Cloudy outlook for climate models More aerosols - the solution
to global warming? Climate models appear to be missing an
atmospheric ingredient, a new study suggests. December's issue
of the International Journal of Climatology from the Royal
Meteorlogical Society contains a study of computer models used
in climate forecasting. The study is by joint authors Douglass,
Christy, Pearson, and Singer - of whom only the third mentioned
is not entitled to the prefix Professor. Their topic is the
discrepancy between troposphere observations from 1979 and 2004,
and what computer models have to say about the temperature
trends over the same period. While focusing on tropical
latitudes between 30 degrees north and south (mostly to 20
degrees N and S), because, they write - "much of the Earth's
global mean temperature variability originates in the tropics" -
the authors nevertheless crunched through an unprecedented
amount of historical and computational data in making their
comparison. For observational data they make u