Another nail in the cimate alarmist coffin

Climate alarmists dismiss any research and data that challenges their pet positive feedback claims as being from non climate scientists and therefore not worthy. Well this research should be harder to dismiss:

Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center

He has been researching clouds and their role in positive feedback and seems like someone who should know a bit about climate and how it works, or doesn't work as the case may be. Whats more, he appears to be an open minded researcher who has looked at the latest data and decided that his original assumptions were wrong.

For those who haven't been able to keep up with the climate debate nobody disputes that CO2 is a warming gas, the problem, for climate alarmists is that it will only cause, at most, 1deg of warming for each doubling, and even that is being challenged. In order to make their wilder claims that allow them to control our lives climate alarmists need positive feedback in the climate. Climate modellers have built this in to their models by claiming that as the climate warms we get a build up of clouds, which in turn causes more warming.

Unfortunately for climate alarmists Dr Spencer's research doesn't support this theory:

"All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by man made greenhouse gases," he said. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."

Note that is a strongly negative feedback; this may even mean that the increase in temperature of 1 deg for each doubling of CO2 may be too high.

And just to add insult to injury for climate alarmists Dr Spencer is no lone maverick, as the alarmists often claim:

The results of this research were published today in the American Geophysical Union's "Geophysical Research Letters" on-line edition. The paper was co-authored by UAHuntsville's Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. W. Danny Braswell, and Dr. Justin Hnilo of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA.

If you read the report you will see that there is still some uncertainty of what this means and that the results of the research still need to be modelled, but that is part of the scientific process followed by those with open minds. However, this latest data is another step in calming the wildest claims and hopefully starting a grown up debate on what is really happening, but I won't hold my breath.

H/t Climate Science