Send in the Clouds

Well this is fun -- Gript, the alternative Irish media outlet, reports that Dr. John F. Clauser, the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate for Physics, has come out harshly against our old friends in the climate cult. Says Clauser,

The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists.

Dr. Clauser has a particular beef with the extremely unreliable climate models which we at The Pipeline have discussed frequently in the past, including here, here, here, and here. Those models have been wildly off the mark in their temperature predictions for the several decades that they've been employed. They're even terrible at predicting temperatures going backwards -- when you plug the available data for the early decades of the 20th century, for instance, the models project temperatures well above those that actually occurred.

For Clauser, the biggest problem with the prevailing models is that they overemphasize the negative effects of carbon dioxide and take the "greenhouse effect" as gospel while ignoring "the dramatic temperature-stabilizing feedback of clouds" which he contends to be "more than fifty times as powerful as the radiative forcing effect of CO2." Gript further explains his position:

Dr. Clauser notes that bright white clouds are clearly the most conspicuous feature in satellite photos of the earth. These clouds are mostly produced by the evaporation of seawater by sunlight. They cover variably one third to two thirds of the earth’s surface. Most of the energy incident on the earth is in the form of visible sunlight. Clouds reflect sunlight energy back into space before it can reach the earth’s surface to heat it. According to the Nobel Laureate, this creation of a reflective cloud cover provides a natural thermostat that regulates the earth’s temperature with a powerful negative feedback effect.

Did somebody say "models"?

Clauser's critique calls to mind that of another theoretical physicist and climate skeptic, the departed Prof. Freeman Dyson of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. His best-known work on the climate question called for climate scientists to employ a little humility. On the subject of "models," Dyson said:

I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Dyson titled that essay "Heretical Thoughts on Science and Society," a nod to the accusation from the scientific establishment that he had betrayed their sacred narrative, apostatized from the Green religion. No doubt John Clauser is about to receive the same treatment. Still, we owe him a great deal. It isn't easy to point out that the Emperor's got no clothes.