Self-Regulation by Clouds

On a typical spring day at latitude 30°N, our TEP2 program tells us that the formation of high clouds will tend to warm the Earth's surface by 38°C, while the formation of thick clouds will tend to cool the Earth's surface by 96°C.

Over the past few weeks here in Boston, the warmest days have been those with high, thin clouds, and the coolest have been those with low, thick clouds. But the difference between the warm days and the cold days is only 10°C. Despite alternating clouds, rain, and sunshine, the temperature at a particular location anywhere in the world is almost always within 10°C of its monthly average at mid-day, and these monthly averages vary by less than 1°C from one year to the next.

How can it be that the Earth's surface temperature remains so stable when clouds have such tremendous power to heat and cool the surface? Some kind of self-regulation of cloud formation and evaporation must be taking place. Indeed, at first glance it seems to us that warmth will promote evaporation from the oceans and lead to the formation of the low, thick clouds that cool the Earth, while cold will suppress evaporation, encourage atmospheric convection, and lead to the formation of the high, thin clouds that warm the Earth. So each type of cloud tends to promote the formation of the other, which is a basis for self-regulation.

An example of self-regulation is the action of a thermostat in a house's heating system. When the heater turns on, the house warms up. If the heater stays on, the house will get too hot. The thermostat turns off the heater when the house is warm enough. The house cools down. If the heater stays off, the house will get too cold. The thermostat turns on the heater when the house has cooled enough. The difference between the turn-on and turn-off temperatures is the hysteresis. The temperature half-way between is the set-point.

The heating system in our house can heat the inside to 30°C when the outside is at 0°C. With the heater off, the house will eventually cool to 0°C. But our house is always close to 20°C inside. That's because the set-point of our thermostat is 20°C and its hysteresis is only 1°C.

High clouds at latitude 30°N in spring would heat the Earth to 55°C if the day were long enough and no change to the high clouds took place. Thick clouds would cool the Earth to −79°C. But the mid-day temperature remains within ±5°C of 17°C. The set-point of cloud self-regulation is roughly 17°C and its hysteresis is 10°C. The self-regulation reduces a maximum possible variation of 134°C to an observed variation of 10°C. That's a factor of thirteen reduction through self-regulation.

Our TEP2 program tells us that if we double the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the Earth's surface will tend to warm up by 1.5°C. Given the strong self-regulation of warming and cooling by clouds, how much warming will we actually observe if we double the CO2 concentration? It may be that the self-regulation of clouds is entirely independent of the heat retained by extra CO2, so that doubling the CO2 will increase the average temperature of the Earth's surface by a full 1.5°C.

But cloud self-regulation is not independent of the heat absorbed by extra CO2. According to our calculations, doubling the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere causes the atmosphere to retain an additional 5.0 W/m² of heat. According to our typical atmospheric conditions, air close to the surface contains 1% water vapor, which amounts to roughly 10 g/m³. When this water condenses into water droplets, thus forming a cloud, the water vapor gives up 20 kJ/m³ of latent heat. If this condensation takes place over 1000 s (about fifteen minutes) in a column 1000 m high, it generates 20 kW/m², which is four thousand times the heat retained by our extra CO2. The heat retained by extra CO2 and the heat produced by condensation are exactly the same type of heat. They are indistinguishable. We think it likely, therefore, that cloud self-regulation will reduce the effect of extra CO2 in the same way that it reduces the effect of cloud variation: by a factor of thirteen. In that case, doubling CO2 concentration will warm up the world by only 0.1°C.

In the presence self-regulation, however, we cannot assume even that CO2 doubling will have a net warming effect. Our calculations show that the extra CO2 causes the heat to be retained mostly between altitudes 3 km and 6 km. In an earlier post we showed how turning on an electric heater in the same room as your home's thermostat will cause the the rest of the house to cool down. It could be that the heat retained by CO2, by virtue of being concentrated in the middle-troposphere, affects cloud self-regulation in such a way as to cause a slight cooling of the surface of the Earth below. Such an outcome seems unlikely, but it is possible.

Another possibility suggested by documents like this one is that the 1.5°C warming from CO2 doubling will in fact be amplified by the self-regulation of clouds, so that we see a 3°C or even 4°C warming due to CO2 doubling. We can think of no examples of such behavior by self-regulating systems, nor do we understand the arguments presented by climatologists who propose such amplification.

In future posts we hope to explore the sources of self-regulation by clouds, and perhaps construct a simple model to investigate how the average temperature of the self-regulated system will be affected by such things as CO2 concentration and the availability of water. Before that, however, we will test our climate model by applying it to day-night variations, and to the planet Venus.