The moon tells us climate scientists are full of it.

[rah]

al·be·do.
[alˈbēdō]

NOUN
1.
astronomy

the proportion of the incident light or radiation that is reflected by a surface, typically that of a planet or moon.

The Albedo of earth or IOW the amount of sunshine it reflects varies depending on the amount of snow and ice present on the globe at any one time. Winter in the Northern hemisphere would be a time of higher albedo because of the amount of snow and ice on land. Winter in the southern hemisphere will not effect the albedo as much because there is much more ocean in the southern hemisphere and thus less land mass for snow and ice to accumulate on.


Earthshine reflected off the moon shows no trend during the Pause

Earthshine reflected off the moon shows no trend during the Pause

About a third of the sunlight that hits Earth gets reflected back out to space mainly by clouds, ice or bare earth. A small change in this can make a big difference to the global energy balance. And the energy balance is kinda “everything” in the climate debate. So this new paper by Palle et al really ought to attract quite a bit of interest. But for lots of reasons real data was never going to provide much joy for most climate scientists.

The Crescent Moon, Looking at Earthshine.
Image of the moon taken by Bob King of Sky and Telescope.

The thing is, climate models predict that CO2 will cause warming, which will in turn cause ice to melt and the albedo to get smaller, which will cause more warming… it’s a positive feedback. So if albedo was shrinking during the last 2 decades, the Crisis Team could say the models were right about albedo, but then, golly, they were even more wrong about that warming that didn’t happen. On the other hand, if albedo was growing, they could add it to the list of excuses for The Pause and write headlines like: Global clouds increase — hiding the effect of CO2! But then skeptics could point out that if more CO2 causes more reflective clouds, the albedo may act as negative feedback — disaster averted.

But back to that data. One of the ways to measure albedo, can you believe, is to track Earthshine — the light that the Earth shines on the dark side of the moon. Obviously Earthshine is the lucky lotto-winning-light that reflects off Earth and hits the Moon, and then reflects back again to Earth again.

A new study by Palle puts together 16 years of data on this and finds there are big changes from year to year but overall there is no trend, which rather fits with The Pause.

Somehow, strangely, even though Life on Earth depends on calculating our Energy Balance, the golden river of climate gravy is not running through the land of Earthshine research. The researchers shifted from a meagre one telescope up to two in 2006. There’s a big gap in the global data in Figure 2 when that happened (see below). But even two telescopes are barely adequate. Palle et al estimate that with eight automatic robotic stations they could achieve 2 – 3 times the precision they have now. But while we can find funds to subsidize 225,000 wind towers, we can’t afford to do the proper basic research that might tell us whether we needed those 225,000 wind towers. Crony-renewables anyone?

If there is a crisis in our global energy balance, a lot of people don’t seem to be taking it seriously.