Despite recent scientific speculation to the contrary, clouds do not cause climate change, says Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professor Andrew Dessler. Rather, they act almost singularly as a feedback mechanism.
Decades of data and Dessler’s own studies of El Niño and La Niña cycles over the past 10 years all support what Dessler describes as the “mainstream and long-held view” that clouds primarily act as a feedback mechanism that amplifies warming from human activity, rather than causing the warming and reducing the blame placed on our shoulders.
Dessler studied the El Niño and La Niña cycles over the past 10 years and calculated our planet’s “energy budget” over that time. He found that clouds played a very small role in initiating these climate variations, a finding that matches up with mainstream climate science and is directly opposite the claims made by other scientists recently.
“The bottom line is that clouds have not replaced humans as the cause of the recent warming the Earth is experiencing,” Dessler says.
“Over a century, however, clouds can indeed play an important role amplifying climate change,” Dessler adds. “I hope my analysis puts an end to this claim that clouds are causing climate change.”
Dessler is considered one of America’s experts on climate variations, and in the video below he explains the facts behind his recent paper, published in the American Geophysical Union’s peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Source: Texas A&M
Image Source: mnsc on Flickr
Lots of talk about carbon, where is the reporting on soot and dust?
A second article on this topic has been posted on Skeptical Science — “Dessler Demolishes Three Crucial ‘Skeptic’ Myths.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/dessler-2011-rebuttal-revisions.html
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, has released a scientific paper that looks at the claims made by two of a small group of “skeptic” climate scientists who regular SkS readers will be familiar with: Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen. Both were co-authors on peer-reviewed papers released this which, once again, sought to overturn the orthodox view of climate. Dessler finds that the conclusions of these two papers are unsupported by observational data.
Source: “Andrew Dessler’s New Paper Debunks Both Roy Spencer And Richard Lindzen, Skeptical Science, Sep 6, 2011
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=1&t=58&&n=983
Thanks for the link! (I’ve seen this, but haven’t shared it here yet.)