The Great Albedo Anomaly: What Earth’s Darkening Says About Climate Certainty
As you know, climate science is settled even when it changes, unlike other kinds of science that change even when they are settled.
Evidently the shine is off planet Earth. At any rate various outlets including MSN and Yahoo! have picked up what seems to be a dpa international story (sorry about the lowercase but their idea not ours) saying “The Earth became darker from 2001 to 2024, meaning it reflects less sunlight, a research team reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).”
Now as a result, the planet is absorbing more incoming solar energy which means it’s warming up for reasons unrelated to CO2. So the standard climate alarmist theory is wrong, right? Heck no. Climate science doesn’t work that way.
And so it is that this story cheerfully admits that the models are a load of dingoes’ kidneys without drawing the obvious conclusion that it would be witless to rely on them. (It also, to indulge a pet peeve, does not link to the actual study lest some fool go and check what it actually says.
But you can find it here.) It seems this darkening is happening more in the northern than southern hemisphere which was not predicted. Indeed one might say it was unpredicted:
“In general, the southern hemisphere gains radiative energy at the top of the atmosphere on average, while there is a net loss in the northern hemisphere, the research group wrote. However, earlier studies indicated that this imbalance is offset by atmospheric and oceanic circulations that transport energy across the equator from the southern to the northern hemisphere. The current study now shows that atmospheric and oceanic circulations have not been able to fully compensate for the differences over the past two decades.”
It is not, we note by the way, obvious why those circulations would be trying to compensate for something happening in the atmosphere, especially as they do not have intentions. But you see it was necessary for the models and generally when it comes to climate science, reality is expected to strive to reach the elevated level of computer simulations rather than some weirdo preoccupation with having the models match the facts.
As in, from the actual study:
“In response to imposed albedo changes in one hemisphere, equilibrium and transient idealized model experiments suggest that clouds compensate for hemispheric asymmetries.”
And also this passage which we submit is rather more damning than the authors appear to realize:
“The reason for the weak hemispheric contrast in the [Absorbed Solar Radiation] ASR trend contribution from cloud changes is less clear. The cloud response is a result of surface-temperature mediated cloud radiative feedback and rapid cloud adjustments to greenhouse gases, aerosols, and natural forcing agents. It is possible that these offset one another, but we cannot tell from observations alone. To gain some insight, we use the multimodel mean climate model simulations in ref. 25 for 2001 to 2019 to examine hemispheric trends in cloud radiative effect (CRE; defined as the difference between clear and all-sky downward [Top of Atmosphere] flux) and contributions from cloud feedback, “effective radiative forcing” ERF (sum of [Infrared radiative Forcing] IRF and rapid adjustments), and the associated cloud masking terms (due to variations in noncloud properties).”
Got it? Mere observations do not yield a convincing explanation, so they retreat into the world of manipulable computer models to get certainty at the expense of relevance.
Speaking of actual data, what is supposedly going on here? Stuff, apparently. The news story says:
“The differing developments in the northern and southern hemispheres are attributed to changes in water vapour and clouds in the atmosphere, as well as changes in the albedo, the reflectivity of surfaces, at the Earth’s surface. For example, ice and snow reflect more solar radiation than rock or water. According to the study, the decrease in sea ice concentration and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has contributed to the darkening. In addition to these factors, the interaction between radiation and aerosols – tiny suspended particles – makes the largest contribution to the difference.”
Goodness gracious us. What a complex set of factors. And goodness gracious them because there’s one that’s strangely missing: the dreaded carbon pollution.
As we observe from time to time, people who are not as a rule well-equipped to judge the question declare that climate change is “simple physics” as well as being settled. But the underlying paper notes that:
“Hemispheric albedo symmetry has been a topic of fascination since it was first observed from satellites. Much speculation exists about whether this is a fundamental property of the climate system or occurs just by chance.”
And the reason much speculation exists is that it’s neither already settled nor simple to settle.
What’s not missing is the need for more research money to prove the models are right even when wrong:
“the study suggests that the role of clouds in maintaining hemispheric symmetry might be limited. Understanding these relationships is also important for improving climate models, the researchers emphasized.”
Another way of putting it is that the models have always been infamous, among people who care about their scientific accuracy rather than their polemical usefulness, for their spectacular inability to handle clouds. And now it turns out that clouds are doing stuff they didn’t predict that could well be having a dramatic impact on warming totally unrelated to CO2.
Indeed, if this decreased albedo is real, and not driven by rising CO2, then the resulting warming from non-carbon causes presumably essentially leaves nothing for carbon to do so the whole theory is wrong.
Or at least it would be if we were not dealing here with climate science. But since we are, it’s carbon even if it’s not. The paper insists that:
“The hemispheric difference in surface warming and surface albedo in response to increasing CO2 forcing seen in climate model simulations together with any further hemispheric changes in aerosol suggests we should see an increase in hemispheric albedo asymmetry in the future. However, if clouds compensate for hemispheric asymmetry (e.g., through circulation changes), but do so over a longer timescale, the trend in the NH–SH ASR difference may reach some upper limit.”
What it will not do, what it cannot do, is demonstrate that increasing CO2 forcing is not a significant thing. The models aren’t built that way.
source climatediscussionnexus.com
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