TROPICAL clouds could put the brakes on global warming, an American
researcher claims. He says existing climate models have missed the effect.
Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied 20
months of observations from the Japanese GMS-5 geostationary satellite, which
monitors a vast region of the Pacific from Australia to Asia. He and colleagues
from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington DC found a strong
relationship between the sea surface temperature and the size of an area covered
by cloud or moist air. For every 1 °C of warming at the sea surface, there
was a 15…
