Warming Climate May Cut Cloud Cover

[marmar]

This piece first appeared at Climate News Network.


LONDON—Australian and French scientists believe they have cracked one of the great puzzles of climate change and arrived at a more accurate prediction of future temperatures.

The news is not good, according to Steven Sherwood of Australia’s Centre for Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. If carbon emissions are not reduced, then by 2100 the world will have warmed by 4°C.

This figure does not, at first, sound high: researchers have been warning for 20 years on the basis of computer models that under the notorious business-as-usual scenario in which everybody goes on burning coal and oil, then as carbon dioxide levels double, global temperatures could rise by between 1.5°C and 4.5°C.

Pessimists could cite one extreme, optimists the other: the range of uncertainty was a recognition that there were still some big unknowns in the machinery of climate, and one of those unknowns was the behaviour of the clouds in a warmer world.
More warmth means more evaporation, more vapour could mean more clouds. Low-level clouds reflect sunlight back into space, and help cool the climate a bit. This is what engineers call negative feedback. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/warming_climate_may_cut_cloud_cover_20140102

[Berlum]

1. But, but but....too bad we can't compensate with (Forbidden Words describing Forbidden Thoughts*)

* describing something that does not exist, and for which you will be banished should you think of it or say it or wonder about it.