3 New Papers Reveal Dominance Of Solar, Cloud Climate Forcing Since The 1980s … With CO2 Only A Bit Player

According to the IPCC (2007), changes in climate occur as a consequence of variations in the Earth’s radiation budget (solar energy absorbed by versus leaving the surface).  Changes in the Earth’s radiation budget occur for 3 primary reasons; two of those three reasons involve solar forcing.

IPCC AR4:

Global climate is determined by the radiation balance of the planet. There are three fundamental ways the Earth’s radiation balance can change, thereby causing a climate change:

(1)  changing the incoming solar radiation (e.g., by changes in the Earth’s orbit or in the Sun itself),

(2)  changing the fraction of solar radiation that is reflected (this fraction is called the albedo – it can be changed, for example, by changes in cloud cover, small particles called aerosols or land cover), and

(3)   altering the longwave energy radiated back to space (e.g., by changes in greenhouse gas concentrations).

Reason (3) is, of course, the one that gets nearly all the attention from those who wish to characterize climate changes as primarily influenced by — or caused by — human activity.  That’s where the 100 parts per million change in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1900 comes in.   According to the latest IPCC report, the total amount of radiative forcing attributed to changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1750 (through 2011) is just 1.8 W m-2.   Again, that’s the total accumulated radiative effect attributed to CO2-forcing of climate changes over the last 260 years.

To put this into context, consider that the total amount of radiative forcing attributed to the +22 parts per million CO2 increase for the 2000-2010 period is claimed to be just 0.2 W m-2 by Feldman and co-authors (2015):

Feldman et al., 2015

“Here we present observationally based evidence of clear-sky CO2 surface radiative forcing that is directly attributable to the increase, between 2000 and 2010, of 22 parts per million atmospheric CO2. … The time series both show statistically significant trends of 0.2 W m−2 per decade (with respective uncertainties of ±0.06 W m−2 per decade and ±0.07 W m−2 per decade)”

Remember that.  CO2 climate-forcing amounts to merely 0.2 W m-2 per decade with a 22 parts per million increase in atmospheric concentration during the first decade of the 21st century, when there was a pause in global warming.…

PLAYING GOD? Tens of millions spent on huge project to change the WEATHER – ‘Putting chemicals in the sky’

China are ploughing more than £22million into shooting salt-and-mineral-filled bullets into the sky in a bid to make it rain.

But Beijing is not alone in its pursuit to play God with the weather, with at least 52 countries, including the US, using weather modification techniques which allows authorities to clear the skies or make it rain.

Droughts in places such as the the US and China are one of the biggest constraints on their farming industries, which is why scientists are working to eradicate the the prolonged dry seasons.

They will do this by putting chemicals in the sky.…

NEW CLOUD STUDIES ARE ANOTHER BLOW TO CLIMATE EXTREMISM

Climate science is in its infancy, and just about every proposition is controversial. The idea that climate science is in any non-trivial sense settled is ridiculous.

One area where this is obvious is clouds. Clouds play a huge role in the Earth’s climate, but the dynamics surrounding the various types of clouds are simply not understood. When climate scientists developed the models on which all global warming alarmism is based, they knew that the role they assigned to CO2 as the principal driver of the Earth’s temperature could not be sustained by a review of the Earth’s climate history. Therefore, they used clouds as a plug factor, programming their models to believe that the human influence on clouds significantly moderates the otherwise extreme influence of added CO2 on the climate. This is one of many ways in which climate “science” is not scientific.

Paper: ‘Has climate change been disproved? Study ‘casts shock DOUBT on global warming’

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/674557/Has-climate-change-been-disproved-Large-Hadron-boffins-cast-shock-DOUBT-on-global-warming

Boffins from CERN have also discovered projected temperature increases over the next century may have been over estimated.

Researchers found trees may have been putting similar aerosols into the air as burning fossil fuels, long before the industrial revolution, meaning humans may have had less impact on the climate than we thought.

Scientists made the discovery during an experiment to create an artificial cloud that was thought could help cool Earth and reverse global warming.

A study published this week in the journal Nature has looked more closely at the tiny particles within clouds, known as cloud seeds, that help cool the planet and found they can be produced naturally.

Clouds, including natural ones and those from aerosols, are seen by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the single biggest source of uncertainty about the so-called human-caused climate change.

The problem stems from not knowing how cloudy the world was before the industrial era, and the fact that some of the gases produced by burning fossil fuels said to warm the plant in the long-term, actually help cool it in the short-term through cloud formation.

But now CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have left the issue even more confusing after discovering, while creating the fake cloud, that trees could have been putting these aerosols into the atmosphere since they first grew at the time of the dinosaurs.…

China’s Smog Clouds May Prevent Global Warming

China’s Smog Clouds May Prevent Global Warming

http://sunshinehours.net/2016/03/24/chinas-smog-clouds-may-prevent-global-warming

I’ve posted articles in the past linking the clean air legislation in the west with more sunshine and therefore more warming. Here is a paper arguing the opposite: the lack of clean air in China is cooling the globe. China is responsible for just 10 per cent of man-made global warming, despite emitting more than one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases, a new study claims. The study found sulphate and nitrate aerosols emitted by burning fossil fuels had a cooling effect that offset much of the warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and black carbon. As a result, while China’s consumption of fossil fuels and its carbon emissions had increased significantly over the past decades, a corresponding increase in aerosol emissions meant its contribution to man-made climate change had remained largely unchanged since the pre-industrial period. The findings suggest that China’s severe smog could have a “silver lining” in cooling the globe, and the study said that a campaign to clear the air could actually increase the country’s contribution to man-made warming. The study was led by Professor Li Bengang at Peking University and published in Nature. http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1929306/chinas-smog-clouds-have-silver-lining-they-may-help

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Nature article: $250 million should be spent on climate models able to skillfully simulate clouds & convection

Nature article: $250 million should be spent on climate models able to skillfully simulate clouds & convection

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/11/nature-article-250-million-should-be.html

An article published today in Nature notes multiple and substantial uncertainties and deficiencies of climate models which are “crucial for predicting global warming,” due primarily to the low-resolution of today’s models which is insufficient to skillfully simulate essential climate aspects such as clouds, ocean eddies, convection, water cycle, thunderstorms, “crucial components of the oceans” such as “the Gulf Stream, and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current” [and ocean oscillations] etc As the article mentions, typical climate models use a low resolution of 100 km, but much higher resolutions of 1 km or higher are required to skillfully model convection and clouds, far beyond the capability of current supercomputers. The author recommends a quarter billion dollars be spent to create international supercomputing centers for climate models, before the world spends trillions on mitigation based on the Precautionary Principle that may or may not be necessary. As climate scientist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has pointed out, and contrary to popular belief, climate models are not based on “basic physics,” rather are almost entirely comprised of parameterizations/fudge factors for most critical aspects of climate including convection and clouds. As the article below notes, “simulations of climate change are very sensitive to some of the parameters [fudge factors] associated with these approximate representations of convective cloud systems” However, even if supercomputers are developed over the next decade capable of handling such high resolution, substantial doubt remains of the benefits for climate prediction due to the inherent limitations of chaos theory, multiple flawed assumptions in the model code, and inadequate observations to initialize such numeric models. These are some of the reasons why two recent papers instead call for a new stochastic approach to climate modeling. Climate forecasting: Build high-resolution global climate models Tim Palmer 19 November 2014 International supercomputing centres dedicated to climate prediction are needed to reduce uncertainties in global warming, says Tim Palmer. Local effects such as thunderstorms, crucial for predicting global warming, could be simulated by fine-scale global climate models. Excerpts: The drive to decarbonize the global economy is usually justified by appealing to the precautionary principle: reducing emissions is warranted because the risk of doing nothing is unacceptably high. By emphasizing the idea of risk, this framing recognizes uncertainty in the magnitude and timing of global warming. This uncertainty is substantial. If warming occurs …

New excuse #57 for the ‘pause’ of global warming: Increase in mid- and upper level clouds

New excuse #57 for the “pause” of global warming: Increase in mid- and upper level clouds

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/10/new-excuse-57-for-pause-of-global.html

Via email from climate data analyst John McLean of the Dept. of Physics, James Cook University, Australia, comes explanation #57 for the global warming “pause,” related to an “increase in mid- and upper level clouds” after 1997, which increased albedo/reflection of sunlight. McLean also finds that “CO2 played little if any part” in the post-1950 global warming, which the IPCC attributes with alleged “95% confidence” entirely to man-made greenhouse gases. He instead finds post-1950 warming explained by natural shifts in ENSO and cloud cover. As he notes, “This means that there is little if any “missing heat” that (supposedly but improbably) 16 years ago decided to start hiding itself away where no-one could find it.” Email from John McLean [emphasis added, h/t Marc Morano/Climate Depot]: My new paper about late 20th century warming is now available via http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=50837#.VFQNL2c4B59 I show that the pattern of global average temperature anomalies since 1950 can be described as a sequence of: (a) ENSO shifting from lots of La Nina events and very few El Ninos to the opposite situation (b) from 1988 to 1997 a reduction in the total cloud cover anomaly (c) after 1997 a decrease in low level cloud but an increase in mid and upper level cloud The temperature data is HadCRUT4, the ENSO data the Troup data from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and the cloud cover data the D2 dataset from ISCCP. Of the above it was (b) that caused warming of about 0.45C degrees. When I adjusted the data in the often-quoted energy balance diagram by Trenberth et al, I found that the increase in heat absorbed at the Earth’s surface was about 5 watts per square metre, a figure greater than that given by the IPCC 5AR for the extra heat caused by greenhouse gas emissions. If my hypothesis is correct then CO2 played little if any part. This means that there is little if any “missing heat” that (supposedly but improbably) 16 years ago decided to start hiding itself away where no-one could find it. The paper is being discussed on WUWT: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/30/new-paper-links-warming-since-1950-to-enso-and-cloud-cover-variations/ and on Bishop Hill: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/10/30/mclean-on-clouds.html

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