CLOUDS
Clouds Haven’t Behaved the Way the IPCC Or the Models Say
10 hours ago Guest Blogger 40 Comments
Michael Jonas
I have been working for quite a while on cloud data, and have now had a paper published on the behaviour of clouds, which challenges the way clouds are interpreted by the IPCC and in the climate models. The IPCC indicate that clouds (1) provide a positive feedback to (CO2-driven) climate change, and (2) have reacted to aerosols with an increasing cooling effect. The IPCC logic is essentially that man-made CO2 helped by #1 has been so powerful that it has more than overcome #2. My paper argues that clouds behaved largely independently of CO2 and had as much of a warming effect as CO2, maybe much more. As far as I can tell from searching the scientific literature, this analysis has not been presented before.
Abstract:
The patterns of behaviour of clouds, both for cloud area and cloud optical thickness, are studied over the period of available data, 1983 to 2017. There was a decrease in cloud cover over the study period, while global surface temperatures increased. The patterns of clouds and temperature indicate that the cloud cover decrease could not have been caused by the increased surface temperature. The clear implication is that the decrease in global cloud area must have been caused by some other unspecified factor, and was not caused directly or indirectly by CO2. Evaluation of the changes in clouds and CO2 over the study period indicate that this unspecified factor had as much positive impact as the increase in CO2, with respect to the amount of radiation reaching the surface (radiative forcing), and possibly a much larger positive impact. The climate models, which have zero or negative cloud impact on radiative forcing independently from CO2, need to take this into account in order to avoid over-estimating the influence of CO2.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/31/clouds-havent-behaved-the-way-the-ipcc-or-the-models-say/
