Earth’s clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

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By Paul Voosen, Science. 

Excerpt: For more than 20 years, NASA instruments in space have tracked a growing imbalance in Earth’s solar energy budget, with more energy entering than leaving the planet. Much of that imbalance can be pinned on humanity’s greenhouse gases emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere. But explaining the rest has been a challenge. ...George Tselioudis, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies ...and his colleagues now think they can explain the growing gap with evidence collected by a remarkably long-lived [Terra] satellite. They find that the world’s reflective cloud cover has shrunk in the past 2 decades by a small but tangible degree, allowing more light in and boosting global warming. ...Tselioudis ...presented the work last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Climate scientists now need to figure out what’s causing these cloud changes ...whether the trend is a feedback of climate change that might accelerate warming into the future.... ...the team [with] NASA’s Terra, ...found ...cloud coverage falling by about 1.5% per decade.... 

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