Climate change activists are dogmatic. Greenhouse gases released by human activity are warming the Earth by trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Thus, doom and gloom and civilizational collapse await us if we don’t decrease the number of cows, gas-guzzling cars, and factories.
But is it really that straightforward? [emphasis, links added]
In a Wall Street Journal column published Sunday, Andy Kessler proposes that Earth’s atmosphere is actually able to regulate itself such that temperatures remain relatively constant despite changes in greenhouse gases or the radiation of the sun.
The mechanism for doing so, Kessler believes, is a negative feedback loop. This is a natural process by which the negative effects of a reaction cause that reaction to slow down or stop.
The hypothesis on climate self-regulation, which is termed the Iris Effect, was first proposed by atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen in 2001. It postulates that cirrus clouds in the tropics dissipate in reaction to rising temperatures.
Additional radiation can then escape from Earth’s atmosphere, causing a cooling effect. Kessler calls this a “safety valve.”
In an interview with Kessler, Lindzen, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, “This more than offsets the effect of greenhouse gases.”
Support for the Theory
Kessler writes that a 2021 paper authored by Lindzen “shows strong support for an Iris Effect.”
The paper’s abstract says, “At this point, the strong areal reduction of cirrus with warming appears very clearly in both climate models and satellite observations.”
The paper states that the Iris Effect results from both “decreased cirrus outflow due to increased precipitation efficiency” as well as “concentration of cumulus cores over warmer areas.”
The paper reviews 20 years of research on the topic.
Additionally, a 2015 paper authored by Thorsten Mauritsen and Bjorn Stevens implemented the Iris Effect into other scientists’ climate models.
The scientists found the changed models to be more accurate at modeling historic climate changes.
Kessler also points to the faint young sun paradox as evidence for the Iris Effect.
The paradox points out that Earth’s climate is mostly the same today as it was 2.5 billion years ago, even though the sun had 30 percent less energy then.
Ignoring the Iris Effect
Clouds, theoretical physicist Steven Koonin explained to the Wall Street Journal, are “notoriously difficult to model,” so climate scientists often adjust or “tune” clouds “to match observations.”
This, Lindzen argues, provides scientists with an opportunity to distort their research to match the activist narrative on climate change.
He claims that scientists who dissent from his perspective on the Iris Effect “adjust their models, especially coverage and reflection or albedo of clouds in the tropics” in order to “maintain the warming narrative.”
An Easier Solution Than Mandates
If true, this is highly convenient. There’s no need for drastic governmental measures to decrease Earth’s temperature.
We can simply trust the Earth to mitigate any effect of excess warming.
As Kessler points out, it’s almost as though Earth was created by an engineer who fine-tuned it such that it would keep its temperature stable and life-sustaining.
h/t Steve B.
Top photo by David Kanigan
Read more at American Spectator
The Fragile Earth and Delicate Balance of Nature are their two top lies we get from the Eco-Freaks
As the climate has avoided catastrophic swings for long periods surely indicates a negative feedback providing stability. The positive feedback proposed by the IPCC et al would result in instability which would have been obvious long ago.
Keeling Curve Keeling Curve There’s not a chance that CO2 will be checked
The whole CO2 reduction scam never had anything to do with the temperature of the earth. Warmth is merely their excuse. The idea is to cut crop yields and use food shortages as another form of depopulation.The Net result of cutting CO2 like they want to, is unhealthy or dead plants. You reduce the base of the food chain and you also necessarily reduce everything above plants on the food chain. They know the truth. This idea of AGW is a lie and they know it. They don’t care what you or I think and, if you haven’t noticed, they’re pretty brazen about that fact! (case in point, Klaus Schwab deciding that travel and water are not human rights. As in we need his permission to drink water, or walk one of which literally falls from the sky, the other is literally necessary for transport of the human body to,well, anywhere.) Why do you think Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland? Covid (the jab, anyway), Flouride, Chlorine all of it was always intended to either shorten human lives or at least make the human stupid enough (as is the case with heavy metals) that they would not understand what was going on. The people governing this planet are demoniacs who apparently see themselves as gods. They aren’t they’re literally the opposite of God and their ‘god’ has deceived them into believing they haev a right to you and your stuff. Wake up.
What hiatus?
The hottest 8 years in the instrumental record were the last 8 years and that was with a strong El Nina for a good part of it.
That’s what placing thermometers right beside military and commercial airport runways will do for you.
True. A lot of weather forecasting is based on data from airports. Airports that were built away from the cities they served are now surrounded by urban sprawl. The airports themselves have new runways to handle more volume. To compare the original Malton airport’s temperature records to today’s records (renamed Pearson) required some asteriks.
This would help explain why there has been a temperature hiatus now for the last two+ decades. But the “Climate Alarmists” don’t give up so easily which is why they changed the name from Global Warming to Climate Change and now Climate Catastrophe or other such scare words. And why any weather anomaly such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and forest fires on CO2-caused “Climate Change.”