Ouch!
According to Science Daily, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory has rediscovered the aerosol factor in climate (yet again). Those familiar with climate science know that aerosols are the preferred wild card used by embarrassed climate scientists whenever their models fail to properly account for unexpected cooling periods…which incidentally is more than 97% of the time.
The cooling clouds
Today Science Daily here reports that NASA’s jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has a paper out that examines the major role aerosols play on climate, especially cooling-effect cloud formation: Well, maybe we got it all wrong after all…and forget what the IPCC has said up to now.
The not-so-surprising statement:
…they found that the total impact from the influence of aerosols on this type of cloud is almost double that estimated in the latest report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
Doubling! I thought this was all settled. How could they have been off by 100%?
What other factors were they 99% sure about, but now will soon revise 100% in one direction or the other? I think it’s safe to say that as observations continue diverging glaringly from the models, many climate factors will have to undergo similar profound adjustments, and some even introduced for the first time.
Rather than narrowing it down in the models, scientists clearly appear to really have meandered way off into the woods and swamps with their models. The big repair work still lies ahead.
Clouds have the biggest impact on the albedo, cool our planet
According to Science Daily, a “new, comprehensive global analysis of satellite data” led by Yi-Chun Chen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a joint team of researchers from JPL and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena “have quantified how changes in aerosol levels affect low-level clouds over the ocean, ‘which cover about one-third of the ocean’s surface, have the biggest impact on the albedo, or reflectivity, of Earth’s surface, reflecting solar energy back to space and cooling our planet’.”
To me this is a back door that opens the way to admitting that water vapor has a negative feedback after all. Never mind the aerosols, which are always in ample supply. More water vapor from higher global temps means more cloud formation, which cool the earth. Now if they’ve underestimated this so much that they now have to double it, then the models can be scrapped – and policymakers should be fuming. Taxpayers too!
According to John Seinfeld, professor of chemical engineering at Caltech:
These results offer unique guidance on how warm cloud processes should be incorporated in climate models with changing aerosol levels.”
That would be just a start. How about incorporating other major well-known factors into the models: like cosmic radiation regulated by the sun’s magnetic field, ocean cycles, and expanding global sea ice?
They don’t get much right and they were wrong again.
Ouch & Oops!
Friday, 6 October 2000
Clouds won’t counter global warming
“Don’t count on clouds to come and rescue us from global warming, says a NASA researcher, who claims that the minimum amount of warming predicted by scientists should be revised upwards by half a degree Celsius.
“Critics of global warming theory – some with vested interests – have tried to discredit the climate change models on the basis that the observed temperature drops were lower than expected,” he says.
“But that’s because until recently, we only used changes in carbon dioxide levels to calculate temperature change.
Once we put in the aerosol data we found the models were in much better agreement with the observed temperatures”.”
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2000/10/06/196029.htm