Hortlund: Clear night: cold
Cloudy night: warm
True. But cloudless hotter day/colder night may have the same average temperature as cloudy cooler day/warmer night.
Actually, this is an issue very indicative of how much confusion is there.
It's not necessarily the water "clouds" that trap all the heat. Water molecules - which occasionally form clouds - act as heat-traping greenhouse gasses even in vapor form, not just as droplets.
Some confuse "less clouds" with "less water" in the athmosphere or just do not differentiate between water and cloud effects. The absense of the clouds does not always mean athmosphere is devoid of water. It may be in an oversaturated state ready to form clouds.
A plane makes pre-existing water condence but does not create water up there in significant amounts.
Anyway, a particluar cloud can have both cooling or warming effects depending on its properties but on average for the all the clouds around the globe, cooling predominates.
Which is natural, since temperartue raise causes more water to evaporate. That causes even more green-house effect, and so on untill all the water is evaporated - which is not the case. The positive feedback is obviously broken - by the fact that water condensed as clouds reflects heat more than it retains it due to green-house effect.
Maybe we should acknowledge the fact that "those scientists" knows a hell of a lot more about this than us and leave it at that?
Maybe we should - if we only knew which ones know the facts, which ones are mistaken and which ones are pushing some radical political agenda regardless of the facts.
When scientists are experimenting out of sight in their laboratories - I will gladly let them be.
But once they start issuing political dictates that affect our lives drastically and change radically every few years to contradict the earlier "facts" - that makes them no more trustworthy than politicians.
If a scientist is so right, why aren't his ideas making money for someone in the private sector where any idia survives on its merits?
Why are they pushing ideas through government politics?
Just because a guy thinks he knows something about upper athmosphere, that does not mean he knows squat about how to deal with a global climate change - or the upper athmosphere, for that matter.
We are told that the "ozone hole" over Antarctic is caused by global warming while the incidences of that hole correspond to unusial coolings in the area.
Academic scientists are notably ignorant in economics - which causes them discard some ideas. They would demand that humanity reduce our numbers to a fraction living in squalor when a simple and cheap solution would be to deal with the consequences rather than prevent them.
The drastic increase in incidence of skin cancers in the last 50 years is not caused by athmospheric changes nearly as much as it is caused by clothes that show more skin and the fasion for tanned look.
It would be far cheaper to tell people to cover their skin than to increase ozone in the athmosphere even if it was reduced.
miko
