Hey, You, Get Offa My Cloud.

David Hume :-
“Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”
None of us, whether we work for the IPCC, are climate scientists or are lay, have the foggiest idea how much of the recent “tiny, tiny” warming is man made. No one who creates, sustains and protects the “models” that predict future climate can, or will, say for “certain” because the simple reason is that there are nowhere near enough observations to draw conclusions from that most important of natural climate phenomena, clouds. The very clouds that are both a result and the main cause of the much maligned greenhouse effect that stops our planet from being a permanent ball of extremely cold ice and rock. We have very little in the way of recorded observations and records of the water vapor in the atmosphere to form an opinion, let alone a theory, as to the forcings caused by, and indeed resulting from, the water of life itself that co-mingles with CO2, the life giving gas, that we all inhale and breath out every minute of every day. Every plant does the same. One of the unspoken facts about “carbon offsetting” through the provision of trees, woods and forests is that, inconveniently, a growing tree will push 200 times as much water into the air as CO2. Couple this with the, at least, 100 times greater forcing that water vapor has on tropospheric warmth than carbon dioxide and what do you get? Answers, on a postcard please, to UN IPCC, somewhere exotic (preferably warm already) - you know, the usual costly air trip away at taxpayer expense to then berate said taxpayer for breathing out, earning a living, consuming product, watching tv or anything else that can be credited carbonwise.
Back to the clouds.

A new paper (March 31st, 2008) (by De-Zheng Sun and Tao Zhang of the Cooperative Institute for Environmental Studies/University of Colorado &NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado, USA and Yongqiang Yu of LASG, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China) shows us the way:
“…underestimating the negative feedback from cloud albedo and overestimating the positive feedback from the greenhouse effect of water vapor over the tropical Pacific during ENSO is a prevalent problem of climate models”
being just one of many gems contained in a paper whose abstract includes:
“…the feedbacks of water vapor and clouds—the cloud albedo feedback in particular—depend on the mean intensity of the hydrological cycle. We have also examined whether the variations among models of the feedback from cloud albedo (water vapor) in the ENSO variability are correlated with the variations among models of the feedback from cloud albedo (water vapor) in global warming. While we find a weak positive correlation between the variations among models in the feedback of water vapor during ENSO and the variations among models in the water vapor feedback during global warming, we find no significant correlation between the variations among models in the cloud albedo feedback during ENSO and the variations among models in the cloud albedo feedback during global warming.”
Paper here:
www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/dezheng.sun/dspapers/Sun-Yu-Zhang-JC-revised.pdf
Conclusions studiously ignored by mainstream scientists - again.
Does it take a vigneron - Erl Happ - to validate Dr Richard Lindzen’s “iris effect” and incorporate it into a Tropical Lower Troposphere cloud theory that puts climate scientists, not to mention NASA, NOAA and the IPCC, to shame? Check out the discussion here:
www.climateaudit.org/?p=3052#comment-244302
It is a somewhat heated argument

Some exceptions to the idiocy:
www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm#research-update
www.terradaily.com/reports/Widespread_Twilight_Zone_Detected_Around_Clouds_999.html

Climate scientists - and Solar physicists - should get out more. There is nothing new under the sun my arse. We will be glad of some cloud cover these coming decades.