New 'twilight zone' detected around clouds

Clouds are a crucial variable in climate models but it is clear that we still know little about how they work

There seems to be something new under the sun -- in the sky, specifically -- that could complicate scientists' efforts to get a fix on how much the world will warm in the future. Greenhouse gases are not the only things in the air that influence the temperature of our atmosphere. Clouds and small airborne particles called aerosols also play an important and complicated role. And now a new ingredient has been discovered: an extensive and previously unseen "twilight zone" of particles that represents a gradual transition from cloud droplets to dry particles.

In a study published last month, scientists from the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., document for the first time that air around clouds that was previously considered clear is actually filled with particles that are neither cloud droplets nor typical dry aerosols such as dust and air pollution. Worldwide, up to 60 percent of the atmosphere labeled as cloud-free in satellite observations is actually filled with this twilight zone of in-between particles, according to the study.

"With the highly sensitive Earth-observing instruments NASA has used since 2000, we can distinguish aerosols and clouds in greater detail than ever before," said Goddard's Lorraine Remer, a co-author on the study. "But the area around clouds has given us trouble. The instruments detected something there, but it didn't match our understanding of what a cloud or an aerosol looked like. What we think we're seeing is a transitional zone where clouds are beginning to form or are dying away, and where humidity causes dry particles to absorb water and get bigger."

Precisely accounting for everything in the atmosphere that can influence changes in global temperatures is critical to scientists' quest to accurately predict what Earth's climate will be in the future. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assessed the potential risks of human-induced climate change, notes that the overall effect of clouds and aerosols on the amount of heat held in the atmosphere is still uncertain. Finding a previously unknown ingredient in the mix further complicates an already complex picture, but it also holds out the promise of resolving some nagging problems in climate change science.

"The effects of this zone are not included in most computer models that estimate the impact of aerosols on climate," said lead author Ilan Koren of the Weizmann Institute "This could be one of the reasons why current measurements of this effect don't match our model estimates." The study was published April 18 in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters.

Atmospheric scientists have been aware of an indistinct "halo" of particles immediately surrounding individual clouds, which are sometimes visible to the naked eye. These are thought to be aerosols accumulating moisture and growing in size, or a cloud droplet shrinking as it evaporates. But the newly detected twilight zone extends far beyond single clouds to fill an entire cloud field.

The research team first came across evidence for this transitional zone in satellite measurements of aerosols that looked "suspicious," according to Remer. "After working with several years of data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, we consistently saw what appeared to be elevated levels of aerosols near clouds. But we couldn't be sure that the instrument wasn't actually detecting stray light bouncing off of the clouds."

The region around clouds is difficult to accurately observe with instruments like MODIS because they operate like our eyes, collecting light reflected by objects below. Scientists interpret the different characteristics of the light received, matching them to known light patterns from different objects such as clouds. But clouds are notorious light scatterers, and the "glare" from the edge of clouds makes it hard to clearly detect what is around them. To be on the safe side, scientists mapping worldwide aerosols with MODIS avoid a 1-kilometer border around clouds.

To find out whether the apparent aerosol detection around clouds in the satellite data was real, Koren and his colleagues, including the late Yoram Kaufman of NASA Goddard, turned to an independent observing system on the ground: the NASA-sponsored Aerosol Robotic Network. The automated instruments in this global network minimize scattered light effects as they track the sun and take readings of the amount and size of aerosols in a narrow column of atmosphere between the instrument and the sun. When the sun is blocked by a cloud, the instrument doesn't make one of its regularly scheduled readings, which provides an indirect measure of the presence of a cloud.

Combining thousands of observations from 15 sites around the world, the researchers found that the amount of aerosol systematically increased as clouds got closer, as did the size of the particles. This held true regardless of whether the site was in a relatively clean setting or one where aerosols from air pollution or biomass burning were common. "We found that the region affected by this cloud field 'twilight zone' extends to tens of kilometers beyond the identified cloud edge," said Koren. "This suggests that 30 to 60 percent of the atmosphere previously labeled as 'cloud-free' is actually affected by cloud-aerosol processes that reflect solar energy back into space."

Introducing this new factor could lead climate scientists to recalculate their best estimates of how Earth's atmosphere holds and reflects solar energy -- the key to accurately predicting the future of global warming. "Current estimates of the effect of aerosols on global temperatures, which is primarily cooling, may be too small because the large contribution from this transition zone has been overlooked," Remer said. "If aerosols are offsetting warming more than we thought, it's possible that warming could increase more than expected in the future if aerosols continue to decline, as has been reported recently."

This summer the scientists hope to get a closer look at the "twilight zone" and the hard-to-detect particles inside it with new measurements by the Aerosol Robotic Network and NASA aircraft.

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Changes on Neptune Link Sun and Global Warming

Skeptics of manmade global warming have found further support in research linking solar output with the planet Neptune's brightness and temperatures on Earth. The findings appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the article, H.B. Hammel and G.W. Lockwood from the Space Science Institute in Colorado and the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, note that measurements of visible light from Neptune have been taken at the Observatory since 1950. Those measurements indicate that Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980. And infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that Neptune has been warming steadily as well.

The researchers plotted on a graph the changes in visible light from Neptune over the past half-century, changes in temperatures on Earth during that period, and changes in total solar irradiance. The results: The correlation between solar irradiance and Neptune's brightness was nearly perfect; so was the correlation between changes on Earth and solar output, according to a report on the research appearing on World Climate Report, a climate change blog.

"When the sun is more energetic and putting out more energy, the Earth tends to warm up, and when the sun cools down, so does the Earth," World Climate Report notes. "The Hammel and Lockwood article reveals that the same is true out at Neptune - when the sun's energy increases, Neptune seems to warm up and get brighter . . .

"How is it possible that the Earth's temperature is so highly correlated with brightness variations from Neptune? The news from Neptune comes to us just weeks after an article was published showing that Mars has warmed recently as well. "If nothing else, we have certainly learned recently that planets undergo changes in their mean temperature, and while we can easily blame human activity here on the Earth, blaming humans for the recent warming on Mars and Neptune would be an astronomical stretch, to say the least."

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Journal abstract follows:

Suggestive correlations between the brightness of Neptune, solar variability, and Earth's temperature

H. B. Hammel & G. W. Lockwood

Long-term photometric measurements of Neptune show variations of brightness over half a century. Seasonal change in Neptune's atmosphere may partially explain a general rise in the long-term light curve, but cannot explain its detailed variations. This leads us to consider the possibility of solar-driven changes, i.e., changes incurred by innate solar variability perhaps coupled with changing seasonal insolation. Although correlations between Neptune's brightness and Earth's temperature anomaly-and between Neptune and two models of solar variability-are visually compelling, at this time they are not statistically significant due to the limited degrees of freedom of the various time series. Nevertheless, the striking similarity of the temporal patterns of variation should not be ignored simply because of low formal statistical significance. If changing brightnesses and temperatures of two different planets are correlated, then some planetary climate changes may be due to variations in the solar system environment.

(From: GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L08203, doi:10.1029/2006GL028764, 2007)






THE GOOD NEWS IS NASTY NEWS FOR THE GREENIES



Feeling crowded? Paul Watson is. The founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a militant environmental organization, writes that human overpopulation is "a virus . . . killing our host the planet Earth," and so the number of people living in the world should be slashed by 85 percent.

"No human community should be larger than 20,000 people," Watson insists in a new essay. "We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion." He describes mankind as "the AIDS of the Earth," and calls for an end to cars, planes, and all ships save those powered by sail.

The views of a fanatic? Yes, but Watson is also a co-founder of Greenpeace and a former member of the Sierra Club board of directors, not to mention one of Time magazine's 20th-century environmental "heroes," and even one of the elder George Bush's "Daily Points of Light." Nutty though his support for eliminating 5.5 billion human beings and most modern conveniences may be, it is not likely to hurt his standing among the green elite. On the contrary: Within the environmental movement, antipathy to population growth and technology is utterly conventional.

In their 1990 book "The Population Explosion," for example, Paul and Anne Ehrlich described "the birth of an average American baby" as a "disaster for earth's life-support systems." Al Gore made a similar claim two years later in "Earth in the Balance." A father of four, Gore also declared that "no goal is more crucial to healing the global environment than stabilizing human population" -- i.e., bringing fewer children into the world.

Bemoaning human fecundity has been in vogue at least since 1798, when Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay arguing that since people multiply faster than the food supply, more babies eventually mean more starvation and misery.

Malthus was wrong (as he later acknowledged), but here we are two centuries later, and neo-Malthusian misanthropy is as fashionable as ever. A report published this week by the Optimum Population Trust, a British think tank, recommends population reduction as the "most effective" strategy to prevent climate change. "The greatest thing anyone . . . could do to help the future of the planet," suggests OPT co-chairman John Guillebaud, "would be to have one less child."

But that's not what the evidence shows. When Malthus was writing, just before the turn of the 19th century, the Earth was home to some 980 million human beings. The global population today is about 6.5 billion, a sevenfold increase. If the alarmists are right -- if more humanity means more suffering and devastation -- our lives should be far more impoverished, degraded, and pitiful than those of our ancestors. But they aren't. By and large, human beings today are healthier, wealthier, safer, cleaner, better fed, and more productive than those who lived in 1800.

Anyone tempted to dismiss such a claim as hopelessly naive should spend some time poring through *The Improving State of the World,* a new book by longtime policy analyst Indur Goklany. A former US delegate to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Goklany has assembled a mountain of data making the case that as nations grow wealthier, the quality of human life rises. Far from being a disaster for our species and the planet, Goklany argues, economic growth and technological change have been a boon for both, making it possible for ever more people to live ever-improving lives in an ever-cleaner environment. That is not to ignore the fact that there is still terrible misery in the world, or that modern industrialized countries far outstrip the developing world in wealth. At the same time, it is in the world's poorest societies that some of the greatest strides are being made.

Take food. Since 1950, the world's population has soared by more than 150 percent. Yet food has become so abundant thanks to the Green Revolution that global food prices (in real terms) have plunged 75 percent. Over the past generation, chronic undernourishment in poor countries has been slashed from 37 percent to 17 percent, despite the fact that there are far more mouths to feed. In the United States, meanwhile, staples such as potatoes and flour have dropped in price (relative to income) by more than 80 percent.

Or take infant mortality. Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than one in five. "In the United States as late as 1900," Goklany writes, "infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6." In developing countries, the fall in mortality rates began later, but is occurring more quickly. In China, for instance, infant mortality has plunged from 195 to less than 30 in the past 50 years. Life expectancy? From an average of 31 years in 1900, it was up to 66.8 worldwide in 2003.s to come later -- nearly eight years later for cancer, nine years for heart diseases, and 11 years for respiratory diseases.

Education, child labor, clean air, freedom, famine, leisure time, global poverty -- by almost any yardstick you choose, humanity is thriving as never before. It is not true that living standards must fall as population rises. On the contrary: Where there are free markets and free minds -- economic growth and technology -- human progress and hope are all but guaranteed.

"Humanity, though more populous and still imperfect, has never been in better condition," Goklany writes. Our lives are better than our ancestors'. Our descendants' can be better than ours.

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Hot Air, Cold Cash: Who are the Merchants of Fear?

Leftist writer Alexander Cockburn says below that the usual Leftist claims about science being "bought" are true -- but who are the buyers and who are the bought?

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the Greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics to the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend, the melting of the icecaps, the rising of the seas, the increase in hurricanes, the decline in penguin fertility and other horrors too numerous for individual citation.

Actually the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon-neutrality, sniggering jovially over Tom Friedman's rapturous endorsement of "clean coal", repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for virtuous alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum's "Energy Biosciences Institute" on the UC Berkeley Campus, first fruit of a $500 million deal between the oil company and a campus whose founding family - the Hearsts - did after all make its pile in the mining business.

In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the Greenhouser fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark, amid headlines about the fall-out from Chernobyl, aging plants and nuclear waste dumps leaking from here to eternity. The apex Greenhouse fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a door marked "nuclear power", with a servant's sidedoor labeled "clean coal". James Lovelock, the Rasputin of Gaia-dom, has said that "Nuclear power has an important contribution to make." (I refer those who rear back at the words "imaginary crisis" to my last column on this topic, where I emphasize that there is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution.)

The world's best known hysteric and self promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear industry and the coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oakridge National Lab. White House "task forces" on climate change in the Clinton-Gore years were always well freighted by Gore and his adviser John Holdren with nukers like John Papay of Bechtel.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump up budgets and rabblerouse the voters. By the mid Nineties he positioned himself at the head of a strategic and tactical alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change", which had now stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to all political life. Indeed, it was in the New Republic, a tireless publicist of the Soviet menace in the late 70s and Reagan 80s, that Gore announced in 1989 that the war on warming couldn't be won without a renewal in spiritual values.

The footsoldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by all devotees of the Greenhouse fearmongers' catechism. Aside from the fact that the graveyard of intellectual error is stuffed with the myriad tombstones of "overwhelming scientific consensus", the IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers, and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.

To identify either the government-funded climate modelers or their political shock troops, the IPCC's panelists, with scientific rigor and objectivity is as unrealistic as detecting the same attributes in a craniologist financed by Lombroso studying a murderer's head in a nineteenth-century prison for the criminally insane. The craniologist' fingers and calipers were programmed by the usual incentives of stipends, grants and professional ego to find in the skull of that murderer ridges, bumps and depressions, each meticulously equated with an ungovernable passion, an ethnic deficit or a mental derangement. The murderer's individual head became a universal model, the particular promoted to an unassailable theory.

At least Lombroso and his retinue measured heads. All Al Gore has ever needed is a hot day or some heavy rain as opportunity to promote the unassailable theory of man-made global warming. Come a rainy summer ('95), a perfectly routine El Nino ('97) or forest fire in Florida ('98) and Gore was there for the photo op, the uplifted finger warning of worse warming to come. '97 also found Gore in Glacier National Park, pointing at Grinnell glacier and telling the press gravely that it was melting, which indeed it has been since the end of the Little Ice Age,1450 to 1800. Mid-latitude glaciers expanded then, just as they contracted in the Medieval Warming Period, hotter than today and thus so vexing to climate alarmists like Michael Mann (now a reigning weather bureaucrat at the IPCC) that they had wiped it off their historical temperature graphs, just like an editor in Stalin's time cropping a team photo of early Bolsheviks to get rid of recently anathematized undesirables.

Man-made global warming theory is fed by pseudo quantitative predictions from climate-careerists working primarily off the big, mega-computer General Circulation Models which include the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the Department of Commerce's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab, a private GCM which used to be at Oregon State before the University of Illinois lured the team away. There's another one at Livermore and one in England, at Hadley.

These are multi-billion dollar computer model programming bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oakridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models confuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to say the weather is possibly getting a little bit warmer but that there's no great cause for alarm and indeed some reason for rejoicing, since this warming (whose natural causes I discussed in that recent column) gives us a longer growing season and increased CO2, a potent plant fertiliser. Welcome global greening.

Back in the early 1970s, in agencies such as its Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) the UN did nourish some quite radical plans for a new international economic order, one establishing more favorable terms of trade for the poorer nations. By the late 70s all such hopes were vanishing under the neoliberal tide and the Reagan-Clinton era finished them off. By the late 1980s the UN high brass clearly perceived the "challenge" of climate change to be the horse to ride to build up the organization's increasingly threadbare moral authority, and to claim a role beyond that of being an obvious American errand boy. In 1988, the United Nations Environment Program, originally formed in 1972, was united in unholy bureaucratic matrimony with the UN's World Meteorological Organization, giving us the IPCC.

The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not so long before some new UN moot on What To Do About the Weather, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo and dimensions of the warming crisis.

The cry is taken up by the IPCC, (and in the 1990s, by the Clinton/Gore White House), with the press releases headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same intentional lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Months and years later come the qualifications and the retractions, long after new contracts and grants have been awarded, and fresh legions hired to staff the ever-expanding empires of the threatmongers. (The Pentagon has at last caught on, and instructed by a glitzy admiral-led study from the Center for Naval Analysis, is building the intellectual foundation for huge new budget increases based on hypothetical connections between global warming and burgeoning, famine-driven terrorism.)

When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating "factors" are concocted, such as the briefly popular sulfate aerosols of the 1990os, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or the existing, inconvenient data are water-Xboarded into submission as happened with the ice-core samples that fail to confirm the modellers' need for record temperatures today as opposed to half a million years ago. As Richard Kerr, Science magazine's man on global warming remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's become almost respectable."

The consequence? As with the arms spending spiral powered by the Cold War merchants of fear, vast amounts of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. Meanwhile, real and curable environmental perils are scanted or ignored. Hysteria rules the day, drowning urgently needed environmental cleanup in our backyard while smoothing the way for the nuclear industry to reap its global rewards.

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SOME RESTRAINT IN ROME

Eminent Italian scientist puts the boot into the IPCC

President George Bush meets Pope Benedict in June. Some Vatican authorities are lobbying the Pope to press the U.S. administration to act on global warming. "It's not for me to say what the Pope and President Bush should discuss, but certainly they will discuss current issues and therefore I imagine and I hope they will [discuss climate change]," said Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Vatican organization charged with developing policy for the environment and social issues.

Cardinal Martino spoke at the start of "Climate Change and Development," a Vatican study seminar two weeks ago designed to "search for solutions to the phenomenon of global warming." The 80 scientists, politicians, theologians and bishops in attendance were asked to consider that: "Global warming may bring about not only the imposition of drastic corrective means to protect the natural environment, but also a grave threat that destabilizes the world." By the seminar's end, the 80 participants had heard dire warnings from some experts, but they heard much more, too -- that global warming is natural, the cause of warming being primarily solar and that it can be beneficial.

During the two-day event, tensions were often high -- the Catholic News Service, which interviewed participants at the private event, described how one pastor needed to calm down a distraught participant in the corridor, and used words like "bitter" and "heated" to set the early mood at the seminar. No one left the seminar thinking that the science of global warming is settled. To the dismay of those hoping that the high-level group would inspire a Church-led climatechange crusade, the Cardinal, in closing the seminar, urged caution in taking any position on global warming.

The man most responsible for quelling any potential call to action is one of the Vatican's own, Antonino Zichichi, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zichichi, who made the seminar's most powerful presentation, set its tone. It amounted to a damning indictment of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body responsible for most of the dire warnings that the press reports daily. Dr. Zichichi demonstrated "that models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view," reported Zenit, a news service that acts as an extension of the Vatican administration.

"On the basis of actual scientific fact 'it is not possible to exclude the idea that climate changes can be due to natural causes,' and that it is plausible that 'man is not to blame.' " Dr. Zichichi has concluded that solar activities are responsible for most of the global warming that earth has experienced -- he estimates that man-made causes of global warming account for less than 10% -- and his conclusions have gravitas: This man is the president of the World Federation of Scientists, past president of the European Physical Society, past president of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics, and past president of the NATO Science Committee for Disarmament Technology.

He is also Italy's most renowned scientist, credited with the discovery of nuclear antimatter, the discovery of the "time-like" electromagnetic structure of the proton, the discovery of the effective energy in the forces which act between quarks and gluons, and the proof that, despite its complex structure, it is impossible to break the proton.

"There is a need to do more work, with a lot more rigour, to better the models being used," he argued in a 60-page written paper that accompanied his speech to the seminar. The Vatican seminar was extraordinary, participants agree: Faith and reason met in inspired discussion and debate about global warming, and despite the occasional heat, came away the wiser for it.

How different from the debate on climate change conducted by environmental groups, or, for that matter, the Parliament of Canada, the U.S. Congress or the German Reichstag, where global warming discussions rely on faith alone, and result in one-sided dogma.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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