By Roy Spencer
As regular readers here are already aware, I am increasingly convinced that the greatest mistake that the IPCC and mainstream climate researchers have made is their assumption that cloud cover on the Earth remains the same on climate time scales, say over 30 years or longer. The issue is critical because clouds determine how much solar energy is absorbed by the Earth, which then largely determines average global temperatures.
Assuming that cloud cover remains the same is part of the climate modelers’ worldview in which nature was in balance before humans came along and upset that balance.
But there is no way to support this worldview with data…it is a matter of faith. It takes only a 1% change in global average cloud cover to cause substantial climate change, either warming or cooling. It has only been since 2000 that have we had sufficiently stable satellite data (from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites) to determine whether there are any long-term, natural changes in global cloudiness, and unfortunately eight years of data is not much in the context of climate change.
More here
Filed under: Global Warming
BOOKMARK