Global Temperatures Rose As Cloud Cover Fell In the 1980s and 90s
October 31, 2018
By Paul Homewood
We’ve been discussing the sudden rise in UK and European temperatures in the 1990s, and I was reminded about a study undertaken by Clive Best and Euan Mearns looking at the role of cloud cover four years ago:
Clouds have a net average cooling effect on the earth’s climate. Climate models assume that changes in cloud cover are a feedback response to CO2 warming. Is this assumption valid? Following a study with Euan Mearns showing a strong correlation in UK temperatures with clouds, we looked at the global effects of clouds by developing a combined cloud and CO2 forcing model to sudy how variations in both cloud cover [8] and CO2 [14] data affect global temperature anomalies between 1983 and 2008. The model as described below gives a good fit to HADCRUT4 data with a Transient Climate Response (TCR )= 1.6±0.3°C. The 17-year hiatus in warming can then be explained as resulting from a stabilization in global cloud cover since 1998. An excel spreadsheet implementing the model as described below can be downloaded from
http://clivebest.com/GCCThe full post containing all of the detailed statistical analysis is here.
But this is the key graph:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/global-temperatures-rose-as-cloud-cover-fell-in-the-1980s-and-90s/
