Watts Up With That? by Willis Eschenbach 1/7/2020
Eleven years ago I published a post here on Watts Up With That entitled “The Thermostat Hypothesis“. About a year after the post, the journal Energy and Environment published my rewrite of the post entitled “THE THUNDERSTORM THERMOSTAT HYPOTHESIS: HOW CLOUDS AND THUNDERSTORMS CONTROL THE EARTH’S TEMPERATURE“.
When I started studying the climate, what I found surprising was not the warming. For me, the oddity was how stable the temperature of the earth has been. The system is ruled by nothing more substantial than wind, wave, and cloud. All of these are changing on both long and short time cycles all of the time. In addition, the surface temperature is running some thirty degrees C or more warmer than would be expected given the strength of the sun.
Despite that, the earth’s temperature has stayed in a surprisingly narrow range, e.g. ± 0.3°C over the entire 20th Century. This represents a temperature variation of ±0.1% during a hundred years. That stability was the curiosity of curiosities for me, because to me that temperature stability was clear evidence of some kind of a strong thermoregulatory system. But where and what was the regulating mechanism?
The short version of my hypothesis is that a variety of emergent phenomena operate in an overlapping fashion to keep the earth’s temperature stable beyond expectations. These phenomena include tropical cumulus clouds, thunderstorms, dust devils, squall lines, tornadoes, the La Nina pump moving warm water to the Poles, tropical cyclones, and the Julian-Madden, Pacific Decadal and North Atlantic Oscillations. In addition, I’ve adduced a large body of evidence supporting my hypothesis.
More:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/07/drying-the-sky/
