We Really Don’t Know Clouds At All

Global warming hysteria is not based on observation–the Earth’s atmosphere is not warming significantly–but, rather, on computer models. Of course, a computer model will do more or less what its designer tells it to, and the fact that the alarmists’ models do not predict global temperatures accurately has somehow failed to dent the religious faith of those who believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

The Science and Environmental Policy Project’s The Week That Was highlights the critical importance of clouds, and our utter ignorance of how they work:

On her web site, Judith Curry bring up a translated interview with Bjorn Stevens of the Hamburg Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He brings up many of the problems with the Climate Establishment, such as:

* Global warming forecasts are still surprisingly inaccurate.

* “Climate sensitivity” [is largely unknown].

* “Back in the 1970s, it was determined using primitive computer models. The researchers
came to the conclusion that their value is likely somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees.

* “This result has not changed until today, about 40 years later. And that’s exactly the
problem.”

The failure to advance knowledge over 40 years is despite enormous increases in computational power of computers and tens of billions spent on “climate science.”

The difficulties he and his fellow researchers face can be summed up in one word: clouds. The mountains of water vapor slowly moving across the sky are the bane of all climate researchers.

First of all, it is the enormous diversity of its manifestations that makes clouds so unpredictable. Each of these types of clouds has a different effect on the climate. And above all: they have a strong effect.

Simulating natural processes in the computer is always particularly sensitive when small causes produce great effects. For no other factor in the climatic events, this is as true as for the clouds. If the fractional coverage of low-level clouds fell by only four percentage points, it would suddenly be two degrees warmer worldwide. The overall temperature effect, which was considered just acceptable in the Paris Agreement, is thus caused by four percentage points of clouds – no wonder that binding predictions are not easy to make.

In addition, the formation of clouds depends heavily on the local conditions. But even the most modern climate models, which indeed map the entire planet, are still blind to such small-scale processes.

It would be ridiculous to base economic policies on models that can’t predict atmospheric temperatures, and don’t even attempt to take into account such critically important factors as cloud formation.

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