Sunlight and Clouds, Not CO2, Drive Earth’s Climate, New Study Finds
The two researchers concluded that the Earth has warmed because it’s absorbing more sunlight because of reduced global cloud cover.
Last week, Katie Spence of THE EPOCH TIMES wrote…
A new study by Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller challenges the prevailing view that CO2 is driving climate change.
The researchers analyzed satellite data and concluded that Earth has warmed due to increased sunlight absorption caused by reduced global cloud cover, not increased CO2.
Nikolov argues that CO2 does not trap heat in the atmosphere as commonly believed, and that atmospheric composition has no effect on global temperature.
The study found that Earth's albedo (the amount of sunlight reflected back to space) has decreased, leading to more solar radiation reaching the surface and causing warming.
Nikolov and Zeller's work suggests that the Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI) is not caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat, but by adiabatic processes in the atmosphere.
The researchers call for more interdisciplinary research into the mechanisms controlling Earth's albedo and cloud physics, which they believe are the real drivers of climate change.
Their findings contradict the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA's stance on the causes of global warming.
The article notes that this research challenges current climate change policies focused on reducing CO2 emissions.
The researchers acknowledge that while they have hypotheses about what's driving cloud cover changes, they don't have a conclusive theory or predictive model yet.
Less clouds means more solar radiation absorption, leading to higher surface temperatures…
It's actually very complicated: earth's solar radiation budget depends on where clouds are (tropics or mid-latitudes), what they are (thin, high clouds or dense, low clouds) and in which season they appear (or fail to appear, as the case may be). What drives variability in global and regional cloud cover is also very complicated, dependent upon changing global and regional circulation patterns linked to the upper atmosphere jet streams, the Brewer-Dobson global circulation governing the position of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) and ozone chemical reactions in the stratosphere.
The thing to note though is that direct solar radiative forcing of the climate via variability in cloud cover is at least an order of magnitude greater than CO2 greenhouse gas forcing. Over short periods (of the order of decades and years), alleged 'man-made climate change' can easily be lost in the noise.
I might also add that Hunga Tonga threw our climate scientist 'experts' a genuine googly which they are still trying to (unsuccessfully) figure out!
Of course they are quite right. Here is a similar study by Professor Ole Humlum covering the global warming period of the 1980s and 90s: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/global-temperatures-and-reduced-cloud-cover/.
To borrow the misused phrase of arch climate alarmist Al Gore, this was one of many “inconvenient truths” I used in my recent debunking of the climate change hoax: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.