By Charles Blaisdell PhD ChE The earth’s cloud cover has long been an important puzzle in climate change. Cloud cover has many types and varies significantly from year to year. …
Tag: Albedo
2001-2019 Warming Driven By Increases In Absorbed Solar Radiation, Not Human Emissions
Three new studies affirm the increase in absorbed solar radiation associated with decreased reflection by clouds (albedo) has been the “root cause” of the positive Earth Energy Imbalance and global…
Earth Seems to Be Losing Its Shine Due to Warming Oceans
According to the study, the Earth’s brightness has decreased as a result of warming ocean waters. Now you’re probably wondering, “how do you even measure something like that?” But researchers…
Ocean Temperature Limit – Corrections and Part 4
Current climate models parameterise clouds and atmospheric water is treated as a “Greenhouse Gas” when it exists in the atmosphere as gas, liquid and solid. The solid phase is a…
Ocean Surface Temperature Limit-Part 3
Climate models are based on a flawed assumption. Until they can replicate the actual physics of deep convection tightly linked to surface temperature rather than the naive parameterisation of clouds…
A pertinent climate question
How much of a change in cloudiness would it take to account for the 0.53 W/m2 increase in TOA radiative forcing since 2003?
An Analysis of the Earth’s Energy Budget
Guest post by Philip Mulholland 1. Introduction. The following two figures, showing the principal features of the Earth’s Energy Budget, were published in 1997 by the Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OK-First)…
Repeated Trials, Autocorrelation, and Albedo
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach OK, quick gambler’s question. Suppose I flip seven coins in the air at once and they all seven come up heads. Are the coins loaded?…
The Daily Albedo Cycle
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I discussed the role of tropical albedo in regulating the temperature in two previous posts entitled Albedic Meanderings and An Inherently Stable System. This post…
Albedic Meanderings
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been considering the nature of the relationship between the albedo and temperature. I have hypothesized elsewhere that variations in tropical cloud albedo are one…
Arctic Albedo Variations
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Anthony has just posted the results from a “Press Session” at the AGU conference. In it the authors make two claims of interest. The first…
The 'strawman' albedo effect
From ETH Zurich , something that actually makes sense. Straw albedo mitigates extreme heat Wheat fields are often tilled immediately after the crop is harvested, removing the light-coloured stubble and…
How Much Sunlight Actually Enters The System?
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There’s a new study in PNAS, entitled “Observational determination of albedo decrease caused by vanishing Arctic sea ice” by Pistone et al. Let me start…
New PNAS paper claims Arctic planetary albedo dropped significantly, yet recent CERES data shows no significant change
From PNAS: Direct satellite observation reveals that the Arctic planetary albedo, a measure of reflectiveness, decreased from 0.52 to 0.48 between 1979 and 2011, a change in albedo that corresponds…
The Thermostatic Throttle
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I have theorized that the reflective nature of the tropical clouds, in particular those of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) just above the equator, functions…
Weekly Area of Snow Extent
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I got to thinking about snow the other day. It was occasioned by my look at the correlation (both positive and negative) of temperature and…
Evidence that Clouds Actively Regulate the Temperature
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I have put forth the idea for some time now that one of the main climate thermoregulatory mechanisms is a temperature-controlled sharp increase in albedo…
A Tropical Oddity
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I wanted to bring you up to date on my current meanderings in the TAO buoy data that I investigated previously in a post called…
Greenland Ice Sheet albedo drops 'off the bottom of the chart' – but look closer as to why
Got this in the mail just as I posted my open thread announcemnt. I’m too busy this weekend to say much else except to post this tweet from Bill McKibben…
A Demonstration of Negative Climate Sensitivity
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Well, after my brief digression to some other topics, I’ve finally been able to get back to the reason that I got the CERES albedo…
Observations on TOA Forcing vs Temperature
I recently wrote three posts (first, second, and third), regarding climate sensitivity. I wanted to compare my results to another dataset. Continued digging has led me to the CERES monthly…
Sun and Clouds are Sufficient
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my previous post, A Longer Look at Climate Sensitivity, I showed that the match between lagged net sunshine (the solar energy remaining after albedo…
A Longer Look at Climate Sensitivity
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach After I published my previous post, “An Observational Estimate of Climate Sensitivity“, a number of people objected that I was just looking at the average…
An Observational Estimate of Climate Sensitivity
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach “Climate sensitivity” is the name for the measure of how much the earth’s surface is supposed to warm for a given change in what is…