9 thoughts on “The Albedo Of The Earth”

  1. From the comments, Roger Pielke said:
    I agree with Judy. The implications of this paper are profound.

    Steve McIntyre said:
    Let me join the congratulations. A profound topic. Out of all the climate papers published this year, surely this one has a chance of being remembered 40 years from now.

    If you only read one climate paper all year, this would probably be the one to pick.

  2. Very profound indeed.

    I wonder if the new NASA sat, DSCOVR, at L1, will help in the measurements of albedo? It’ll be in an ideal spot to do so; full view of earth, always with the disk at the same sun angle.

    As for climate… water vapor (even in the disputed models) seems to be the largest climate influence? If so, do the climate models take into account the fact that we’re putting enormous additional water vapor in the atmosphere via irrigation? (in many parts of the world, irrigation demands drastically reduce, or even eliminate, the flow of rivers). All that water has to go somewhere, and that’s mainly into the air. Further, farming changes albedo. And BTW, that’s a rhetorical question, because, no, the vaunted “climate models” don’ t take those factors (or others, like urban heat islands) into account. It reminds ome of a saying from long ago (late 90’s) from computer programming; GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

    1. It might but 2/3rds of the planetary surface is oceans and we humans have little actual input into what happens there.

    2. Water vapor has a way of turning into clouds, a complicating factor greenhouse gas models at best crudely fudge.

  3. So basically, the wizards of smart set up their climate models and didn’t take CLOUD COVER into account.

    The country is in the best of hands. /sarcasm

    Tar. Feathers. The end.

    1. Dave, you’re being a bit unfair. They had to omit things like cloud cover, and prior climate shifts such as the little ice age, and alter the temp records so the past was colder, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to get the results they wanted from the models.

      /sarc

  4. As usual with these things, I don’t see the sense in political cheerleading on scientific papers. Certainly not ones that I didn’t go through all the math carefully. Wait and see.

  5. Well, If the authors don’t have tenure, they won’t get it.

    If they do have tenure, they are about to be hounded with any number of social, bureaucratic, and legal assaults.

    I hope they can weather the storm

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