The invalid assumptions of the globo warmers

George Will:

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There is much debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased for that long (11 years). What we know is that computer models did not predict this. Which matters, a lot, because we are incessantly exhorted to wager trillions of dollars and diminished freedom on the proposition that computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming. On Nov. 2, The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Ball reported some inconvenient data. Soon after the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Thinking Man's Thinking Man—reported that global warming is "unequivocal," there came evidence that the planet's temperature is beginning to cool. "That," Ball writes, "has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect."

Models are no better or worse than their assumptions, and Ball notes how dicey these assumptions can be: "The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet." It gets worse: "The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation—and how clouds in turn affect temperature—remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently."

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It is my experience that clouds lower the temperature when I am under them. In the summer they can lower the temperature in this part of Texas by about 20 degrees if they are thick enough to block the direct sunlight. In the summer they usually form up over the Gulf of Mexico at night and drift over the land during the day following the heat. Around four in the afternoon there is a 20 percent chance they will dump some rain somewhere. In the winter the clouds come from the cold fronts usually out of the northwest.

The cloud study that Will alludes to reminds me of Joni Mitchel's Both Sides Now.

Rows and flows of angel hair,
And ice cream castles in the air,
And feather canyons everywhere,
I've looked at clouds that way.

But now they only block the Sun,
They rain and snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done,
But clouds got in my way.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
It's cloud illusions I recall,
I really don't know clouds, at all.

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