Thursday, August 05, 2010

The Great Global Warming Blunder.

A tweet leads me to a James Delingbole article extolling a book by AGW sceptic Dr Roy Spencer. The book is called The Great Global Warming Blunder.


It seems that his central argument is that decreasing low-level cloud cover (which has been shown to be associated with increasing sea surface temperatures in the Pacific) is not a feedback from the higher temperature, but a cause of the higher temperature.

Which raises the question of what is causing the decreased cloud cover. It was suggested that cosmic ray fluctuations could cause variations in cloud cover.  However, more recent work suggests that the cosmic ray concentrations are 100 times too small to affect cloud formation.

Which leaves the question of the cause of the decreasing cloud cover. So I have emailed Roy Spencer asking for his thoughts. So far, all I have to go on is that Spencer puts it down to Natural Variation.

How nice to be able to dismiss the whole body of climate science in two words. Roy Spencer is an anti-evolutionist, and stands accused of fiddling graphs.

I'll let you know in due course.

That tweet has cost me about 2 hours. Still, it was fun, revisiting the old climate debate.