Clouds, Computer Models and Global Warming

According to a piece written by Alan Caruba in The New Media Journal, clouds are not taken into consideration when the computer models forecast warming trends:

There’s a reason why one should be extremely wary of the computer models that are cited by the endless doomsday predictions of Al Gore, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, and all the other advocates of “global warming.”

The reason is clouds. Computer models simply cannot provide for the constant variability of clouds, so they ignore them.

In a July issue of The Economist there was an article, “Grey-Sky thinking” subtitled, “Without understanding clouds, understanding the climate is hard. And clouds are the least understood part of the atmosphere.” Since the increasingly rabid claims of Earth’s destruction from rising temperatures depend on computer modeling, how can they be regarded as accurate if they must largely exempt or deliberately manipulate the impact of clouds?

How can you make predictions, whether it’s a week or a decade from now, if you haven’t a clue why clouds do what they do?

That's interesting and it's not something I've ever heard or read before. You would think that all variables would be taken into consideration when forecasting warming or cooling trends. If they can't be figured in then you would think an asterisk noting this would appear in every prediction or study.

Tim Garrett, a research meteorologist at the University of Utah, with refreshing candor has said, “We really do not know what’s going on. There are so many basic unanswered questions on how they (clouds) work.” And that is never mentioned in the great “global warming” debate, one we are continuously told is “decided” and upon which there is a vast scientific “consensus.”

This is particularly significant because clouds act to both cool and warm the Earth. It is widely believed that high clouds can reflect solar radiation away from the planet, but they can also serve to trap heat in the atmosphere. New studies, however, have given some cause to reconsider this. Moreover, cloud droplets can last for less than a second while whole clouds can live out their lives in minutes or days. There is no way to integrate such massive, constant change into a computer model that divides the world into boxes up to sixty miles on a side, so they mostly do not.

This is why there are two new missions by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration involving highly sophisticated devices to measure and study the actions of clouds. This is also why, up to now, the computer models on which “global warming” claims have been made have actually been tweaked, adjusted, manipulated—take your choice of terms—to factor in the mystery of clouds.

How wide is the computer modeling gap when it comes to predicting the weather? The Economist reported that, “In a recent paper in Climate Dynamics, Mark Webb of Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change and his colleagues reported that clouds account for 66% of the differences between members of one important group of models and for 85% of them in another group.” Clouds simply defy the logarithms of computer modelers.

In short, “Too much still remains unknown about the physical mechanisms that determine cloud behavior,” said The Economist.

When organizations and government agencies (like the U.N., the Evironmental Protection Agency and so many others), who have the ability to change the way we live our lives, use incomplete and unsubstantiated data such as these computer models provide, it borders on fraud.

Whatever computers spit out depends on what data is entered; garbage in, garbage out. Computer models may be compared to lie detectors. They are unreliable. Lie detectors can't be used in a court of law and neither should computer models be used to force change upon the way we live or how we are penalized and taxed because of the size of our "carbon footprint."

There's more to the above linked article. Be sure to read the whole thing.