El rompecabezas de las "nubes" en el asunto climático

Clouds and El Nino

After the turn of the century, I became interested in climate science. But unlike almost everyone else, I wasn’t surprised by how much the global temperature was changing. As someone with experience with heat engines and engine governors, I know how hard it is to keep a heat engine stable under a changing load. As a result, I was surprised at how little the temperature was changing.
Over the 20th Century, for example, the temperature changed by a trivially small ±0.3°C. Since the average temperature of the planet is on the order of 287K, this means that the global temperature varied only about a tenth of one percent in a hundred years … that that is amazingly stable.

 

Scientists Have Found The ‘Missing Link’ From Sunspot Activity To Cosmic Rays-Clouds To Climate Change

Hailed as ‘the last piece of the puzzle’ in codifying our understanding of the mechanism(s) that cause climate changes, scientists are increasingly turning to Sun-modulated cosmic ray flux and cloud cover variations as the explanation for decadal- and centennial-scale global warming and cooling. In other words, climate changes are increasingly being attributed to natural variability, not anthropogenic activity.

 

Las nubes influyen decisivamente en el clima

La nubosidad es la pariente pobre olvidada en el análisis del clima terrestre.

 

What Is The Surface Area Of A Cloud?

Or what is the surface area of any fractal solid?
This is strongly related to the Coastline Paradox:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
Just with the added dimension of a solid.
It all comes down to the interaction of a bunch of surfaces and volumes with fractal geometry. Good luck with that…
So I’m now trying to figure out some way past this conundrum. How do you weigh a cloud? Without mass, volume, and surface area; how do you compute thermo properties and effects?
I think I see why they say “modeling clouds is hard”. It may be impossible.

 

NASA: We Can’t Model Clouds, So Climate Models Are 100 Times Less Accurate Than Needed For Projections

NASA has conceded that climate models lack the precision required to make climate projections due to the inability to accurately model clouds.
Clouds have the capacity to dramatically influence climate changes in both radiative longwave (the “greenhouse effect”) and shortwave.

 

Global Warming and the pause, caused by changes in cloud cover, not CO2
 
A new paper in Russian, by OM Pokrovsky, shows that global cloud cover decreased markedly from 1986 to 2000. This is a very large decline in terms of the planetary atmosphere. Pokrovsky uses ISCCP satellite data (the “International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project” — a US program). It’s the best cloud data there is. The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”. [IPCC, 2007]
Clouds cover two-thirds of the Earths surface, reflecting around 30% of the total energy from the Sun back to space. A small change in cloud cover can easily warm or cool the planet, like a giant pop-up shade-sail.
This, on its own, explains all the warming that occurred from 1986 – 2000. It explains the pause. We don’t know why clouds decreased, but we know it wasn’t due to CO2, which kept rising relentlessly year after year, and even faster after the turn of the century.

 

New Study Asserts Cloud Cover Changes Drove The Post-1980s Solar Radiation Increase Important To Recent Warming

Using NASA’s MERRA-2 radiation data, scientists find shortwave radiation (SW) has been rising since the 1980s. The SW increase has been larger and faster than longwave radiation (LW) changes during this same timespan. Cloud variability has been the “main driver” of these trends.

 

New Study Asserts Cloud Cover Changes Drove The Post-1980s Solar Radiation Increase Important To Recent Warming

Using NASA’s MERRA-2 radiation data, scientists find shortwave radiation (SW) has been rising since the 1980s. The SW increase has been larger and faster than longwave radiation (LW) changes during this same timespan. Cloud variability has been the “main driver” of these trends.

 

Heber, muchas gracias por ponerlo, para mi es agradable leer ya que me interesé por la variación de la radiación solar entre ciclos. Conocimientos sobre sistemas complejos y caóticos aplicados al análisis y no, evidentemente, a la predicción pero con conclusiones que casan con mis hipótesis y razonamientos.