I recently read an article called “Climate models underestimate global warming by exaggerating cloud brightening.” The article spoke of how our current climate models were likely inaccurate, for they didn’t account for the changing color of our clouds. To elaborate on this, our current models for climate change show clouds to be brighter than they actually will be. As stated by the article, “As the atmosphere warms, clouds become increasingly composed of liquid rather than ice, making them brighter. Because liquid clouds reflect more sunlight back to space than ice clouds, this "cloud phase feedback" acts as a brake on global warming in climate models.” When researchers went back and corrected the incorrect brightness of the models’ clouds, they found that “the climate sensitivity increased from 4 degrees C in the default model to 5-5.3 degrees C in versions that were modified to bring liquid and ice amounts into closer agreement with observations.” This common mistake in our current models on climate change has proven to have quite a drastic effect on the predicted change in global temperature of an entire degree Celsius. Overall, this group of researches found that the incorrect information on the “stabilizing cloud feedback” led, consequently, to the acquisition of incorrect information on the change in temperature in the world, and we are in even more trouble than we previously thought.
This article is extremely relevant to our society today. Global warming is an issue we try to prevent every day. In my opinion, nothing is scarier than the idea of Earth itself becoming uninhabitable. As we near this doomsday, we begin to consider how we might stop it from happening. This article shows us that this point of destruction is coming at us at a faster rate than we previously thought. Not only is this very relevant to our lives, but it also gives us somewhat of a call to action. Our planet is decaying, and we need to do something to stop that. Some efforts have been made to stop this process, like reducing, reusing, and recycling, but that is not enough. We need to use more alternative sources of energy, like solar and wind power. Above all, no matter what we do, we need to do it now, because we don’t have much time to wait.
This article had its ups and downs. One reason I liked it was that it provided a stunning new piece of information about the increasing temperature of our planet. Also, it informed me more about the topic of “stabilizing cloud feedback.” This was something I had never heard of before, and I am now able to have a better grasp of how cloud color relates to temperature, and thus the state of matter of H2O. Though there were many positive sides to this article, there were also some things I didn’t like. For instance, at times, I found the article extremely confusing, and much of it sounded like environmental jargon: “Using a state-of-the-art climate model, the researchers modified parameters to bring the relative amounts of liquid and ice in clouds into agreement with clouds observed in nature. Correcting the bias led to a weaker cloud phase feedback and greater warming in response to carbon dioxide.” Statements like these confused me greatly, and made me less willing to go on with my reading. If i could give one suggestion to the author of this article, it would be to eliminate this type of speak and give a layman’s version of these confusing details. On the whole, however, I loved the article and found it very informative.
Citation:
"Climate Models Underestimate Global Warming by Exaggerating Cloud Brightening." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
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