Sentences with phrase «clouds have a warming effect»

At night the reflection effect is zero so the greenhouse effect and reflection of thermal radiation dominate and the low thick clouds have a warming effect.

Not exact matches

Besides SSCE, scientists have also been investigating stratospheric sulfur injections — firing sun - reflecting aerosols into the air, similar to the cooling effect after a volcanic eruption — and cirrus cloud thinning, where you thin the top level of clouds, which have a warming effect on the planet.

But at breaks in the cloud deck, smoke has the opposite effect: It is brighter than the dark ocean surface, reflecting solar radiation and reducing warming.

In a recent study, for instance, well - respected climate models were shown to have completely opposing estimates for the overall effect of the clouds and smoke in the southeast Atlantic: Some found net warming, whereas others found cooling.

Scientists have been interested in the effects of pollution on Arctic clouds because of their potential warming effect.

It may seem surprising to people, but you can look at something like Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, and you can look at something like Venus which we tend to think of as sort of having this rather heavy, clouded atmosphere, which [is] hellishly warm because of runaway greenhouse effect, and on both of those planets you are seeing this phenomenon of the atmosphere leaking away, is actually what directly has led to those very different outcomes for those planets; the specifics of what happened as the atmosphere started to go in each case [made] all the difference.

A study published in Nature Climate Change in March demonstrated that contrails have a net warming effect and can also affect natural cloud patterns.

And, Stevens says, the study doesn't discuss the types of clouds that are thought to be the most crucial for future warming: low - lying clouds over the subtropical oceans, which have a strong cooling effect but may be dissipating as the world warms.

The research also appears to solve one of the great unknowns of climate sensitivity, the role of cloud formation and whether this will have a positive or negative effect on global warming.

[Response: Note also that more low clouds would unambiguously mean a cooling effect, but more high clouds could lead to either a warming effect or a cooling effect, depending on the altitude of the clouds and the typical particle size in the GCR - induced clouds (if any).

I'm not even an amateur climate scientist, but my logic tells me that if clouds have a stronger negative feedback in the Arctic, and I know (from news) the Arctic is warming faster than other areas, then it seems «forcing GHGs» (CO2, etc) may have a strong sensitivity than suggested, but this is suppressed by the cloud effect.

Constable would often record his thoughts on the back of the studies, for example on Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead he writes: «We have had noble clouds and effects of light and dark and colour — as is always the case with such seasons as the present», while on Cloud Study, Hampstead he describes a «morning under the sun, clouds silvery grey on warm sultry ground».

I know Lindzen has a theory that a change in tropical cloud cover will offset greenhouse - gas - caused warming, the unproven «iris effect».

I would expect the albedo effect presented by clouds to be weak over the mostly snow / ice covered Antarctica, but Svensmark argues that the clouds here warm rather than cool the temperature.

For instance, increasing cloud cover due to global warming may change the albedo, but this would be a feedback to a larger warming effect, rather than a cooling.

I've touched on lake - effect snows, the classic pattern in the Upper Midwest and western New York State in which frigid winds blowing over relatively warm Great Lakes waters generate persistent cloud bands and lots of snow.

(Note that radiative forcing is not necessarily proportional to reduction in atmospheric transparency, because relatively opaque layers in the lower warmer troposphere (water vapor, and for the fractional area they occupy, low level clouds) can reduce atmospheric transparency a lot on their own while only reducing the net upward LW flux above them by a small amount; colder, higher - level clouds will have a bigger effect on the net upward LW flux above them (per fraction of areal coverage), though they will have a smaller effect on the net upward LW flux below them.

So, the question of whether or not more of these clouds would be formed, along with the question of their net effect (given that they reflect sunlight from above, but also trap heat from below), gives rise to some degree of imprecision when it comes to the degree of warming predicted by models.

Re 9 wili — I know of a paper suggesting, as I recall, that enhanced «backradiation» (downward radiation reaching the surface emitted by the air / clouds) contributed more to Arctic amplification specifically in the cold part of the year (just to be clear, backradiation should generally increase with any warming (aside from greenhouse feedbacks) and more so with a warming due to an increase in the greenhouse effect (including feedbacks like water vapor and, if positive, clouds, though regional changes in water vapor and clouds can go against the global trend); otherwise it was always my understanding that the albedo feedback was key (while sea ice decreases so far have been more a summer phenomenon (when it would be warmer to begin with), the heat capacity of the sea prevents much temperature response, but there is a greater build up of heat from the albedo feedback, and this is released in the cold part of the year when ice forms later or would have formed or would have been thicker; the seasonal effect of reduced winter snow cover decreasing at those latitudes which still recieve sunlight in the winter would not be so delayed).

I'm not a cloud expert, and I may be describing this particular uncertainty inaccurately, but I use this as one example, and (unless this aspect of the science has changed in recent months) I believe that one aspect of uncertainty has to do with these clouds and their ultimate net effect as the atmosphere warms.

First, clouds can have a greenhouse effect that can offset their albedo effect and allow warming.

Global warming will only have a small effect in the tropics provided the cloud forests remain.

«While low clouds have a predominantly cooling effect due to their shading of sunlight, most cirrus clouds have a net warming effect on the Earth,» Spencer said.

Spencer + Braswell have shown that over the tropics on a shorter - term basis, the net overall feedback from clouds with warming is negative; this is largely due to an increase in reflection of incoming radiation by increased clouds with a smaller effect from the reduction of energy trapping high altitude clouds, which slow down outgoing radiation by absorbing and re-radiating energy.

For example, clouds in day time have a net cooling effect but at night time they have a net warming effect.

Stuart L I am a stupid layman, but wonder about the effects of water vapour (clouds) when I lived in the UK cloud conditions would cause the temps to be milder (warmer) here in Philippines cloud causes cooler conditions, how can one calculate the overall effect on the earths surface?.

These models suggest that if the net effect of ocean circulation, water vapour, cloud, and snow feedbacks were zero, the approximate temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels would be a 1oC warming.

With regard to clouds, Willis argues that no clouds in daylight in the tropics will have a net warming effect compared to clouds.

While this does not «prove» that global warming is not man - made, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds.»

I thought I read a few findings that showed that aerosols actually had an overall warming effect rather than a cooling one (brown cloud over Asia raising temps).

In addition, the larger amount of open water leads to more moisture in the air, which affects the formation of clouds that have their own effect on warming, either enhancing or reducing it.

Every model assumes that tropical - region cirrus cloud cover, which has a net warming effect on surface temperatures, increases with increasing surface temperature — a positive feedback.

Clouds are one of the big unknowns about global warming as they can have a range of effects, warmer temperatures caused by global warming will result in higher rates of evaporation and therefore will result in higher cloud cover.

Clouds have both a cooling effect and a warming effect, depending on the type of cloud.

More clouds both drastically reduce energy input from the sun and simply slow release of what energy there is trapped in the lower troposphere, but the long term effect would be a fall in average temperature because of the significantly reduced input power but the atmosphere's ability to cool is aided by air current circulation whereby the warmer air rises above those low clouds and that infra - red is more easily re-emitted into space, whereby the low clouds now block that re-emission from hitting the ground again to any significant degree.

While CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas, increasing concentrations of which may be expected to have (other things being equal) a warming effect, scientists disagree about how large that effect may be (this is particularly affected by ignorance of the effect of clouds).

Warmer winters (if they have lots of clouds... in winter thick clouds actually warm since there is less daylight and there cooling effect is now reversed to warming by retaining the heat... reflecting more IR than carbon dioxide can do, depending upon the type of cloud).

1700: A new study aims to highlight the potential of a geoengineering technique referred to as «marine cloud - brightening» (MCB) which researchers say has the potential to cancel out the effects of global warming in a world double the CO2 concentration of the pre-industrial world.

Heating «cloud albedo effect» is a far better explanation of palaeo - climate than CO2 because the latter has a delay of 500-1500 years as oceans warm.

Clouds» impact on climate would obviously change as the world warms (a feedback) but, if solar - magnetic effects change clouds, as now seems likely, clouds could also drive climate change (a forcing).6, 7

Seeding the clouds in this way would cause them to dissipate more quickly, lessening their overall warming effect.

Since low altitude clouds have a net cooling effect (their «whiteness» is more important than their «blanket» effect), increased solar activity implies a warmer climate.

In contrast, high clouds tend to have a warming effect on the surface and atmosphere.

However — a group of scientists of the US Department of Energy Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Maryland and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem now say that aerosol pollution does not necessarily lead to (low - lying) stratus clouds one would appreciate for climatic cooling, but that it can also be a factor in the creation of thunderstorm clouds, clouds that have a complicated climate effect, but that are suspected of being net warmers.

Basically, Dr Ferenc Miskolczi's life as a NASA climate research scientist was made hell because he discovered that the extra water vapour being evaporated is not having a positive - feedback (increasing the CO2 warming effect by absorbing more infrared from the sun), instead it is going into increased cloud cover, which reflects incoming sunlight back to space.

And even if you can demonstrate an effect on cloud cover, clouds have both a cooling and a warming effect, what will the balance be and how much will that net forcing be?

In short, Lindzen's argument is that the radiative forcing from aerosols is highly uncertain with large error bars, and that they have both cooling (mainly by scattering sunlight and seeding clouds) and warming (mainly by black carbon darkening the Earth's surface and reducing its reflectivity) effects.

Perhaps they will find clouds don't influence warming so much, maybe having a damping effect.

So, CO2 - AGW is probably very low [overestimated by a factor of > = c. 3] and «cloud albedo effect» heating has probably been responsible for the warming, now stopped because the effect has has saturated.

Their promotional embellishments have also corrupted the meaning of «greenhouse effect,» a term originally relating the loose confinement of warm nighttime air near ground level by cloud cover, to hot air trapped inside a greenhouse,» Kondis explained..