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Surprise! Less cloud cover means more sun and heat.
Petter Tuvnes and Erik Bye
August 20, 2025
Note: Almost everyone knows this fact about the weather, except those promoting man-made global warming alarmism from the use of fossil fuels and “Greenhouse Gas Theory”. John Shanahan, civil engineer
Introduction
Who would have thought that less global cloud cover would lead to higher global temperatures? Not the UN climate panel IPCC, at least. It seems that many who support the IPCC are perplexed by the fact that global temperatures do not align with their climate models, particularly in relation to the development of CO2 emissions, a vital plant nutrient.
One of those who is surprised is Dr. Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA GISS in New York, a division of NASA that has been involved in climate research. An article by Dr. Schmidt was published in the journal Nature in 2024, “Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory,” and writes, among other things: “Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.” Dr. Schmidt speculates on ocean temperature changes (ENSO), less pollution, and volcanoes as causes of changes in global temperature. In reality, he is only asking for more money to do more research, since climate scientists loyal to the UN climate panel have no clue. In their reports, the IPCC has only dealt with the “solar constant” outside the Earth’s atmosphere and ignored the sun that reaches the Earth’s surface. The “solar constant” (TSI) outside the
atmosphere is solar radiation of about 1360-70 W/m2. The IPCC believes that clouds have a positive effect on global temperature, that more clouds give more warming and vice versa: “The sign of the net radiative feedback due to all cloud types is less certain but likely positive.” (IPCC report AR6, WG1, p. 574). This is only true at night, but the effect of fewer clouds and more sunshine on the Earth during the day is much stronger, something we have experienced over the past 40 years as the IPCC and their lackeys have made alarming climate predictions, which have failed.
The world-leading journal Science has published the realistic article by Goessling et al. (2024) “Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo” (paywall). The research establishes that lower albedo is an important contributing factor to the high global temperature in recent years. Albedo is the term for the reflection of short-wave solar radiation (sunshine) from clouds, particles in the air, and the Earth's surface with ice and snow, approximately. 30% of TSI. From the abstract of the article:
Abstract
«In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5 kelvin above the preindustrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17 kelvin. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers, including anthropogenic warming and the El Niño onset, fall short by about 0.2 kelvin in explaining the temperature rise. Using satellite and reanalysis data, we identified a record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap. The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a multiannual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will be crucial for assessing the present and expected future warming.»
The cloud cover has declined
The report shows that cloud cover has declined at the same time as global temperatures have risen in the years 2000–2023, a continuation of the previous trend. This is something climate realists have known for a long time, but what is new is that it may now be widely accepted.
The researcher Prof. Antero Ollila, Finland, who is also a member of the Norwegian Climate Realists' Scientific Council, has published an article entitled "The 2023 Record Temperatures" in the journal Science of Climate Change in 2024. He has used data from the NASA CERES satellite monitoring (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System), which measures cloud cover and electromagnetic radiation with different wavelengths in and out of the Earth. The Sun gives short-wave radiation (SW, short wave) to the Earth, while the Earth radiates long-wave (LW, long wave) heat radiation. CERES data is from 2001, but other satellites have data from 1982 (CM SAF). It turns out that global cloud cover has decreased by about 3-4 percentage points since 1982, while global temperature has increased during that time. The advanced climate models (GCM, general circulation models) are not able to model the effect of clouds, so Prof. Ollila has therefore used a simpler IPCC model and his own developed model.
Prof. Ollila's results are very consistent with the real development of global temperature, unlike the IPCC models. It turns out that radiation reaching the Earth that is absorbed (ASR, absorbed solar radiation) is modified by reflective cloud cover and particles in the air (aerosols).
Ollila is not alone in pointing this out. Others include Michael O Jonas (2022, in the article “Clouds independently appear to have as much or greater effect than man-made CO2 on radiative forcing” (wjarr.com) and Nelson & Nelson in "Decoupling CO2 from Climate Change".
The IPCC has the same data
The IPCC has the same data that these other researchers have used, but it has analyzed it irrationally. The researchers Dr. Nikolov & Dr. Zeller (N&Z)
have pointed this out in the article "Roles of Earth's Albedo..." (Geomatics2024 https://doi.org/10.3390/geomatics4030017 ). The IPCC has multiplied the change in data (anomaly) for outgoing reflected solar radiation by -1 (minus one), thereby reversing the trend and ignoring the result. N&Z shows that 100% of all warming since the year 2000 can be explained by decreasing cloud cover and changes in solar radiation. The "greenhouse effect" has had no measurable effect.
The figure is from the analysis of N&Z and shows changes (anomaly) in both global temperature (GSAT red curve) and absorbed solar radiation to the Earth's surface (ASR). Note that ASR is brought forward 5 months because ASR occurs first, and the GSAT change is a result of it.
The cause of the increase in the temperature?
The IPCC has claimed that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the cause of all the increase in global temperature since pre-industrial times (1750), coinciding with the end of the Little Ice Age in the 19th century. However, decreasing cloud cover may have already begun around 1818 according to Diodato et al (2024) “Downward Mediterranean Cloudiness BeyondLittle
Ice Age Background Variability.”
In addition to the IPCC ignoring decreasing cloud cover as a cause of increasing global temperature, researchers Soon et al. point out (together with climate realists prof. em. O. Humlum and prof. em. J-E. Solheim) that it is possible to explain global warming since the 19th century by the sun becoming somewhat stronger (increased TSI), ref. “Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850”.
The reason why clouds have not been focused on earlier is that observations over a long period of time are needed to see trends in climate variation (usually over 30). Annual changes reported in the media as climate change are misleading and really just weather change, and we know that the weather changes quickly and often. In addition, the climate models on which the IPCC is based (GCM) are not able to model cloud variations. No one has so far come up with a good explanation for why cloud cover has decreased, but the theories of Dr. Henrik Svensmark about radiation from the cosmos and the sun with varying nucleation in the atmosphere, verified at CERN, have been proposed.
NASA GISS is an important premise for the IPCC, and now it is time to reject what the IPCC has come up with so far about possible future catastrophic climate change, as the head of NASA GISS, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, admits that they don’t have a clue.
The time has come
The time has come to end all measures against "fossil" energy because emissions of plant CO2 have no measurable effect on either global temperature or climate. Measurable climate change is natural, and the only thing we can do is adapt with, among other things, better infrastructure against unusual weather, something former President Obama's science advisor Professor Koonin recommends in the book "Unsettled".