Clouds

Most clouds are formed within the first 2 km of the atmosphere. We can see this from the diagram below (source), with the 3rd chart: 'cloud thickness, km', which plots altitude (y-axis) against percentage occurence. Having reached a height of only 2km cloud cover has fallen to only about 6%.

Percentage of occurrence of the
(a) cloud base altitude,
(b) cloud top altitude, and
(c) cloud thickness
- observed during different seasons over Gadanki. Altitude bin size is 500 m.

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From the data above we draw several conclusions:

1. We already know that, at low altitudes water vapour predominates as the 'greenhouse gas'. At surface level, for example, carbon dioxide can be only 0.04% of the atmosphere, but water vapour may be as much as 4% (over equatorial oceans). In this example, water vapour is 100 times more prevalent than carbon dioxide.
2. If follows that most of a greenhouse gas effect must be close to the surface and be due to water vapour
3. At under 1km altitude water vapour begins to condense out as cloud. Most of it has condensed out by 2km.
4. When the altitude reaches the tropopause (beginning at about 10km) nearly all the water vapour has condensed out as cloud.
5. So nearly all of the greenhouse gas effect is done by 10km
6. As well water vapour falling off, the actual atmospheric density thins considerably. By about 26km there's hardly any atmosphere left!
   
7. This refutes the trick of the greenhouse gas model, which has been used in one form or another, since 1967. In that model a hypothetical change in the balance of radiation at the top of the troposphere (some where about 10 to 16km up - depending on where one is at the equator), is somehow projected to the surface!! Despite:
   • increasing atmospheric density as downwelling longwave radiation, DLWR, approaches the surface from the tropopause, meaning that downwards radiation, DLWR, is absorned before the projected change can happen. So the model has no agency through which change at the surface can be effected by what happens above.
   • The increasing temperature of the atmosphere as DLWR gets closer to the surface; which means that the effect it can have is entirely swamped by the more energetic (higher temperature) air below it.

Previously Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. @NikolovScience ( 5h5 hours ago)

A totally backward understanding of the role of clouds in #ClimateChange by CarbonBrief

"A new study helps unravel one of the biggest uncertainties for scientists making climate change projections – how clouds will be affected as the Earth’s warms up."

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Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. @NikolovScience

Clouds do NOT change in response to warming. Instead, #climate warms in response to a decrease of global cloud cover/albedo. Why is it so difficult to grasp this simple fact?

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Joh A @Latebird2013 ()https://twitter.com/Latebird2013/status/1153091156881883136

Replying to @hoffballs @NikolovScience

• Changes in Earth’s Energy Budget during and after the “Pause” in Global Warming: An Observational Perspective, 2018
• Cloud Feedback Key to Marine Heatwave off Baja California, 2018
• Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget, 2002
• Decreasing cloud cover drives the recent mass loss on the Greenland Ice Sheet, 2017
• Late Twentieth-Century Warming and Variations in Cloud Cover, 2014