t the first time the ‘canonical’ narrative for climate alarmism has been contradicted by observation, hence another attempt to bury the disparity by insisting that the ‘real’ physics behind climate alarmism has only been recently revealed by the GCMs. The following is an update to my response to Anthony Banton, who published the same set of charts you did, from 6 months ago:
Here’s Donohoe et al (PNAS, 2014) [1]:
‘The greenhouse effect is well-established. Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, reduce the amount of outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) to space; thus, energy accumulates in the climate system, and the planet warms. However, climate models forced with CO2 reveal that global energy accumulation is, instead, primarily caused by an increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). This study resolves this apparent paradox. The solution is in the climate feedbacks that increase ASR with warming—the moistening of the atmosphere and the reduction of snow and sea ice cover. Observations and model simulations suggest that even though global warming is set into motion by greenhouse gases that reduce OLR, it is ultimately sustained by the climate feedbacks that enhance ASR.’
And here is Trenberth and Fasullo (GRL, 2009) [2]:
‘Global climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) are examined for the top-of-atmosphere radiation changes as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases build up from 1950 to 2100. There is an increase in net radiation absorbed, but not in ways commonly assumed. While there is a large increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing greenhouse gases and water vapor (as a feedback), this is offset to a large degree by a decreasing greenhouse effect from reducing cloud cover and increasing radiative emissions from higher temperatures. Instead the main warming from an energy budget standpoint comes from increases in absorbed solar radiation that stem directly from the decreasing cloud amounts. These findings underscore the need to ascertain the credibility of the model changes, especially insofar as changes in clouds are concerned.’
Or as Donohoe et al put it :
‘Trenberth and Fasullo considered global energy accumulation within the ensemble of coupled general circulation models (GCMs) participating in phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison (CMIP3). They report that, under the Special Report on Emission Scenarios A1B emissions scenario, wherein increasing radiative forcing is driven principally by increasing GHG concentrations, OLR changes little over the 21st century and global energy accumulation is caused nearly entirely by enhanced ASR – seemingly at odds with the canonical view of global warming by reduced LW emission to space.’
In summary, the mechanism of AGW revealed by the GCMs are not just ‘paradoxical’, but are also ‘not in ways commonly assumed’ and ‘seemingly at odds with the canonical view or global warming.’ Which brings up some questions, such as when did the mechanism discovered by the modelers officially become the standard CAGW narrative and why is the canonical mechanism still being touted in academia, the media, etc.? To put it bluntly, why are we reading about this revelation in the comments at WUWT, as opposed to, say, reading about it in the wake of a slew of Nobel prizes awarded to the climate modelers for (finally) proving the existence of CAGW?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4250165/
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL037527
Yes, that increased OLR has been a pesky fly in the CO2= forcing ointment.
Never mind, contradictions are ignored and equations altered to produce a foregone conclusion.
The hypothesis, first proposed in the 1960s and strongly supported by the author of the publication mentioned in this article, is literally depicted playing out in panels C and D from the CMIP suite of models. Notice that ASR begins increasing and eventually exceeds the point at which it started. That is indisputable and unequivocal. The reason Donohoe et al. describe this as an apparent paradox is because the no-feedback (canonical) response in panels A and B are significantly different than the real response including the feedback in panels C and D. Notice the qualifier “apparent”. It’s not a real paradox. It’s just an error in perception when your vantage point is based on a more remedial understanding of what is happening.
‘The reason Donohoe et al. describe this as an apparent paradox is because…’
No, the word ‘paradox’, i.e., a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement (New Oxford American Dictionary), is a completely appropriate term for the CAGW narrative in light of actual observations.
Attached is a graphic from the IPCC’s (Sixth Assessment Report), showing their ‘understanding’ of the changes in ‘radiative forcing’ between 1750 and 2019. I don’t see anything about lower cloud cover in there, but then I don’t have the time or inclination to wade through all the the IPCC reports we’ve been forced to fund under threat of fine or imprisonment. Maybe you can do better.
That is a table of forcings; not feedbacks.
IPCC AR6 WGI discusses the shortwave feedback in many places, but perhaps the best place to start especially in the context of clouds is section 7.4.2.4. In a nutshell they assess the feedback as being net positive thus ASR increases.
‘That is a table of forcings; not feedbacks.’
C’mon b – there was a chart identical to the one I posted that was ‘denominated’ in delta_t rather than W/m^2, so these are all in effects.
Where’s the 20-30 year old quote from Gore, Hansen, etc. to the effect that emitting CO2 causes cloud cover to decline, thereby warming the Earth?
The entries in the table are forcings. The values represented by the bar graphs are the effects. The entries themselves include the feedbacks. They are not broken out separately.
I don’t know where the quotes are specifically for Gore or Hansen. There may not be any from 20-30 years ago specifically related to the cloud feedback being positive.
BTW…it is important to note that declining cloud cover does not necessarily mean the cloud feedback is positive. It depends on the vertical, diurnal, and microphysical aspects of the cloud so we have to be careful when directly equating less with positive and more with negative in terms of the feedback.
Quoting ‘Manabe’ already put you in the losing camp as far as im concerned..
I cited several authors including the author of the “bombshell” study venerated in this article.
Nevermind that disagreeing with Manabe (and Wetherald) regarding the validity of the hypothesis doesn’t change the fact that they were the first to present the hypothesis. It’s still a hypothesis of the prevailing modern climate science theory all the same.
I should probably point out that Arrhenius considered the effect of ice and cloud cover in the 1800s but he stopped short of mentioning them in terms of a feedback. Others preceding Manabe and Wetherald did hint at it but not with the same focus as what began appearing in the 1960s and later. For that reason I personally prefer to start the timeline for this hypothesis in the 1960s. Some might even argue for the 1970s or even 1980s. Either way it is very much a predictions or the prevailing theory today.
Sorry, modern climate science is at best an hypothesis, not a theory.
I’m not sure what difference that makes. It doesn’t matter what you call it: theory, hypothesis, etc. An increase in ASR was a prediction all the same.
Perhaps, but the theory is wrong or at least incomplete. (which is another way to say it’s wrong) If it was right we would not be here.
According to the Trenberth and Fasullo 2009 paper this increase in ASR wasn’t supposed to happen until 2040-2070. It was also driven by warming from reduced OLR. Last I checked 2000 wasn’t in this range and there’s no evidence of any OLR reduction driving any warming at all.
So, what is the mechanism?
PS. I suspect this is related to the tropical hot spot. Higher atmospheric temperatures at high altitudes would lead to less condensation and hence fewer clouds. Of course, no tropical hot spot exists.
[Trenberth & Fasullo 2009] provide a central estimate of about 2000. The 1σ range is from about 1980 to about 2030 as shown in figure 1c when the 1st derivative (not shown) starts sloping upwards. Remember the publication is primarily focused on the integrated ASR as opposed to the actual ASR so you have to accommodate for this.
Every thing is a prediction of the climate science.
“Ensemble mean” == pseudoscientific climatology model nonsense.
I wonder if I could average all my shots at a 200 yd target and claim a bullseye?
With a very large uncertainty ring. 🙂
So, it is a cyclical thing, just like the rest of climate/weather. Humans don’t have a damned thing to do with it. Imagine that.
When we deforest large tracts of land to build solar voltaic and wind turbine generator arrays of massive scales, we change the weather.
Not according to them. They are “saving” the climate/weather/environment/blahblah. Blatant lies, they tell them anyway.
Where does this importance of measured cloud change leave elderly general scientists like me (and possibly many more) who rejected CO2 driver hypotheses from the start and turned to cloud cover change many years ago as a more likely candidate?
It remains credible that natural processes have maintained Earth temperatures to stay within narrow limits in virtually every relevant study. That set of mechanisms is strong and dominant and surely able to cope with a newcomer in the form of a bit of burnt coal.
We are reasonably certain that measured solar radiation received by the Earth is reasonably constant and not the primary cause of global temperature variation. Bigger effects are measured from ocean cycles like El Nino, but these tend to average to constancy over study times that are long enough.
It is hard to fathom why the CO2 control knob speculation gained so much momentum (the power of expensive advertising?) without assuming that many scientists were not bright enough to laugh at it. Lemming science fails.
Geoff S
But CO2 has caused the reduced cloud cover in the first place. Ask Nick.
It’s not just Nick saying it. The author of this “bombshell” study is saying it too.
I don’t really care who’s saying it. No one knows. Climate modelers want it to be CO2 so they look for a way it can be. It’s all speculative nonsense.
We know that enhanced back radiation is not causing the ”warming” because we now know that weaker albedo is more likely the cause, therefore we cannot say that enhanced GHE is causing reduced albedo. It’s ridiculous.
Increased temps mean more evaporation which means higher specific humidity (i.e. more water vapor per volume of air). As that volume of air rises the temperature goes down meaning the relative humidity goes up – which means *more* cloud cover (from higher specific humidity) and not less as the relative humidity reaches a level where the water vapor precipitates out, i.e. the dew point is reached. The altitude at which this happens may change as the atmospheric temperature gradient changes with warming of the atmosphere, but it will *still* happen at some altitude.
Somehow climate science flips this on its head saying higher specific humidity somehow reduces cloud cover while also causing even *more* evaporation.
From an enthalpy viewpoint the higher specific humidity also means larger heat transport into the upper atmosphere because of higher latent heat content. So *more* heat gets released toward space when the latent heat is released.
Climate science just seems to be on a merry-go-round of circular reasoning with no stopping: CO2 warms the air which causes more evaporation which causes fewer clouds which warms the air even more which means even more evaporation and even fewer clouds ……..
Reality just seems to get lost in there somewhere!
No, it means the potential for more evaporation. The reason that an air mass descending on the lee side of a mountain range is so dry is that there is insufficient evapotranspiration to meet that potential.
Of course there will be local variation. But if the potential is there then at least part of the potential will certainly be realized overall. The full potential may not be reached but conditions won’t be static either.
Only for the recent few solar cycles. It appears that the Maunder Minimum is evidence that the sun can vary.
News Flash!!! I’m not a climate scientist and I’ve been saying that for years. The oceans are warming. The only way to warm water is with visible radiation. Fewer clouds mean warmer water. If Climate Science was a real science that would have be the first variable to study, not CO2.
https://app.screencast.com/lEzV7u9cJugzc
More ways to expose this hoax.
https://app.screencast.com/hQSOZQaptm6XY
https://app.screencast.com/ZMpNTvkLD7DDJ
Gemini AI is fascinating. Look at the instant piece I got when I asked: Make a case for this being well ahead of the shady basis for Net Zero pursuits and strongly advocate for a change of course to avoid the wasting of trillions more.
Gemini reply in seconds: In two parts.
The findings presented in the Tselioudis et al. paper, as highlighted in your provided text, present a compelling case for a drastic re-evaluation of the scientific basis underpinning Net Zero policies and strongly advocate for a change of course to avoid the continuation of immense financial and societal waste.
Here’s why this research is a profound challenge to the current Net Zero paradigm and why a shift in focus is urgently needed:
1. A Fundamental Misdiagnosis of Earth’s Energy Imbalance:
2. The Alarming Inadequacy of Climate Models:
3. The Irony of Unintended Consequences (Aerosols):
4. The Immense Cost and Opportunity Cost of a Flawed Pursuit:
But cloud behaviour is controlled entirely by GHG concentrations in the atmosphere.
Or so we are told.
Yes. ‘So we are told’. It would help their cause if they explained the mechanism by which increased CO2 causes changes in the cloud cover. Sounds like another dreamed up hypothesis designed to blame it all on CO2 in order to justify Net Zero.
I remember back in the 60s in the UK we mostly stopped using coal for domestic heating and at the same time much of the local industry either ceased to exist or converted to electricity from steam power. This reduced considerably the amount of SO2 being dumped in the atmosphere. I believe that this cleaning up process was widely adopted in the industrialised west. This coincided with the global temperature increase starting in the 70s. Cause and effect? This ties in very nicely with the reduction in sulphur in aviation and shipping fuel causing the cloud reduction this century. I don’t see any necessity for the CO2 causes everything hypothesis at all. If anything it’s just a minor player.
Mechanism? Mechanism? We don’t need no stinkin’ mechanism.
part two
Strong Advocacy for a Change of Course:
Based on the evidence presented in the Tselioudis et al. paper and its critical interpretation:
The Tselioudis et al. paper is not merely a data point; it’s a potential paradigm shift. To continue blindly down the Net Zero path without fundamentally integrating these revelations would be a profound disservice to both scientific integrity and the well-being of societies facing immense economic burdens and an uncertain future. The time to course-correct is now, before trillions more are squandered on a pursuit that may be fatally flawed.
I’m not so sure that “climate impacts are being felt”, at least where I live, or where I am currently vacationing.
Any reviews must be by REAL scientists, following the scientific method rigorously.
Last year Happer gave a lecture on radiation transfer in clouds which concluded:
1 – “Clouds and water vapor are much more important than greenhouse gases for Earth’s climate”
2 – “Doubling CO2 concentration, a 100% increase only decreases radiation to space by 1%. Covering half the sky with clouds decrease solar heating by 50%”
3 – “Clouds can be quantitatively modeled with 2n-Stream Radiative Transfer Theory”
Media: It’s Even Worse Than We Thought – Man-Made Climate Change Destroys Cloud Cover.
Yes, that will be the next item on the news.
In this case it isn’t the media. It’s the author of this “bombshell” study. He thinks the GHGs already emitted by humans today has committed us 10 C of warming in part because of the alterations to cloud patterns.
Cause, meet effect.
This will not result in a major correction in the climate advocates story line about carbon dioxide … reason being … it would threaten too many jobs and people with personal stakes on the “story line.”
Apparently it has to be said endlessly – this paper is from GISS! It continues a line of research they have been publishing for over thirty years.
What causes reduced cloud cover, Nick?
Warming.
Ocean surfaces warmed by the sun cause more evaporation, which causes more clouds formations.
Who knew?
(where’s my grant for my pal-reviewed, much-cited climate research paper?)
Now that’s a worry! Warming = less cloud = more warming = less cloud = more warming. Where will it end? I do hope there is some kind of mechanism to stop it, coz the planet will end up exploding into a ball of fire!
Given that you seem to know, Nick, maybe you could predict for us?
“Nick, maybe you could predict for us?”
He doesn’t need to, it has been done by people who study this stuff for a living and have brains the size of planets.
And you believe in Colluuuusion and Joe’s mind is sharp…got it.
Facts not in evidence
Facts are never in evidence with Stokes, Simon, and bgdwx.
have brains the size of planets.
I would have expected Marvin to get bored of it pretty quickly.
Marvin was paranoid so he would have anguished over what was going to happen.
Who knew climate was so simple that one word covers it? Chuckle.
The author of this “bombshell” study thinks human GHG emissions have already committed us to 10 C of warming. What I want to know is what WUWT was thinking when they approved this article for publication.
Mr. x: Funny how you say you want to know something after dozens of comments demonstrating your utter blindness to it.
10c, you get a modifier bonus on your grants based on how many degrees you state as the expected increase will be.
10 x Grant equals Big Bucks, you just can’t land on the Wammy.
You keep repeating that. It becomes no less absurd in the echo.
The planet has been 10 C warmer in the past so I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying it is absurd. But I will say that it is an outlier prediction which is part of my point.
That’s interesting, since I seem to recall someone insisting Tom was outrageous to insist that it was warmer in the past. Hmmm…
I don’t know what to tell you since I’ve never told Tom that it wasn’t warmer in past. What i have told Tom is that it is incorrect to claim it was warmer in 1930s or at any point in the last several hundred years. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t warmer in the past like the PETM era.
Not what you said to me. However, your claims about the past remain unsupported, as does the alarmist meme. There remains nothing remarkable about the current climate as far as any evidence is concerned, models and their fluid predictions notwithstanding.
Can you post a link so I can see the context?
[Judd et al. 2024]
I would not know where to look, but you sought to enlist my help to tell Tom that he was wrong to insist that temperatures were higher in the past. There was no other detail. I said Tom was correct that they had been higher in the past.
Your claims regarding the 1930s and the Medieval Warm Period are unsupported by data. All evidence suggests that they were as warm or warmer than present temperatures within relevant error margins. Current “records” measured to the tenth of a degree are not compelling and do not support alarmist dogma. Corrections to raw data are without consistent support, even when they are presented, which they often are not. Some researchers have gone as far as to refuse requests for codes and methods used in those manipulations.
I am well aware that millions of years ago, things were quite beyond those limits, having quarried tropical fossils in Wyoming for several years
That was in reference to the 1930s.
Can you post a global average temperature reconstruction showing that the 1930s and MWP era (1150-1300) were warmer than today?
This hypothesis is easily falsified. [Kaufaman et al. 2020]
Here is what the global average temperature looks like with and without corrections applied.
[Hausfather 2017]
Again, you present a global temperature series that is not based on actual measurements, since there was no global coverage at that time. In the 1930s, entire continents and the oceans were largely without any such measurement capability, and what existed was far from the level of precision and calibration that might validate your claims. There was and remains no data that can be used for such a comparison. Estimates and computer simulations cannot be compared to actual measured data.
The US temperature series is as good as it gets for that period. In addition, current measurements are so corrupted as to make even more recent data unfit for the purpose you are attempting.
“NOAA has released its summer 2024 (June through August) contiguous U.S. maximum temperatures (shown below) clearly demonstrating the dust bowl era period of the 1930’s remain the highest summer temperatures measured in the U.S.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/09/11/year-2024-contiguous-u-s-maximum-summer-temperatures-fail-to-reach-levels-achieved-90-years-ago-in-the-dust-bowl-era-despite-climate-alarmists-record-high-election-year-hype/
Obviously, the situation is far worse for the MWP, but proxies and historical references indicate that it was at least as warm as today.
4 More New Reconstructions Affirm The Medieval Warm Period Was ‘Warmer Than Today’ – Watts Up With That?
It is based on actual measurements. The observational repositories used are GHCN and ERSST.
That’s not true. For example, in the 1930s GHCN contains about 5000 land stations spread all over the world and ERSST uses all of the ocean observations available in the IOCOADS. I did a rough and quick count of observations in several of the decks for the 1930s and it was well over a million before I decided to stop.
Let’s assume that is true for a moment. That would mean it would be unfit for your and Tom’s purpose of claiming that it was warmer in the 1930s as well. This is also problematic for your claim that the MWP was warmer. Afterall, if you’re telling me the data in the 1930s is unsuitable for analysis then I’m going to be skeptical of any claim by you that data 1000 years ago is suitable.
The average US daily high temperature for Jun, Jul, Aug contributes only about 0.25% of the global average.
BTW…That same source that the WUWT article uses says the last 10 years is 0.3 F higher than the 10 years of the 1930s.
None of those are the global average temperature reconstructions. They are only spot locations showing warmer/cooler periods at different points in time.
When you combine all proxies from all locations into one global average temperature dataset this is what you get.
[Kaufaman et al. 2020]
Trying to spin gold from straw. When all is said and done, there is no evidence that the temperatures today are in any way remarkable. They still can’t grow wine grapes in England as they did during the MWP, and alpine glaciers have retreated to reveal the remains of forests and trade routes present centuries ago.
It is amusing that you avoid the details of measurement siting, since that alone precludes any pretense of global data prior to the mid-20th century, and also raises doubt about the value of those after that.
” BTW…That same source that the WUWT article uses says the last 10 years is 0.3 F higher than the 10 years of the 1930s.”
In other words, at worst, temperatures are essentially the same since error ranges well exceed the difference. Given increased urbanization and other surface changes, it is not a stretch to presume that it was likely warmer then, all else being equal.
“They still can’t grow wine grapes in England as they did during the MWP, and alpine glaciers have retreated to reveal the remains of forests and trade routes present centuries ago.”
It’s like the past doesn’t exist as an experiential reality. Only the made up temperatures are real.
About eight years ago when I was doing a compilation of degree-day calculations for locations around the globe there were *still* vast areas of mountainous Peru and Bolivia that were unmeasured. Large parts of Africa was the same.
5000 land stations spread around the globe means each station, if equally spread, would be measuring temperature for over 30,000 sqkm. That’s a density of about 7 stations in the US state of Kansas. And that is supposed to give a good estimate of the climate of Kansas? From the cool north border with Nebraska, to the warm border with Oklahoma and from the temperature border with Missouri to the semi-arid desert border with Colorado? What exactly would the average of those seven stations tell you about the “climate” of Kansas? Now propagate that to places like Siberia, Bolivia, or Chad. From this we are supposed to get a “global average temperature” that describes the global climate?
Indeed. I am about 20 miles from the Salt Lake City International Airport at almost the same elevation, yet the temperatures measured there differ from my own by an average of five degrees F. I am far from being in a rural location. Attempting even now to quantify a concept like “global temperature” is questionable. How can anyone extrapolate the past to a modern precision from essentially no data?
Jonathan Cohler: “Whole rubric of global temperature is a fake & a fraud” | Tom Nelson Pod #10
He talks about a 2007 paper that I haven’t had time to see if it is available:
Does a Global Temperature Exist?
Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, Bjarne Andresen
J. Non-Equilib. Thermodyn.
2007 • Vol. 32 • pp. 1-27
And yet a lot of people do it. It is featured prominently on every page of WUWT.
They can’t. That’s why the uncertainty on past measurements of the global average temperature are higher than they are today. There was data though; just not as much as today which is the primary reason why the uncertainty is higher in the past.
“And yet a lot of people do it. It is featured prominently on every page of WUWT.”
So what? A lot of people believe the moon landing was faked. This is just one more use of the argumentative fallacy named the Bandwagon Fallacy.
“They can’t. That’s why the uncertainty on past measurements of the global average temperature are higher than they are today. There was data though; just not as much as today which is the primary reason why the uncertainty is higher in the past.”
Even temperature measurements today have a measurement uncertainty that legislates against generating an average with more precision/resolution than the units digit. Current averaging of temperature data doesn’t even recognize the need to weight SH and NH temperatures based on the variances of the temperature variables. The lack of mathematical rigor in climate science today is dismaying. Even the most basic climate science assumption that all measurement uncertainty is random, Gaussian, and cancels is a joke of monumental proportion.
Again demonstrating that still have little or no understanding of metrology and measurement uncertainty.
That would depend on what you mean by “remarkable”. In this context my threshold for “remarkable” is rather high therefore I don’t think today’s temperatures are “remarkable”.
That could be because it may have been warmer in England during the MWP. Afterall, there is a lot of evidence that suggests England was very warm during the 1150-1300 period…the period and location Hubert Lamb was focused on when he originally reported the discovery of the MWP in 1965.
That’s the pot calling the kettle black. You avoided the details of measurement siting when you cited the WUWT article that uses nClimDiv. Do you think it is fit for the purpose or not? If not then why did you use it?
What do you think the error range is? Can you post a link to the publication assessing the error range of nClimDiv?
There is more urban area today than there was in the 1930s.
“What do you think the error range is? Can you post a link to the publication assessing the error range of nClimDiv?”
The Type B measurement uncertainty of typical current temperature measurement stations is about +/- 0.3C. Averaging even just 10 of these stations results in a measurement uncertainty of almost +/- 1C, i.e. the units digit.
Your continued assertion that the SEM is the measurement uncertainty of a data set is just one more abuse of statistical descriptors by climate science. The SEM only tells you how precisely you have located the population average. It tells you NOTHING about the accuracy of the population average you have so precisely located. The ACCURACY of that so precisely located population average is the propagated measurement uncertainty of the elements in the data set. The more single measurements of different things taken by different instruments that you include in that data set the greater the measurement uncertainty becomes. And that propagated measurement uncertainty applies to the precisely located population average.
SEM = SD/n
According to the GUM, the SD is *the* measurement uncertainty. It is the dispersion of values that can reasonably be assigned to the measurand. It does *NOT* define measurement uncertainty as the sampling error of the measurements, i.e. the SEM.
There is not a professional machinist alive that will say you can measure the crankshaft journals of ten different V8 engines using 10 different “uncalibrated” micrometers, add all 80 measurements together into one data set, take their SD and divide it by 80 to get the measurement uncertainty of average value of the measurements. Each and every one will tell you that the measurement uncertainty of that average value is the SD of the data set.
Yet YOU and climate science claim that doing just that with temperature measurements is correct. Divide the SD by the number of elements to get the dispersion of values that can reasonably be assigned to the measurand.
“They still can’t grow wine grapes in England as they did during the MWP”
Just not true. The evidence of wine grapes in the MWP is scanty, but the evidence of wine grapes growing now is abundant. It is big business.
Even Scotland!
My bad, that was a careless statement. I should have qualified it as “…some places in England and above the 55th parallel”, where wine production at the time is documented, but not possible now.
During The 800s-1300s AD, Wine Grapes Were Grown At Latitudes Where Polar Bears Now Roam
Your attempt to show that the U.S. temp’s are meaningless compared to global temperature is not convincing..
The U.S, is about 6% of the global land area. If it contributes only 0.25% of the global temperature, something is screwy. The globe’s land percent is ~30%. 6% of 30% is ~1.8%. 1.8% ÷ 0.25% = 7.
If climate science is degrading the U.S. temperatures by a factor of 7 in calculating a global temperature, something is way out of whack!
Lastly, you don’t provide any data showing that U.S. temperatures are NOT representative of global land temperature, especially within the same latitudes.
Horse feathers.
Show the measured data that Hausfather used to create the “global temperature” for the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
I want to see the stations in the middle of the SH Pacific Ocean. I want to see the stations in Southeast Asia for the same period. Maybe those in Siberia as well. How many stations were in the north of 60 degrees anywhere on the globe.
Lastly, you are again showing mean values with no hint of the variance/standard deviation that belong to those means. Note, not the SEM that only tells how accurate the mean estimation is, but the actual standard deviation of the probability distribution used to calculate the mean.
From Gemini- Supplemental Paragraph: A Fundamental Contradiction in AGW TheoryThis study’s findings directly contradict a core tenet of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis: the positive water vapor feedback loop. AGW theory posits that as CO2 causes initial warming, it leads to increased evaporation and thus more water vapor in the atmosphere. Since water vapor is itself a potent greenhouse gas, this is expected to amplify the warming in a positive feedback loop. Crucially, increased atmospheric water vapor is also often associated with the potential for more cloud formation, particularly high-altitude clouds which can also trap heat, further reinforcing the warming.
However, the Tselioudis et al. paper reveals the opposite is occurring: a significant reduction in cloud cover, specifically the contraction of major storm-cloud zones, is identified as the dominant contributor to increased solar absorption and recent warming. This observed decrease in reflective cloud cover directly undermines the expectation of an amplifying feedback from increased cloudiness, which would act to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. The fact that warming is driven by less clouds rather than more highlights a critical inconsistency, suggesting that either the water vapor feedback is not operating as strongly as hypothesized in the context of cloud formation, or that other, more powerful, cloud-related dynamics are at play that current models fundamentally misrepresent. This glaring disparity demands a rigorous re-evaluation of the assumed feedbacks within climate models and the AGW narrative itself.
The IPCC and the modellers are smart enough to give themselves plenty of wiggle room. The water vapour arguments include (a) that water vapour atmospheric concentration increases with increasing temperature, and (b) so does the atmosphere’s carrying capacity. IOW that absolute humidity can increase while relative humidity decreases. IOW2, that it is possible for there to be both more water vapour and less cloud.
The modelling of this is quite primitive, so that for example it doesn’t fully account for the energy used in the hydrological cycle, but then it does appear that wiggle room is a high priority.
If the specific humidity goes up then at some altitude that extra latent heat *will* get released and *more* clouds will result. They may be at a higher elevation but they will still act as shade for the Earth. And that *more* latent heat will get released toward space (at least part of it will) increasing the heat loss.
It’s the specific humidity that tells you how much water vapor is in a volume of air. The relative humidity only tells you when that water vapor will turn to water, i.e. when you are approaching the dew point. It’s how *much* water vapor that is important to heat transfer.
Someday climate science needs to move into the 21st century and start actually using enthalpy as their metric and not just temperature as an unreliable proxy.
Mr. Oregon: I agree with you and Mr. Rotter that this paper ought to shake things up because I’ve seen the CliSci cult’s positive water vapor feedback loop (pwvfl). I think it’s also based on an unfounded “co2 done it” base. From what we see here from Mr. Stokes and Mr. x, the rigorous re-eval will wait until a GISS paper says co2 is causing the pwvfl and more clouds, and they’ll treat this paper as used TP.
I recall from the 1970s (when I was a youngster) that we needed to reduce pollution (the real kind of pollution) or we would be headed for another ice age. So, we spent a couple of decades putting scrubbers on coal plants, reducing sulfur content in fuels, and other projects to reduce real pollution. And the temperature went up. Ice age avoided. And somehow this is now a problem? Sounds like there are many out there that need to get a life … a real life. Goodness.
To my mind there’s a very important issue that has been missed here: The IPCC claim that there is a positive cloud feedback to CO2-driven warming which will approx double the CO2 effect. This paper does not – unless I have missed it – show that the reduced cloud cover is not a feedback. Although the treatment of aerosols does go some way towards this, the paper appears still to cling to the feedback idea, saying that the feedback isn’t as expected rather than that clouds could be behaving independently. In Clouds Haven’t Behaved the Way the IPCC Or the Models Say on WUWT in 2022, I do address the feedback issue, showing that the observed cloud behaviour appears to be independent of CO2.
From my somewhat naive perspective, the anthropocentric view that climate change is entirely down to human beings is equivalent to the geocentric model of the solar system, i.e. the role of the sun is minimised or ignored completely. The current solar cycle has exceeded predictions as to its strength, as shown by the aurora being visible at low latitudes multiple times. Could the hypothesis that clouds are seeded by cosmic rays have some validity? What effect does increased solar activity have on atmospheric circulation?
This isn’t news to anyone who’s read Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder’s The Chilling Stars, published ten years or so ago. The mechanism for cloud creation is fairly well understood by now, too. Except by alarmists and ignorant politicians, of course.
Years ago while dining with colleagues (Genentech) in Switzerland we debated climate change action. I had studied this quite extensively by then and thought I’d convinced them – in much more general terms – the thrust of this article: That nearly all the cause of climate change is natural forcings, and IF humans have a contribution it’s in the “noise level” and inconsequential. And that making massive changes to our energy systems will have zero positive impact. Their reply: “Well, isn’t it just the right thing to do anyway?” I was almost speechless. They effectively said “Isn’t it the right thing to do to waste $trillions, destroy land resources, and destroy the grid and economies…..anyway?”