Reconciling Two New Cloud Feedback Papers Posted on 19 February
2013 by dana1981 The role of clouds as a climate feedback –
whether they amplify or dampen global warming, and by how much –
is one of the largest remaining uncertainties in climate
science. Climate contrarians will often invoke the cloud
feedback, claiming that they will dampen future global warming
so much that future climate change will be too small to worry
about. Dessler (2010) estimated the short-term cloud feedback
using measurements by the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy
System (CERES) instruments on NASA's Terra satellite from March
2000 to February 2010, finding that the net feedback is fairly
small, but most likely positive (amplifying global warming). Two
new papers on the subject are now out, An analysis of the short-
term cloud feedback using MODIS data by Zhou, Zelinka, Dessler,
and Yang, and Impact of dataset choice on calculations of the
short-term cloud feedback by Dessler and Loeb. As the titles
suggest, Zhou et al. use cl