Moving on from climate virtue.

The United Nations will convene its 17th annual climate-change conference next month in Durban, South Africa, with the purpose of sealing a new carbon-cutting deal to succeed the soon-to-expire 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It promises to be a historic event, if not in the way the organizers might hope.

The chances that a global deal on carbon would ever be reached were always slim, a point brought home by the collapse of the comic 2009 Copenhagen summit. But obituaries are sometimes late to print. Now, at last, the U.S., Russia and Japan have all said they won’t agree to any new binding carbon pact, while India and China were never believers in the first place.

That leaves the European Union, which until last month was “the only one still considering signing up in some fashion to a second commitment period,” according to Todd Stern, the Obama Administration’s climate negotiator. Even that’s no longer true. Last week, EU Climate Action Director General Jos Delbeke told reporters that “in reality what may happen is that the Europeans will pronounce themselves politically in favor of the Kyoto Protocol” but won’t lock themselves into any new anticarbon pacts unless “other parties join the club.” Regarding that likelihood, see above.

That isn’t the only reality check Europe is facing on the carbon front. In an internal memo first reported last week by Dow Jones Newswires, the European Commission’s energy department observed that “there is a trade-off between climate- change policies and competitiveness.” By the EU’s own estimate, the cost of meeting its current carbon emissions targets - a cut of at least 20% of 1990 emissions levels by 2020 - comes to at least 48 billion Euros ($67 billion) per year.

For a closer look at the price Europeans pay for their carbon virtue, consider Tata, Europe’s second-largest steelmaker. Last month the company warned that “EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry,” citing this as one reason to close some of its U.K. operations and possibly cut some 1,200 jobs. Yet under the terms of Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme, Tata could be paid at least 20 million this year and next for those closures and layoffs.

Europe also seems to be getting wiser, if not yet wise, to the prohibitive costs of being green. In Britain, the government of David Cameron - which entered office last year promising to be the country’s “greenest government ever” - has scrapped plans for a carbon-capture-and-storage plant in Scotland, which was set to bust its £1 billion budget. “If there was a completely unlimited resource then we may have been able to surmount the technical problems,” Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne told the BBC.

Then there are those “technical problems.” The process of capturing and compressing CO2 is energy-intensive. Storing the carbon once it’s been sequestered is another issue. In Germany, a 30-megawatt carbon-capture pilot plant has been in operation since 2008. Yet plant-operator Vattenfall must truck the sequestered CO2 more than 150 kilometers daily to store it in the nearest suitable locale. The company also recently suspended its plans for large-scale carbon capture and storage at Janschwalde in Germany. Environmental groups oppose putting carbon underground because they fear living above huge carbon sinks.

And so it goes with every technology that claims to promise greenhouse-gas salvation. Wind power may emit zero carbon, but windmills need up to 90% of their capacity backed up to prevent blackouts - usually with coal and gas plants. Windmills also kill a lot of birds. As for solar power, a new study from the University of Tennessee and Occupational Knowledge International finds that manufacturing the necessary lead batteries threatens to release more than 2.4 million tons of lead pollution by 2022, or one-third of today’s total global lead production.

The science on climate change and man’s influence on it is far from settled. The question today is whether it makes sense to combat a potential climate threat by imposing economically destructive regulations and sinking billions into failure-prone technologies that have their own environmental costs. The earnest people going to Durban next month may think so. The rest of the world is wearier and wiser.

How to spend $157,000 per job.

The green jobs subsidy story gets more embarrassing by the day. Three years ago President Obama promised that by the end of the decade America would have five million green jobs, but so far some $90 billion in government spending has delivered very few.

A new report by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General examined a $500 million grant under the stimulus program to the Employment and Training Administration to “train and prepare individuals for careers in ‘green jobs.’” So far about $162.8 million has been spent. The program was supposed to train 125,000 workers, but only 53,000 have been “trained” so far, only 8,035 have found jobs, and only 1,033 were still in the job after six months.

Overall, “only 10% of participants entered employment.” In the understatement of the year, the IG says the program failed to “assist those most impacted by the recession.”

The jobs record is even more dismal when you consider that many of the jobs classified as green aren’t even new jobs, much less green, according to a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. They include positions that have been “relabeled as green jobs by the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics].”

This means that bus drivers, Environmental Protection Agency regulators, university professors teaching ecology, and even the Washington lobbyists who secure energy loan guarantees count as green employees for the purposes of government counting. The Oversight Committee finds that even a charitable assessment of the Labor program puts the cost of each green job at $157,000.

The silver lining is that the IG found that as of “June 30, 2011, $327.3 million remained unexpended” from the Labor program’s appropriation. The IG urges that all funds “determined not to be needed should be recouped as soon as practicable and to the extent permitted by law.” That ought to be the deficit supercommittee’s first $327 million in savings.

A campaign to establish ecocide as the fifth international crime against peace appears to have gained further momentum following the first mock trial at the UK’s Supreme Court.

The campaign to make ecocide a crime is the brainchild of international lawyer Polly Higgins, who wants the UN to be able to brand companies that harm the environment as guilty of an offence comparable to genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.

The concept of ecocide has gradually secured more and more support since Higgins proposed it to the United Nations 18 months ago, but it was thrust into the spotlight last month when two fictional chief executives were found “guilty” of the offence at a mock trial on September 30.

UN issues call for green public-private partnerships

Figueres predicts carbon market will overcome current uncertaintyReal barristers led the case for and against the chief executives of two hypothetical firms, albeit ones that closely mirrored real companies responsible for a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and unconventional tar sands extraction in Canada.

The jury eventually branded the Athabasca Tar Sands projects a crime, but returned a not guilty verdict for the charge of ecocide against the company responsible for the oil spill.

Speaking to BusinessGreen, Higgins hailed the trial as a success, adding that the not guilty verdict actually helped to boost the campaign, by demonstrating that showing that the mock trial followed realistic lines and was not a publicity stunt targeting firms that are guilty of environmental damage.

She also revealed that a number of countries including Australia, Brazil and Mexico are considering holding similar mock trials and that businesses are becoming increasingly engaged in the debate.

“This is very much positioned as a proposal that the business community really needs to wake up to,” she said. “The insurance industry is very engaged on this right now, we put out invites to oil and gas companies to the trial.”

She added that one oil company has since invited a lawyer at the trial to offer best practice advice on the prospective law.

She refused to reveal the names of the parties involved, but said it showed that businesses are increasingly realising that ecocide could be passed as a law.

“It’s going to be sooner rather than later [that ecocide will become a crime], because if we leave it too late we’ll all be toast,” she added.

If the law were passed, Higgins believes that businesses would need to shift their green strategies from “risk management” to addressing the potential legal consequences of environmental crimes.

“It’s no longer going to be about saying there’s a 0.01 per cent risk of something going wrong, its about saying that if it does go wrong, we’ll end up in prison, so we’re not going to do it,” she said.

Whether or not a chief executive really would end up in prison would depend on their culpability, said Ian Lawrie QC, who prepared the defence for the mock trial and acted as a hypothetical instructing solicitor.

He argued that if a director had been let down by an employee who they believed to be doing a good job, they might be deemed less responsible than if they knew about the mistakes being made.

Lawrie also revealed he is due to give a talk to a group of solicitors in the coming weeks, briefing them on the potential ecocide law. While he has not been directly approached by firms for advice, one of his existing clients has asked to be briefed on the outcome of the trial.

Jane Russell QC of Tooks Chambers, who was part of the trial’s prosecution team, urged firms to prepare for ecocide becoming law by ensuring they understand how to comply with the prospective law.

“I think if somebody is advising oil companies on best practice that’s great,” she said.

But despite the increased interest in the proposal, Higgins said she was unlikely to formalise the campaign for the new law. “So many people want to help make this happen, but I’m reluctant to start up a huge organisation,” she said. “I’m a lawyer, so I don’t want to manage people and organise a campaign.”

Once a fairly reliable harbinger of dry times in Southern California, the gal lost street cred last year. Her presence last fall was viewed with trepidation because we were in the midst of a drought. Another below-normal rainy season was feared and forecast.

Then the winter came, and so did the rains. A few days before Christmas, some of us had to drive through about a foot of that La Nina in flooded Mission Valley.

Up in Northern California, the rains kept coming and coming. Snow piled up high in the Sierra. In San Diego, the season ended with 12.62 inches of rain, well above the annual average of 10.34. Statewide, the drought was declared over, and La Nina was a laughingstock.

Was the rain last week a sign of more to come, or will she return to form and leave us high and dry this time?

We posed those questions to several meteorological experts, and their answers are found later in this story.

Take a look and then draw your own conclusions - because it will be your turn to make a forecast. It’s time for the 10th annual Union-Tribune Precipitation Prediction Contest.

Here’s how it works: Tell us how much rain you think will fall at Lindbergh Field, San Diego’s official weather station, between July 1 of this year and June 30, 2012. The winner will be the person who comes closest to the actual total, either over or under. Also, as a mandatory tiebreaker, list the calendar day that you think will be the wettest of the year.

Entries must be received by midnight Oct. 24.

The winner’s prize is nothing to sneeze at: four two-day adult ski lift tickets at Brian Head Resort in Utah and a two-night stay at the Cedar Breaks Lodge in Brian Head.  Enter at SignOnSanDiego.com/RainContest or mail your entry to: Robert Krier, Precipitation Prediction Contest, The San Diego Union-Tribune, P.O. Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191.

What was up last year?

La Nina is a periodic atmospheric phenomenon marked by cooler-than-usual ocean temperatures in the central Pacific. Those cool waters usually help shift the storm track north, which typically leaves Southern California and the southern states drier than normal, and the Pacific Northwest wet.

Other than in Southern California, La Nina behaved as expected last year. Texas had a record drought, and the Northwest was soggy.

“California had some very unorthodox outcomes,” said Klaus Wolter, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado and for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Western Water Assessment team.

Wolter predicted last year that La Nina would return this winter. What he didn’t foresee was Southern California getting slammed last December by an “atmospheric river” of moisture thousands of miles long. Over Dec. 21 and 22, San Diego recorded 3.84 inches of rain.

The “atmospheric river” phenomenon is impossible to predict more than two weeks in advance. If one hits a normally dry place like San Diego, it skews the numbers. January to March was drier than usual; take away those two days in December and the season total is well below normal.

This year? Wolter is going low again. “I would be very surprised if you had a wet year,” Wolter said. “Ten inches? Good luck with that.”

Long-range forecasters stress that the presence of La Nina doesn’t guarantee anything, but it’s like playing with loaded dice. Rigged dice can be made to come up seven more often the normal odds, but that doesn’t mean seven will appear every roll.

“The thing we have to realize is that it kind of shifts the likelihood of something happening,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center in Maryland. “This year, there’s a slight tilt (toward dry) in your area, but it’s a very slight tilt.”

Those at the center have yet to figure out why the La Nina tilt last year, which was far stronger than this year’s episode, didn’t deliver a dry winter in Southern California, Halpert said. “To put it in terms you can use in the newspaper, stuff happens,” Halpert said. Halpert’s prediction for San Diego this year: 9.2 inches. “But I’m never right,” he added.

Wannabe La Nina?

Bill Patzert of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena said La Nina this year is a wannabe, compared to last year’s. “The signal in the ocean is puny,” he said. Other global-scale atmospheric patterns, such as one called the Arctic Oscillation (based on pressure and temperature differences in the Arctic), could override La Nina and make it play second fiddle. That’s what happened last year, Patzert believes. A strong, long-lasting negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation helped lock the West Coast into a trough pattern that brought a series of powerful storms, especially those in December.

But it’s impossible to know if the oscillation will repeat last year’s performance. Like those atmospheric rivers, its phases can’t be predicted more than a couple of weeks out.

Patzert thinks La Nina will reassert itself this year. His prediction: 8.18 inches, but he is not confident. “My prediction is a (guess),” he said. “There’s just not enough information right now to sound too prophetic.”

The lone meteorologist consulted for this story who expects above-normal rainfall in San Diego this year is Ivory Small, science officer at the National Weather Service’s office in Rancho Bernardo.

Last year, a general trough pattern on the West Coast in the spring and summer led him to a “persistence” forecast. He thought the condition would continue into the rainy season, so he predicted normal rainfall. This year, with similar conditions present, Small is predicting an inch above normal: 11.34 inches. “I may be the lone dog hanging out there just to be challenging,” Small said.

H/T John Coleman

Enlarged

Many readers have complained about the Labor/Greens- dominated Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation’s refusal to publish many of the submissions damning the carbon dioxide tax.

Of the many warming sceptic readers with anecdotes of their own submissions being deep-sixed, Wandzia is the one who has managed to measure the bias after receiving this email delivering some sad news:

From: “Committee, JSCACEFL (REPS)”
Date: 6 October 2011 1:15:32 PM
To: XXXXXo@gmail.com
Subject: RE: Signed Carbon Tax Submission-W XXXXX

Thank you for your contribution to the inquiry by the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation.

The committee has received your email as correspondence. While the committee considers the views in correspondence, it does not publish correspondence on its webpage. This does not lessen the importance of your contribution, however only those documents that went to specific detail about the Bills were published as submissions....

Secretary
Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation

Wandzia now writes:

The Joint Select committee on its website says it received a total of 326 submissions

“The department has published 267 non-confidential submissions on the legislation received from individuals, academics and business, environmental and community groups. The remaining submissions are either confidential or express general views on the carbon pricing mechanism.”

I decided to check all the letters from private persons in this list of 267.

The following 22 letters were all VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL TEMPLATES SAYING THE SAME THING :

41 John Bartholomew
48 Deanna Booth
67 Michael Clark
68 Charlotte Clarke
81 Anna Cooke
82 Bruce Cooke
83 Susan Cooke
88 Christine Davis
91 Ian Dixon
97 Susan Dunn
122 Emma Gordon
128 Dr Robbin Gunning
136 Joanne Horton
143 Wendell Judd
146 Rolf Keulsen
159 Dr Graham Mackay
163 Fiona McCleary
180 Bob Noble
223 Giovanni Sottile
240 Paul Taylor
259 Jessie Wells
266 Christopher Wright

The next following 22 letters were roughly the same letter following a second FORMULA template with individual small changes - three letters marked with * were very long elaborate versions. Once again all say virtually the same thing.

42 Alice Beauchamp
106 Helen Evans
107 Iain Fyfe
111 Ellen Finlay
130 Manuela Hancock
131 Jocelyn Hansen
141 John Jeayes *
145 Samantha Kent
153 Peter Lendfers
168 Jim Morrison
194 Robyn Phillips
195 Rob Pittman
204 Amy Quinton
207 Jayne Ramshaw
221 Jonathan Smith
227 Paul Stark*
239 Louise Taylor
241 James Tedder
250 Greg Twitt
253 Bas Van Riel
258 Richard Weller*
262 Kirralee Wishart

The following 9 letters were totally general and some were as short as a paragraph (marked*). All said the same thing but very very general. Those with a ? are very very basic.

52 Peter Brown -general
56 Chris Cannizzaro - general
60 Kerrie Chandler - ? general
121 Tom Gordon - ? general
166 Robert Moore - general
186 Monica O’Wheel general
193 Alan & Meg Peterson *
212 Blair Roberts-totally general
236 Fiona Taber-general

This makes a total of 53 letters ALL SEEMING TO BE FROM THE SAME GROUP OF PEOPLE AND ALL PRO CARBON /PRO GOVERNMENT SAYING THE SAME THING..

The website says it has chosen to NOT PUBLISH 59 letters (326-267) of which my submission was one....I sent it plainly as a submission and they are calling it correspondence.

My beef with this is that this government is skewing the submissions from private persons. Nearly every private submission is from one of these pre programmed people!  I would dearly like for this to be revealed to the public and for the Government to be brought to account and possibly direct the committee to put up those that they are not revealing. Many people l know from around Australia submitted and none of their letters are revealed here. If they published the last nine then they may as well publish the lot.

An extremely good source tells me the overhelming majority of private submissions or “correspondence” to the committee is in fact from people opposed to the tax.

UPDATE

Reader Michael also had his submission redefined as “correspondence” and left unpublished. His reply:

I respectfully disagree, it was not correspondence but a formal Submission. It was a written submission in pdf format, as only 7 days were permitted to make Submissions (and I sent a hard copy). I have made similar submissions before and this is the first time someone is seeking to censor my submission. Please consider this a formal request to accept my submission. If it is not going to be treated as submission, please formally escalate your administrative decision to a more senior officer for review. I wish to be informed in wrtting of the result of that review.

I reserve my right to complaint to the Ombudsmen, take action before the Administrative Review Tribunal. or refer my concerns to members of Parliament.

Dr Michael XXX

Reader Bruce can’t understand why there seem to be different rules for sceptics:

I was forwarded an email today which, in explaining why my email was not listed as a submission, said

“The committee has received your email as correspondence. While the committee considers the views in correspondence, it does not publish correspondence on its webpage. This does not lessen the importance of your contribution, however only those documents that went to specific detail about the Bills were published as submissions.”

I thought, fair cop, until I decided to follow the link to the published submissions, where I found that of Kerrie Chandler, whose entire submission was

“To Whom It May Concern

Even with all the confusion surrounding the Carbon Tax, I would like to support the move the Government is making. In order to reduce our Carbon Polution you have to place a monetary value on the air we breathe. I hope this is a step in the right direction and, I hope the Government sets a model and digs their heels in to become a world leader in this arena.

My support is with the Government at present.”

Weather forecastera are predicting another cold winter. But believers in global warming caused by humans need not despair. Physical Oceanographer Tom Rippeth of Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences “knows” that it is all “a consequence of global warming”:

“Whilst at first sight the recent spate of cold winters might be interpreted as not fitting the picture of a warming planet, they do in fact appear to be a consequence of global warming”

The secrets behind the new findings are - you guessed it - “complex computer models”:

“Using complex computer models scientists have found that, as the ice cap over the ocean disappeared, this allows the heat of the relatively warm seawater (0 degrees C) to escape into the much colder atmosphere above, creating an area of high pressure surrounded by clockwise-moving winds that sweep down from the Arctic over northern Europe.”

“The result here in the UK is that instead of our normal winter conditions, which are dominated by warm and wet winds blowing in off the Atlantic, we experience much colder winds coming in from the North and the East.”

Read the entire article here

PS

The climate alarmists really know how make it easy for themselves: Whatever happens, it is always a result of global warming. No wonder there has been an huge erosion of credibility for the warmist type of climate science.

Icecap Note: Ah then since cold in winter kills more people than heat in summer, global warming would be a good thing.

Enlarged.

A study from the Boulder, Colo.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) claims to have found all that missing heat from global warming’s “lost decade” It’s lurking in Davy Jones’s locker.

According to official science, global temperatures were meant to rise this century in line with increasing levels of man-made carbon dioxide, but didn’t. Now the puzzle has allegedly been solved: the heat is more than 300 metres below the world’s oceans, where it appears conveniently safe from physical verification.

According to the study’s official press release “deep oceans may absorb enough heat at times to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade - even in the midst of longer-term warming.”

Note “may” and “at times.” Note also how “periods as long as a decade” matches nicely with the (most recent) period of no warming that has to be explained (away).

The report, which claims that we should be prepared for several similar periods of non-warming in the coming century, “even as the trend toward overall warming continues,” is revealing on several counts. It amounts to a reluctant admission that global temperatures have indeed stalled. This fact has so far either been denied, ignored or buried beneath the claim that the past decade was still the hottest in the past 100 years (even if not by much).

Also, this newly identified mechanism, or at least hypothesis - by which greater depths heat up faster than the ocean surface - should, whatever its merits, confirm that climate science is far from “settled.” This comes on top of recent intense debate over the role of the Sun and clouds in Earth’s climate.

Meanwhile the suspicion that politics continues to rule science is aroused by the identity of one of the authors of the NCAR study, Kevin Trenberth. Followers of the Climategate scandal - in which a series of internal emails to and from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia clearly demonstrated that research results had been falsified and peer-review perverted - may remember Dr. Trenberth’s 2009 lament that: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t....Our observing system is inadequate.”

Note that Dr. Trenberth doesn’t seem to countenance the possibility that the whole anthropogenic thesis - that the climate is driven by man-made industrial emissions - might be wrong. It is the absence of the real world to follow the models that is the alleged “travesty.”

Dr. Trenberth, it seems, has now found the explanation he needs in the NCAR study, but it doesn’t come from advances in the “observing system.” There is major controversy over measurement of surface temperatures - with monitoring stations being found near heat ducts and on hot tarmac - so you can imagine how difficult it would be to track ocean temperatures below 300 meters. The conclusion that the heat has been deep-sixed comes entirely from computer models.

According to the report, “simulations ... indicated that temperatures would rise by several degrees during this century. But each simulation also showed periods in which temperatures would stabilize for about a decade before climbing again.” Apparently, the claim that the deep ocean is warming faster than the upper ocean is explained by the fact that “surface waters converge to push heat into deeper oceanic layers.”

Interesting hypothesis, but it should be remembered that there is another aspect of Dr. Trenberth’s record that casts an even longer shadow not just over his objectivity but that of all official climate science. That revolves around the resignation from the IPCC in 2005 of hurricane expert Chris Landsea. Dr. Landsea quit because of flagrant misrepresentation of hurricane science by Dr. Trenberth, with the apparent backing of the IPCC’s highest authorities.

Dr. Landsea had been asked by Dr. Trenberth, an IPCC “Lead Author,” to write a section on Atlantic hurricanes for the Fourth Assessment Report. Shortly afterwards, Dr. Landsea was “perplexed” to see that Dr. Trenberth was to participate in a press conference to peddle the notion that global warming was “likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity.” Dr. Landsea noted that none of those participating were hurricane experts. Moreover, their alarmist conclusions - which were widely reported - clashed with the fact that no reliable, long-term upward trend in hurricane activity had been identified. Nor did Dr. Landsea and other experts project that global warming’s impact on hurricane activity would be significant.

When Dr. Landsea took his concerns to the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, Mr. Pachauri tried to brush him off by suggesting that Dr. Trenberth was somehow speaking in a personal capacity, and/or that he had been misquoted by the media. Neither claim was true. Dr. Landsea wrote in his letter of resignation, “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.” The perception that Dr. Trenberth was speaking for the IPCC could, in Dr. Landsea’s view, only undermine the institution’s credibility. Dr. Landsea concluded that “Because of Dr. Trenberth’s pronouncements, the IPCC process ... has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost.”

Dr. Landsea’s complaints were swamped by Hurricane Katrina.

This latest study may thus have resolved Dr. Trenberth’s “travesty,” at least to his own satisfaction, but the travesty of the IPCC process - and the economic policy destruction for which it provides the justification - remains outstanding.

A paper published last week in the journal Meteorological Applications undermines a key assumption of the theory of man-made global warming, finding that the cooling effect of clouds far outweighs a supposed ‘greenhouse’ warming effect. Alarmists claim clouds have an overall ‘positive-feedback’ warming effect upon climate due to ‘back-radiation’ of the ‘greenhouse’ gas water vapor. This new paper based on satellite measurements finds instead that clouds have a large net cooling effect by blocking solar radiation and increasing radiative cooling outside the tropics. The cooling effect is found to be -21 Watts per meter squared, more than 17 times the supposed warming effect from a doubling of CO2 concentrations [1.2 W/m2]. Another key assumption of the AGW theory topples in the face of real-world data showing the net feedback from clouds is strongly negative.

Combining satellite data and models to estimate cloud radiative effect at the surface and in the atmosphere

Richard P. Allan

Abstract: Satellite measurements and numerical forecast model reanalysis data are used to compute an updated estimate of the cloud radiative effect on the global multi-annual mean radiative energy budget of the atmosphere and surface. The cloud radiative cooling effect through reflection of short wave radiation dominates over the long wave heating effect, resulting in a net cooling of the climate system of -21 Wm-2. The short wave radiative effect of cloud is primarily manifest as a reduction in the solar radiation absorbed at the surface of -53 Wm-2. Clouds impact long wave radiation by heating the moist tropical atmosphere (up to around 40 Wm-2 for global annual means) while enhancing the radiative cooling of the atmosphere over other regions, in particular higher latitudes and sub-tropical marine stratocumulus regimes. While clouds act to cool the climate system during the daytime, the cloud greenhouse effect heats the climate system at night. The influence of cloud radiative effect on determining cloud feedbacks and changes in the water cycle are discussed.

This is sharp contrast to the claims of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M here but is in good agreement with Spencer and Braswell.