Study Sheds Light on Effects of Clouds on Warming  					
-  							Published: January 17th, 2014
 By Tim Radford, Climate News Network
  LONDON
  					 						
 						 					
  					 					  					 					 						 							 						 							 										  						  						  						  						  						 							By Tim Radford, Climate News Network
  LONDON – Australian and French scientists believe they have  cracked one of the great puzzles of climate change and arrived at a more  accurate prediction of future temperatures.
   								 																			
	
	
	
		
		
		
			
		
		
	
	
 																		One of the great unknowns of climate science is what  effect clouds have in accelerating or slowing warming. A new study  sheds light on their possible impact.
Credit: 
EJP Photo/Flickr 								 							
  The news is not  good, according to Steven Sherwood of Australia’s Centre for Excellence  for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. If  carbon emissions are not reduced, then 
by 2100 the world will have warmed by 4°C (7.2°F).
  This figure does  not, at first, sound high: researchers have been warning for 20 years on  the basis of computer models that under the notorious business-as-usual  scenario in which everybody goes on burning coal and oil, then as  carbon dioxide levels double, global temperatures could rise by between  1.5°C and 4.5°C (2.7°F and 8.1°F).
  Pessimists could cite one extreme, optimists the other: the range of  uncertainty was a recognition that there were still some big unknowns in  the machinery of climate, and one of those unknowns was the behavior of  the clouds in a warmer world.
  More warmth means more evaporation, more vapor could mean more  clouds. Low-level clouds reflect sunlight back into space, and help cool  the climate a bit. This is what engineers call negative feedback.
  [h=3]Drying the Clouds  But if more water vapor actually led to less cloud, then more  sunlight would reach the surface and the world would warm even more:  positive feedback would be in play. Climate models cater for such  possibilities, but cannot choose between them.
  What Sherwood and his colleagues from Pierre and Marie Curie  University in Paris did was to start with some real-world observations  of what happens when water vapor gets into the atmosphere.
  They report in 
Nature that  up draughts of water vapor can rise 15 kilometers (9.32 miles) to form  high clouds that produce heavy rains, or the vapor can rise just a few  kilometers before coming back to the surface without forming rain  clouds.
  When this happens  the process actually reduces the overall cloud cover because it  desiccates the clouds above: it draws away water vapor from the higher  regions in a process called convective mixing.
   								 																			
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
 																		The new study suggests that in a warmer world there may be fewer clouds and thus less of a cooling effect.
Credit: Fir0002 at English Wikipedia via 
Climate News Network 								 							
  Climate models in the past have tended to predict high cloud  formation that damps warming. What Sherwood and his colleagues have done  is demonstrate that the world may not work like that.
  [h=3]Profound Effects in Prospect  So the next step was to feed the new understanding into computer  simulations. These then showed that climate cycles could develop that  would take vapor to a wider range of heights in the atmosphere, with the  consequence that fewer clouds would form as climate warms.
  If so – and other climate scientists will have their own arguments  with the findings – then as carbon dioxide levels double, which they  will do in the next 50 years or so, the average planetary temperatures  will increase by a colossal 4°C (7.2°F).
  Governments have expressed the wish – but not so far taken the  necessary action – to contain planetary temperatures to a rise of no  more than 2°C (3.6°F). If Sherwood and colleagues are right, they will  not get their wish. And the process will go on. The temperatures will  continue to soar beyond 2100, to reach an additional 8°C (14.4°F) by  2200.
  “Climate skeptics like to criticize climate models for getting things  wrong, and we are the first to admit they are not perfect, but what we  are finding is that the mistakes are being made by those models that  predict less warming, not those that predict more,” said Professor  Sherwood.
  “Rises in global average temperatures of this magnitude will have  profound impacts on the world and the economies of many countries if we  don’t urgently curb our emissions.” 
  
Tim Radford is a reporter for Climate News Network. Climate News Network is  a news service led by four veteran British environmental reporters and  broadcasters. It delivers news and commentary about climate change for  free to media outlets worldwide.