A Mystery Climate Mechanism....

A mystery climate mechanism may counteract global warming, according to an article in Geophysical Research Letters.

A new study by two physicists at the University of Rochester suggests there is a mechanism at work in the Earth’s atmosphere that may blunt the influence of global warming, and that this mechanism is not accounted for in the computer models scientists currently use to predict the future of the world’s temperature. The researchers, David H. Douglass and Robert S. Knox, professors of physics, plotted data from satellite measurements of the Earth’s atmosphere in the months and years following the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The results, published in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters (and now online), show that global temperatures dropped more and rebounded to normal significantly faster than conventional climate models could have predicted.

Therefore, there was something producing a self-correcting feedback.

Douglass and Knox point out that the mechanism producing the negative feedback may be the “Infrared Iris effect” due to clouds proposed by MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Clouds can both cool the Earth by reflecting light from the Sun, and warm the Earth by trapping heat between them and the ground. Since cloud formation is influenced by temperature and humidity changes in the atmosphere, the team suspects that clouds may form and dissipate in a way that tends to push the global temperatures back to steady normal.

Since the explanation of Pinatubo by the computer models was wrong in regard to the response time and the negative feedback, Douglass asks, “Are the computer models right when they consider the change to the climate caused by carbon dioxide?”