The Cloudy "AGW" Forecast

Not only did CERN issue a paper which, umnnnnhhhh, pointed to shortcomings in AGW research (you know, like sunlight...), some other highly-credentialed guy also published a peer-reviewed item suggesting that AGW proponents may have missed the impact of clouds on temperature.

Sun, clouds......stuff that's just un-noticeable, right?

At the heart of this debate is whether cloud changes, through their ability to alter how much sunlight is allowed in to warm the Earth, can cause temperature change.

We claim they can, and have demonstrated so with both phase space plots of observed temperature versus Earth radiative budget variations here, and with lag-regression plots of the same data here, and with a forcing-feedback model of the average climate system in both of those publications. (The model we used was suggested to us by Isaac Held, Princeton-GFDL, who is hardly a global warming “skeptic”.)

The Believers respond with:

The Dessler and Trenberth contrary view – as near as I can tell – is that clouds cannot cause temperature change, unless those cloud changes were themselves caused by some previous temperature change. In other words, they believe cloud changes can always be traced to some prior temperature change. This temperature-forcing-clouds direction of causation is “cloud feedback”.

Put more simply, Dessler and Trenberth believe causation between temperature and clouds only flows in one direction :

Temperature Change => Cloud Change,

whereas we and others believe (and have demonstrated) it flows in both directions,

Temperature Change <= => Cloud Change.

Well, the $Umpty-Bazillion only flows into Believers' pockets, ya know, silly.  That's really the model they're using.  All the rest, like sunshine?  Who cares??

HT:  PowerLine