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Global warming

Clouds cooled the Earth

Nature Geoscience volume 9, pages 865–867 (2016)Cite this article

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The slow instrumental-record warming is consistent with lower-end climate sensitivity. Simulations and observations now show that changing sea surface temperature patterns could have affected cloudiness and thereby dampened the warming.

Climate scientists broadly agree that Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity — the global warming that occurs a long time after the atmospheric carbon dioxide has been doubled — is likely to be between 1.5 and 4.5 K. Estimates based on climate models often favour the upper end of the range1,2, whereas estimates based on instrumental-record warming tend to arrive at the lower end3,4. This apparent discrepancy is currently the subject of intense research efforts and a number of explanations have been proposed. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Zhou and colleagues5 show that the cloud response to a peculiar pattern of sea surface temperature warming could be the cause of the difference.

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Figure 1: Schematic of the proposed mechanism for increasing low-level cloudiness with observed non-uniform sea surface temperature pattern.

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  1. Thorsten Mauritsen is at the Max Planck Institut für Meteorologie, Bundesstrasse 53, 20146 Hamburg, Germany,

    Thorsten Mauritsen

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  1. Thorsten Mauritsen
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Correspondence to Thorsten Mauritsen.

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Mauritsen, T. Clouds cooled the Earth. Nature Geosci 9, 865–867 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2838

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