Does Cloud Cover Explain Recent Temperature Trends?

[Valin]

Power Line:

John Hinderaker

November 2, 2014

 

Climate science is in its infancy, and much of what drives the Earth’s climate is understood poorly if at all. It is clear, however, that clouds have a significant impact on temperatures. A recent paper by Australian physicist John McLean suggests that cloud cover, combined with the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, explains temperature trends from 1950 to the present. Anthony Watts summarizes the paper’s findings:

 

Key points of the paper:

 

* Indicates that the temperature pattern can be attributed to a sequence of events, namely a shift in the prevailing ENSO conditions, then a reduction in total cloud cover and then a shift on cloud [cover] (decrease in low level cloud that was largely offset by an increase in mid and upper level cloud)

 

* Uses the Trenberth, Fasulo & Kiehl energy balance diagram to show that the loss in total cloud cover caused an increase in heat energy being absorbed at the Earth’s surface that was greater than the increase that IPCC 5AR claims was due to greenhouse gases

 

* Indicates that greenhouse gases played little if any part in the warming, which not only refutes the IPCC’s belief or opinion but also means that there is negligible, or even no, 16 or more years’ of “missing heat” to be found.

 

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You can read the paper for yourself here. These are some highlights:

 

 

The pattern of the residual temperature anomaly does not correspond to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which has been increasing almost linearly from 1958, when monitoring began and certainly has not stabilised since 2000. The pattern is also inconsistent with other greenhouse gases, including methane, whose concentration rose from 1984 to 1999, and CFC-12, which increased from 1979 to year 2000.

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[Valin]

& this.....

 

A 97 Percent Footnote

Steven Hayward

November 2, 2014

 

Pointing out the fraudulence and superficiality of the climatistas “97 percent!” campfire slogan is a tedious business, but someone has to do it. (My most complete analysis of it is here.)

 

The distinguished climate economist Richard Tol has been all over the original Cook paper, and has a fresh takedown up on his website right now. If you’re not familiar with Tol, he is one of the pre-eminent economists in the field of the economics of climate change. His work was cited several dozen times in the infamous and later admittedly politicized “Stern Review” in the UK that purported to find huge near-term costs of climate change. Tol not only repudiated the way his work had been used in the Stern Review; he said if a graduate student had turned in the Stern Review as a class paper, he would have flunked the student. Most other serious economists laughed at the Stern Review’s economics, which is one reason it quickly sank like a stone. Tol is not, incidentally, a skeptic of human-caused climate change. He just has economic scruples, and calls BS when he sees it.

 

Anyway, here are few highlights from Tol’s latest broadside about the shoddiness of the Cook “97 Percent” paper:

 

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