Albedo

Number of papers: 5

Clouds independently appear to have as much or greater effect than man-made CO2 on radiative forcing — World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, 2022; Michael Jonas

“The patterns of behaviour of clouds, both for cloud area and cloud optical thickness, are studied over the period of available data, 1983 to 2017. There was a decrease in cloud cover over the study period, while global surface temperatures increased. The patterns of clouds and temperature indicate that the cloud cover decrease could not have been caused by the increased surface temperature. The clear implication is that the decrease in global cloud area must have been caused by some other unspecified factor, and was not caused directly or indirectly by CO2.”

Analyzing changes in the complexity of climate in the last four decades using MERRA-2 radiation data — Nature Scientific Reports, 2020; Delgado-Bonal et al.

This extremely technical NASA paper looks at 4 decades of cloud data, suggesting that clouds are a key driver of climate, because a tiny increase in cloud cover can have a huge cooling effect. “Our research supports the idea that clouds and albedo, which ultimately determine the SW radiation, are variables of the utmost importance for current climate change, in agreement with previous research about the changes in stratocumulus or energy imbalance in the last four decades for example. An increase in cloud coverage of 0.1 would, on average, lead to a 7% increase in spectrally integrated global average reflectance of shortwave radiation.”

The changing nature of Earth's reflected sunlight — Proceedings of the Royal Society, 2022; Stephens et al.

This paper claims that recent warming is from slightly reduced albedo, not greenhouse forcing: “As in other recent studies, we find that by far the largest contribution to the increasing rate of change of earth’s energy imbalance is from an increase in net absorption of solar energy by the planet that has occurred over the past two decades due to reductions in the amount of solar radiation reflected to space by Earth. We cannot say if these changes in reflected sunlight are unprecedented given they are small within the context of the historical changes that must have occurred over Earth's history. Although small in that context, the changes are both statistically significant at the 95% confidence level and profound.”

Surface Albedo Feedback, Seasonal Heat Storage and Meridional Heat Transport Determine the Seasonality of Recent Warming in Antarctica — JGR Atmospheres, 2024; Haijin Dai

“1) Local radiative feedback and remote forcing warm the polar region of Southern Hemisphere, although additional energy is stored in the ocean. 2) Seasonal warming in Antarctica is mainly determined by anomalies in solar radiation, seasonal heat storage and meridional heat transport. 3) Stronger (weaker) eddy activity increases (decreases) poleward meridional heat transport and warms (cools) Antarctica in most months (June)”

Earth's Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured From Earthshine — Geophysical Research Letters, 2021; Goode et al.

“We measure a gradual, but climatologically significant 0.5 decline in the global albedo over the two decades of data. We found no correlation between the changes in the terrestrial albedo and measures of solar activity. The inter-annual pattern of earthshine fluctuations are in good agreement with those measured by CERES (data began in 2001) even though the satellite observations are sensitive to retroflected light while earthshine is sensitive to wide-angle reflectivity. The CERES decline is about twice that of earthshine.”