Poor Al Gore. Ever since he lost the 2000 election, he’s put all his eggs in the climate change basket. But, little by little, those eggs are being tossed out onto the floor by reputable scientists.
The latest example is a scientific study conducted at the University of Reading of the interactions between aerosols and clouds, which shows the interaction is much weaker than most climate models assume – which means the Earth will warm markedly less than those climate models that the former VP has invested in.
Or, in the words of Paul Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute, instead of facing Climate Change, at worst, we may be facing “global lukewarming.”
The Cato bloggers are referring to a post written by Dr. Nicolas Bellouin, Associate Professor of Climate Processes at the University of Reading.
As one might imagine, the clouds have a significant role in how the earth’s climate works, and because of that, they have a major role in all of those computer models which claim global warming will melt the ice caps and kill us all by a week from next Tuesday.
One of the things affecting clouds in those climate models is the interaction between aerosol and the atmosphere:
When it comes to the influence of human aerosol emissions on cloud properties, the scientific mainstream view is that aerosols modify clouds in such a way as to result in an enhanced cooling of the earth’s surface—a cooling influence that has acted to offset some portion of the warming influence resulting from human emissions of greenhouse gases (primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, like coal, oil, and natural gas to produce energy). In the absence of this presumed aerosol cooling effect, climate models predict that the earth should warm at a much faster rate than has been observed. A large cooling effect from aerosols was thus introduced in the early 1990s as a way to “fix” the climate models and bring them closer in line with the modest pace of observed warming. Despite that “fix,” climate models continue to overpredict the observed warming rate—which is bad enough news for climate models already.
And that’s the good news for the climate alarmists:
His [Dr. Nicolas Bellouin’s] team shows that the anthropogenic cooling impact from clouds is much less than “assessed” by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and also much less than employed by climate models. Less enhanced cloud cooling means that greenhouse gases have produced less warming than the climate models have determined. Another way to put it is that this new finding implies that the earth’s climate sensitivity—how much the earth’s surface will warm from a doubling of the pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration—is much below that of the average climate model (3.2¬∞C) and near the low end of the IPCC’s 1.5¬∞C to 4.5¬∞C assessed range. This result comports with the concept of “lukewarming,” which we describe in an upcoming (August) hardcover book as “the new science that changes everything”
A study by Bjorn Stevens published in the journal of the American Meteorological Society last June came to the same conclusion.
