Warming Might Thin Heat-trapping Clouds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071102152636.htm

"Instead of creating more clouds, individual tropical warming cycles that served as proxies for global warming saw a decrease in the coverage of heat-trapping cirrus clouds, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center. That was not what he expected to find."

""All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases," he said. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."

"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer said."

are a typical harbinger of hideous, persistent summer heat here in SoCal.

It does bring up an interesting possibility into the mix. What role does the earth itself play in regulating its own temperature?

But only in passing. I have never read the book.

I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that the earth is alive. But I do think in a certain way it adapts to certain conditions. Or maybe those "adaptations" are our mere ignorance about the way the earth works.

Lovelock does not claim the Earth is alive. He says, "...life on earth functions as a single organism..."

In essence: systems can be found in the Earth's ecosystems which are analogous to those found in a single organism. (i.e. Your body and mine contain many many small living creatures generally working in concert. So it is with the Earth.)

the so-called "Earth's Adaptive Iris"

www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/adinfriris.pdf

Another research group reanalyzed his data and found no evidence for it.

www.atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/IRIS_BAMS.pdf

Yet another research group using different methods found no evidence to support Lindzen's hypothesis either.

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020915iristheory.html

Spencer's earlier work with satellite microwave sounding units - that supposedly showed no warming of the upper troposphere in contrast to the balloon temperature data - was shown to be in error.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/247/4950/1558

http://www.nature.com/news/1998/980820/full/news980820-1.html

The upper troposphere *did* warm significantly over the last few decades.

The OP was right - a lot of climatologists will find this study "controversial".

"Although doubling the concentration of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide would by itself raise Earth's temperature, the change in atmospheric composition also may trigger other effects that could amplify or diminish this temperature change.

"It's not just the heat the greenhouse gases themselves will trap," said Del Genio. "We have other factors to worry about. Clouds are one of the most influential climate factors, and one of the most difficult to understand."

All clouds both trap heat and reflect solar energy. They hold heat in like a blanket, preventing it from escaping the Earth, and their white upper surfaces also reflect sunlight back into space before it can warm the atmosphere. The net effect can either heat or cool the planet, depending on how thick, wide and high in altitude the clouds are."

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020915iristheory.html

I agree that the change in atmospheric composition may trigger other effects that we don't know about, and that is kind of what I said in another reply. Maybe that perceived "adaptability" is just our ignorance.

He denies climate science, he denies evolution. 'Nuf said.

* Denialist

this is just another of the Earth's buffering systems, which we will continue to pressure and overload with our carbon emission activities. On our present course, we will overload the Earth's buffring capacity, I suspect (we cannot TRULY know that this will happen until it happens, a fact not lost on Global Warming deniers like Spencer who take theior pay from the Bushevik Pay Korps).

The larger issue, that the human energy and chemical footprint, by dint of technological advance and sheer numbers, has now exceeded the Earth's carrying capacity even at the late 20th century industrial level.

But, even still, all of this grasping at cirrus straws smacks of desperation, very much the same way the IPCC was beyond timid in their predictions. These Busheviks (not the IPCC, Spencer) are so used to creating false realities with repetition and propaganda, the think they can talk the Earth out of restoring environmental equibibrium to correct for the fact that we have removed and vaporized a substantial amount of carbon into the atmosphere, or the texas-sized Eastern Pacific Garbage patch and it's fish-food plastic-pellets that are eventually going into all of our digestive tracts daily.

That and a dozen other major issues that are almost already at tipping point, even if we could somhow screech to a halt tomorrow.

But it is an interesting article, and if true may give us another decade or even a ridiculously optimistic guess of a century to deal with man-made Global Warming.