Over the years, scientists have captured spectacular photographs while mapping ice during NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission. Many of the photographs have featured the icy landscapes of Greenland and Antarctica, over which lengthy missions are flown each year over. But the views during shorter duration IceBridge missions over Alaska reveal some equally majestic icescapes. Chris Larsen of the…
From ETH ZURICH and the “obvious science” department comes this study that is little more than a recycle of what is already understood about crops and “shininess”, back in 2009 – reflective surfaces absorb less heat during the daytime. Just wait till the greens deal with GMO engineered “reflective corn”, they’ll have a head-exploding dilemma. Climate…
From the American Geophysical Union and the “but we’ll still find a way to blame CO2, just you wait” department. It seems this is a frustrating day for climate-ice researchers, earlier, it was found that ice cores used to determine ancient CO2 levels are likely contaminated by microbes, and they altered the gas mixture balance.…
Study of ancient eruptions shows modern ice sheets could be vulnerable From THE EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY and the “dirty ice” melts faster department Volcanic eruptions have been known to cool the global climate, but they can also exacerbate the melting of ice sheets, according to a paper published today in Nature Communications. Researchers who…
Guest essay by Clyde Spencer The total reflectivity of Earth is important in energy budget calculations and in Global Circulation Models used to predict climate. If the value used is too low, it will contribute to models predicting more warming than is correct. I’ll demonstrate below why measured albedo is in fact too low as…
From M.I.T. and the “Total outgoing radiation is actually one of the biggest uncertainties in climate change” department: Batches of shoebox-sized satellites could improve estimates of Earth’s reflected energy A team of small, shoebox-sized satellites, flying in formation around the Earth, could estimate the planet’s reflected energy with twice the accuracy of traditional monolith satellites,…
Earlier, we published a story about how clouds near airplane contrails get brighter, reflecting more solar radiation to space. Now, on the surface, this new study says that Arctic glaciers are melting faster because red algae is changing the albedo of the ice, increasing uptake of solar radiation. It is just one more example of…
From STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY and the department of negative feedbacks comes this surprising finding that says not only do contrails add reflectivity for incoming solar radiation, they also increase reflectivity for other nearby clouds. Clouds may have a net warming or cooling effect on climate, depending on their thickness and altitude. Artificially formed clouds called contrails…
In the early days of WUWT, I reported on this project here: Earth’s Albedo Tells an Interesting Story Now data has been release in a new paper. From the INSTITUTO DE ASTROFÍSICA DE CANARIAS (IAC) New data on the variability of the Earth’s reflectance over the last 16 years The measurements of this key climate variable, obtained…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my continuing wanderings through the regions cryospherical, I find more side roads than main highways. In my last two posts here and here, I discussed the curious inverse relationship between temperature and ice accumulation rates in Greenland and Antarctica. Wanting to understand the changes in the polar oceans that occur when…
From the EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY and the “we told you so time and again at WUWT” department comes this study which not only explains the “insta-melt” in the Summer of 2012, but the ongoing melting that has been incorrectly blamed on CO2, when instead it’s all about older soot embedded in snow coming…
From Penn State High in the sky where the cirrus ice crystal clouds form, jet contrails draw their crisscross patterns. Now researchers have found that these elevated ice cloud trails can influence temperatures on the ground and affect local climate, according to a team of Penn State geographers. Video follows. “Research done regarding September 2001,…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I discussed the role of tropical albedo in regulating the temperature in two previous posts entitled Albedic Meanderings and An Inherently Stable System. This post builds on that foundation. I said in the latter post that I would discuss the diurnal changes in tropical cloud albedo. For this I use…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Anthony has just posted the results from a “Press Session” at the AGU conference. In it the authors make two claims of interest. The first is that there has been a five percent decrease in the summer Arctic albedo since the year 2000: A decline in the region’s albedo –…
This press session at AGU conference today had quite a lot to say. Personally, I think the issue of carbon soot forcing is one of the strongest drivers of this, as WUWT previously covered here: In the Arctic, nearby soot may be a larger forcing than CO2 NASA Satellites Measure Increase of Sun’s Energy Absorbed…
From the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research: In between red light and blue light: Leipzig researchers discover new functionality of molecular light switches Diatoms play an important role in water quality and in the global climate. They generate about one fourth of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere and perform around one-quarter of the global…
From ETH Zurich , something that actually makes sense. Straw albedo mitigates extreme heat Wheat fields are often tilled immediately after the crop is harvested, removing the light-coloured stubble and crop residues from the soil surface and bringing dark bare earth to the top. Post-harvest tilling is a widely practised and common management technique in…
WUWT readers surely remember all the media hype over this story. This was REP’s last entry on WUWT: As WUWT readers are aware, there has been a great deal of attention paid by the main stream media to the extensive melt on the Greenland icecap that occurred during July (for example, see here, here, here, here,…
Map of correlations suggest it may be affecting biomass and planetary albedo. From the Hockey Schtick: A paper published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution describes a new satellite dataset of solar UV-B radiation for use in ecological studies. According to the authors, “UV-B surfaces were correlated with global mean temperature and annual mean radiation…
Steve Goddard tips me to this article in the Canberra Times on May 16th, 1974: SUPPORT FOR A THEORY OF A COOLING WORLD It has some interesting claims in it that sound much like climate change claims made today. Apparently they detected large albedo changes via satellite, with a 12% increase in snow and ice…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There’s a new study in PNAS, entitled “Observational determination of albedo decrease caused by vanishing Arctic sea ice” by Pistone et al. Let me start by registering a huge protest against the title. The sea ice is varying, it isn’t “vanishing”, that’s just alarmist rhetoric that has no place in…
From PNAS: Direct satellite observation reveals that the Arctic planetary albedo, a measure of reflectiveness, decreased from 0.52 to 0.48 between 1979 and 2011, a change in albedo that corresponds to a climate forcing 25% as large as that due to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the same time period, according to this…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I have theorized that the reflective nature of the tropical clouds, in particular those of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) just above the equator, functions as the “throttle” on the global climate engine. We’re all familiar with what a throttle does, because the gas pedal on your car controls the…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been reflecting over the last few days about how the climate system of the earth functions as a giant natural heat engine. A “heat engine”, whether natural or man-made, is a mechanism that converts heat into mechanical energy of some kind. In the case of the climate system, the…
From the University of Colorado at Boulder comes this press release and accompanying photo. The photo, showing hazy pollution laden air in the Bernese Alps, makes me wonder why they don’t attribute current glacier ice loss issues to soot. Asia in particular, is a leader in soot production, right next to those Himalayan glaciers that…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been investigating one of my favorite datasets in the last few days, the CERES satellite-based top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation dataset. In particular, I’ve taken month-by-month global and hemispheric averages of the data. The dataset consists of observations of three variables—downwelling solar radiation, upwelling longwave (infrared) radiation, and upwelling shortwave radiation…
[I’m making this excellent essay a top sticky post for a day or two, I urge sharing it far and wide. New stories will appear below this one. – Anthony] Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Dr. Kevin Trenberth is a mainstream climate scientist, best known for inadvertently telling the world the truth about the parlous…
From the AGU Weekly Highlights, something I’ve pointed out more than a few times. See this photo of a moulin in upper Greenland, where carbon soot has collected at the bottom: Image from National Geographic online slide show – Photo: James Balog – click for more The authors find that BC (black carbon) emitted within…
Guest Post by David Middleton “Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt… Right On Time” I guess Professor Tedesco missed this… “Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says…
Got this in the mail just as I posted my open thread announcemnt. I’m too busy this weekend to say much else except to post this tweet from Bill McKibben and some past blog excerpts and invite discussion. Bill McKibben @billmckibben The reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet has…literally dropped off the bottom of the…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Well, after my brief digression to some other topics, I’ve finally been able to get back to the reason that I got the CERES albedo and radiation data in the first place. This was to look at the relationship between the top of atmosphere (TOA) radiation imbalance and the surface…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I read a Reviewer’s Comment on one of Richard Lindzen’s papers today, a paper about the tropics from 20°N to 20°S, and I came across this curiosity (emphasis mine): Lastly, the authors go through convoluted arguments between forcing and feed backs. For the authors’ analyses to be valid, clouds should…