From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Climate activist and one

–time scientist, James Hansen, has written a new paper which finds that reduced cloud cover has been largely responsible for global warming in the last 25 years:

There is actually no great secret about any of this – it has long been known that cloud cover has decreased since at least the 1980s, mirroring the rise in sea surface temperatures.

It is the sun which warms the oceans, not GHGs which have a negligible effect. In turn, of course, that extra heat in the oceans makes the atmosphere warmer. We see this every time there is El Nino.

It is widely accepted that we know very little about how clouds interact with the wider climate. But we do know that low level clouds tend to reduce temperatures by blocking sunlight.

But that does not stop Hansen from claiming that the reduction in cloud cover is the result of global warming, thus creating climate feedbacks, making said warming even worse! This goes against alarmist conventions, which have usually predicted more water vapour and thus more clouds. Neither does Hansen offer a shred of evidence to back up his assertion.

Hansen actually destroys his own credibility in his own paper, with this statement:

In short, this is not an objective study which follows the evidence. Rather, it is written with the media in mind and with a preordained conclusion.

But Hansen does accept that part of the decreased cloud cover conundrum can be explained by reduced atmospheric pollution, which has been ongoing since the Clean Air Acts of the 1950s, and most recently augmented by reduced sulphur emissions from shipping.

As Hansen explains, aerosols act as condensation nuclei for cloud formation. Air pollution was widely blamed for global cooling in the 1970s, and we can directly observe the effects on global temperatures whenever there is a major volcano, such Pinatubo.

Instead of obsessing about fossil fuels, maybe it’s time climate scientists worked out why there is more sunlight than there was a few decades ago.