Hansen acknowledges that recent warming was caused by a reduction in clouds, then tries to blame it on the burning of fossil fuels. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The only thing which could have caused recent high sea surface temperatures is a reduction in clouds. There is no physical mechanism for carbon dioxide to rapidly warm water.
They say that it is dust that helps clouds grow and that those tiny particles are crucial for water to condense.
Therefore an inrease in burned fossil fuel and therefore increase in particles should result in more clouds,I’d say.
And China is extraordinary in making smog(and having an increase in Monsoon rainfalls and floods)
That’s why a decrease in clouds may be a cyclical thing.
Warmer Oceans = more clouds = cooler oceans = less clouds.
It also may be that fossil fuel burning just got much cleaner that the reduction of particles lead to a decrease.
But thanks god Hansen has the one and only answer to all questions.Just as his peers.
Makes live so much easier .That’s how one keeps job and reputation.
“one hypothesis, put forward by Henrik Svensmark of the National Space Institute in Copenhagen, posits a link between solar activity and cosmic-ray flux.
According to Svensmark, cosmic rays seed low-lying clouds that reflect some of the Sun’s radiation back into space, and the number of cosmic rays reaching the Earth is dependent on the strength of the solar magnetic field. When this magnetic field is stronger (as evidenced by larger numbers of sunspots), more of the rays are deflected, fewer clouds are formed and so the Earth heats up; whereas when the field is weaker, the Earth cools down.”
https://physicsworld.com/a/evidence-that-cosmic-rays-seed-clouds/
thanks-
I like theories that respect a complex system like climate with a complex approach instead of reducing it to my simple point of view or even worse, to that of climate experts with their one size fits all co2 chainsaw.
Though I assume things are still way more complex than that.
But using the main source of energy as reference is 1000x more likely to lead to the solution than 0.01% co2.
A recent inadvertant geoengineering experiment is another localised warming cause attributed to cleaned up emissions from shipping,
High sulphur content (3.5%) bunker fuels were replaced by lower sulphur content distillate fuels (0.5%) about 3 years ago.
The theory, which may have been proven, is that SO2 from combustion of high sulphur fuels masks global warming by forming aerosols that thicken and brighten clouds, reflecting the sun’s rays back into space.
Quite how a gas – SO2- forms aerosols is a mystery.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/cleaner-shipping-fuel-is-contributing-ocean-warming-scientists-say-2024-05-31/
There are constraints, such as the laws of thermodynamics, that apply no matter how complex the system. Excessive preoccupation with details is a good way of avoiding an overall understanding of the phenomena of interest.
Sulphur containing particles are cloud condensation nuclei as well. CCN begin the process of forming droplets. A drop in cloud cover can have many contributing factors.
For example rain in the Sahara keeps the dust down. It has been raining in the Sahara. A lot.
That dust is critical for rain formation over the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean. High sulphur fuel oil is much more likely to lead to cloud formation than reflective shielding because of the altitude at which it is emitted.
Svensmark linked past passages of the solar system through spiral arms of stars radiating from the centre of our galaxy, to a greater density of cosmic rays which in turn lead to ice ages. That aside, we are now five years into a grand solar minimum which will last until 2053. Solar cycle 25, which has exhibited a greater number of sunspotless days than recent cycles, is about half over. Cycle 26, starting in 2031, could see temperatures similar to those during the Maunder minimum. It is pretty clear that he sun is giving less, but what we might call the ‘Svensmark effect’ is less clear, from what I can find. Has anyone further information about this?
Valentina Zarkova?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Ole Humlum’s climate4you.com has a good discussion, backed up by actual climate data, on the subject of clouds and warming. Click on the climate+clouds button. Humlum concludes that overall, clouds are a cooling mechanism.
The warmer sea surfaces drive the decline in low cloud cover, but the essential point is that the AMO is always warmer during centennial lows in solar activity.
A warmer AMO is driven by negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, like in 2023, while rising CO2 forcing is expected to increase positive NAO states.
https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
Warmer sea surface temps would lead to more water vapor, which would tend to cool the surface, or at least somewhere in the water, because the water vapor has higher energy and is escaping from the body of water taking its energy with it. But I would think that more water vapor would lead to more clouds, however I’m not thinking deeply, but only looking at the surface.
Yet when the sea surface warms, low cloud cover declines. The trick is to think how that happens, rather than think it can’t happen. And however much you imagine that evaporation cools the sea surface, it hasn’t managed to cool the AMO for the last 30 years.
With a crackpot theory that believes water vapour enhances the greenhouse effect, it is not surprising Hansen claims that clouds result in positive feedback. So, of course Death Valley should be freezing cold and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean baking hot. Apparently, James Watt got it wrong, the boiler should be cold, and the condenser hot for the steam engine to work.
The comment. “when you’re a hammer”, reminds me of another. “He has three rocks in his toolbox, but only knows how to use two of them”!
He only uses two for a good reason.
As soon as he uses one more rock things evolve from simple math to infinitely complicated.
The 3 body problem is a total pain.
And climate has probably a dozen relevant factors be it sun rays,sun spots,magnetic fields,water vapor,oscillation etc.
But reducing everything down to a single “body” like co2,the most irrellevant one,makes things so much more easier for experts.
And with only one rock in the box everything looks like a nail.
The three body problem isn’t too difficult : https://gvigurs.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/threebody.pdf
CO2 absorbs IR radiation, but re-radiates it to be absorbed by other gases in the atmosphere and radiated to space at a different wavelength, The ‘greenhouse effect’ claims that CO2 ‘blocks’ IR radiation, but isn’t too clear what happens to it then. The models implement this ‘blocking’ and hence predict non-existent catastrophic warming.
Seems you have mastered your stuff in several disciplines.
As far as I can say co2 nor any other greenhouse gas can block radiation ,only slowing down the process of entering and reentering the atmosphere,
while the decisive factor seems to be atmospheric pressure.
In south france where the Pyrenees meet the ocean it does not really matter where and how high the humidity is.
At see level it is always warmer than 10 minutes away in the mountains.
That may be the reason why Mars’ 95% co2 atmosphere is so cold and why co2 fails to block anything.
My thanks to Francis Barnett re the link to the Zharkova article regarding the galactic cosmic ray effect. If you are interested in Zharkova’ math, see Tom Nelson’s Pod.