What if the climate alarmists are looking in entirely the wrong place for what controls global temperatures? They claim the answer is emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by human activity and that humans must redirect vast scarce resources to reduce such emissions. Most of the best scientific evidence points away from their favorite bogeyman (CO2), or as they mischaracterize it, “dirty pollutant.” Previous posts have presented much of this evidence. But if it is not CO2 that determines temperatures, what is it?
Changes in the Density of Low Clouds
One very interesting possibility is visible everyday to humans, unlike CO2, which is invisible. The ideas have been around for several decades, but seem never to have received much attention. All that is needed, however, to see this possibility is to look out the window at the sky. An important answer appears to be low clouds. The climate alarmists’ General Circulation Models (GCMs) have great difficulty in explaining how clouds behave, one of the many fatal drawbacks of their models. Clouds change rapidly and are clearly non-linear and chaotic.
But is there a plausible mechanism that controls them that would explain climate change? Some controls include the availability of water vapor, which condenses into clouds, and various determinants of evaporation of surface water to form water vapor. It is all very complicated and not easily modeled by the alarmists’ useless GCMs.
The Key Role Apparently Exercised by Galactic Cosmic Rays
One possibility for understanding some of this is the effects of galactic cosmic rays in the creation of nuclei that promote condensation of water vapor into clouds. Despite great hostility from climate alarmists towards anyone who deviates from their doctrines, it has now been shown that increased cloud condensation nuclei lead to more water vapor condensation, more clouds, and lower temperatures. One determinant of such nuclei are cosmic rays from distant supernova, which are affected by solar fluctuations as they enter the solar system.
The density of such cosmic rays is affected by where the solar system is located relative to the supernova from which the particles originate as well as fluctuations in our Sun, which change the number of galactic cosmic rays that reach Earth’s atmosphere. Much of this is summarized in my book and more recently by Mike Jonas.
Climate alarmists should find it useful to read this and other evidence for what is called the Svensmark hypothesis (after the discoverer) rather than engaging in further repetition of their CO2 mantra, which has now been shown to have no significant effect on temperatures.
Climate is controlled by natural cycles. Earth is just past the 2004+/- peak of a millennial cycle and the current cooling trend will likely continue until the next Little Ice Age minimum at about 2650.See the Energy and Environment paper at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0958305X16686488
and an earlier accessible blog version at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html
Here is the abstract for convenience :
“ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in time in relation to the current phases of those different interacting natural quasi periodicities. Evidence is presented specifying the timing and amplitude of the natural 60+/- year and, more importantly, 1,000 year periodicities (observed emergent behaviors) that are so obvious in the temperature record. Data related to the solar climate driver is discussed and the solar cycle 22 low in the neutron count (high solar activity) in 1991 is identified as a solar activity millennial peak and correlated with the millennial peak -inversion point – in the RSS temperature trend in about 2004. The cyclic trends are projected forward and predict a probable general temperature decline in the coming decades and centuries. Estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling are made. If the real climate outcomes follow a trend which approaches the near term forecasts of this working hypothesis, the divergence between the IPCC forecasts and those projected by this paper will be so large by 2021 as to make the current, supposedly actionable, level of confidence in the IPCC forecasts untenable.””
Re clouds see Fig 11 at link. above.