In August, Texas A&M  U. atmospheric sciences professor Andrew Dessler’s work concerning clouds’ influence on climate change attracted media outlets not for its mainstream results, but for its direct criticism of an earlier paper.

“I looked at what effects clouds have on the overall energy of the planet and found that clouds cannot be causing climate change over the last 10 years,” Dessler said.

Roy Spencer, proclaimed skeptic of climate change and climatologist at U. Alabama-Huntsville, coauthored a paper that was published in July suggesting that clouds were the primary reason for temperature changes in the last decade.

“It is widely accepted in the climatology community that clouds play a very small role in climate change over short periods of time [such as a decade],” Dessler said. “Spencer’s paper suggested that there should be major revisions to climate change theory.”

Less than six weeks after Spencer published his paper, Dessler released his refute. Due to Dessler’s quick response, critics said his refutation is invalid because Dessler’s published his results too quickly.  Dessler said he knew about Spencer’s argument as early as last December, and started working on his own version in January.

“When Spencer’s paper came out, I looked at it and adjusted what I had already written,” Dessler said.

Because climate change is communicated as controversial within the media, both Spencer and Dessler received coverage.

“Every month, hundreds of papers come out that are either explicitly or implicitly in agreement with mainstream climate theory that humans are in the driver’s seat of the climate and that future warmings could be really large,” Dessler said. “And those papers don’t get any traction in the media. But then a handful of papers published every year by hard-core skeptics do get a lot of traction because there’s a huge sympathetic media for those papers.”

Dessler said Spencer’s paper received the media attraction because it falls under the category of “hard-core” skepticism.

Fox News picked up the story about Spencer’s paper, addressing the topic on its website.

“Has a central tenant of global warming just collapsed?” the story began, and continued, “the planet isn’t heating up, in other words.”

Dessler said someone needed to refute Spencer’s article because of the media traction it gained.

“It was necessary for me to write my paper because even though no scientists believe Spencer’s work, it was important to get a rebuttal out there so that policy makers wouldn’t be able to trumpet this,” Dessler said.

An article that appeared in Scientific American Magazine in early September compared the scientific validity in Spencer’s and Dessler’s works.

Although both scientists used the same data set, their approaches in data analysis varied, leading to differing outcomes.

Using data collected by a NASA satellite for Earth’s atmospheric and oceanic temperatures from 2000 to 2010, both climatologists calculated whether the atmosphere or the ocean had a more significant effect on the earth’s surface temperatures. They then fit their data to climate models.

“…[Spencer and colleagues] plotted only six [climate] models [from 14 total] and the particular observational data set that provided maximum support for their hypothesis. Plotting all of the models and all of the data provided a much different conclusion,” Dessler stated in his paper, which was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Oct. 1.

Dessler went on to show that it was ocean heat, from the El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillations, that influenced temperature evolution for the last decade, and that the ocean is 20 times more influential on climate change than clouds.

These oscillations represent cyclical changes in the southern Pacific Ocean’s surface temperatures that occur approximately every five years. El Niño means the warming of the water’s surface, and La Niña means the cooling.

Although Dessler said he believes Spencer’s paper holds no significance in the climatology community, he wrote his own as an outreach to ensure that the public does not get the wrong idea about climate change.

“Someone who is not in the trenches of this research could get the wrong idea,” Dessler said.