For three decades, the climate establishment has treated clouds as an annoying footnote, a "source of uncertainty" to be scrubbed away, a rounding error in models built around carbon dioxide. But a growing body of work says the opposite. Clouds are not the noise in the climate system. They are the engine, and CO2 is the passenger.
The implications are not academic. If clouds drive warming and cooling, then the entire edifice of carbon regulation, carbon taxes, and carbon guilt rests on a foundation that doesn't actually do what is claimed. This is vital information for political parties like One Nation.
Start with the embarrassing fact the models themselves admit. The CMIP5 and CMIP6 climate models, the ones the UN globalist IPCC relies on, systematically fail to reproduce observed mid-tropospheric temperatures. The failure is worst in the tropics, exactly where the greenhouse effect is supposed to be most pronounced.
That is not a minor discrepancy. It is the models getting the signature region of their own theory wrong. The IPCC's own latest report lists the proposed excuses: too much weight on CO2's warming effect, anomalous cloud feedback, or bad weather balloon data. But as May and Mulholland note (link below), "no one really knows why they are so poor at reproducing tropospheric temperature profiles."
No one knows. That is the state of the science at the heart of the most expensive policy project in human history. The Australian economy is threatened by just that!
To understand why the tropical failure matters so much, you have to understand what the greenhouse theory predicts and what the atmosphere actually shows.
The theory says that if CO2 is the dominant driver, the warming should follow a specific pattern. The tropics should develop a pronounced "hot spot," a region of elevated warming in the upper troposphere, roughly 8 to 12 kilometres up, where the enhanced greenhouse effect should be most visible. This hot spot is not a minor detail of the theory. It is the fingerprint of CO2-driven warming. Every mainstream model produces it. Every model run that doubles CO2 generates a tropical upper-troposphere that warms faster than the surface.
The problem is that the hot spot is not there.
Decades of weather balloon and satellite measurements show no such amplified warming in the tropical upper troposphere. The observations show the surface and lower atmosphere warming modestly, while the upper troposphere warms in line with the surface or even less, not the dramatic amplification the models predict. This mismatch is the single most important discrepancy in all of climate science, and it has been documented repeatedly, by researchers like McKitrick and Christy and others, across multiple data sources and multiple decades.
If CO2 were doing what the models say it does, the hot spot would exist. It does not. That is not a measurement error. It is a failure of the theory, and the field has spent twenty years trying to explain it away rather than confront it.
The new modelings work by Andy May and Philip Mulholland (linked below) is worth reading carefully, because it is not a rhetorical attack. It is an honest attempt to build a physical model of the troposphere from first principles and it succeeds in a way that quietly undermines the CO2 story.
Their approach divides the troposphere at what they call the "molar density intersection," an altitude where the air transitions from a moist, water-vapour-dominated regime to a dry, radiatively-dominated one. Below this intersection, the troposphere can be modelled almost perfectly using just three variables: surface temperature, lapse rate, and dew point depression.
Here is the key sentence in the entire post, buried in the methods section:
"No explicit CO2 term appears in the DPAH equations."
Let that land. The lower troposphere, the part of the atmosphere where weather happens and where most of the greenhouse effect is supposed to operate, can be reproduced to better than 98% accuracy using surface conditions and water vapour dynamics. No CO2. No greenhouse gas concentration. No radiative forcing term.
The authors are careful and honest about what this means. They explicitly state that the absence of a CO2 term is "a property of the chosen functional form" and "does not constitute a measurement of the radiative contribution of CO2." That is exactly the kind of caveat a serious scientist makes. But the implication is unavoidable: water vapour is doing the work below the intersection, and the models that obsess over CO2 are looking at the wrong variable.
Above the intersection, the picture changes. The air is bone-dry, specific humidity drops to around 0.03 g/kg; essentially all water vapor has been deposited onto ice crystals. In that regime, the moist-adiabatic framework breaks down, and the authors need a different model.
Their upper-troposphere model requires seven free parameters to fit the data, and the authors admit it is "more an exercise in curve fitting than a physical model." Seven parameters, several of which they acknowledge may have "little physical meaning." This is not a physical theory of CO2-driven warming. It is a confession that the upper troposphere is complex, multi-process, and not captured by any simple greenhouse model.
The honest conclusion they reach: below the intersection, water vapour dominates and CO2 does not appear. Above it, the processes are so tangled that no clean low-parameter model exists at all. Neither finding supports the tidy story that CO2 is the master dial on the climate.
The companion study covered by Natural News (linked below) pushes the argument further. If the May-Mulholland work shows that water vapour, not CO2, drives the lower troposphere, the cloud research shows that cloud cover is the principal control on how much solar energy reaches the surface in the first place.
The findings are stark. Satellite and surface measurements show that shrinking cloud cover, not CO2 drives a large share of recent surface heating. Storm-cloud zones have been contracting 1.5 to 3 percent annually since 2000. Satellite data shows a nearly 3 percent drop in cloud reflectivity per decade since 2003. And the same cloud-solar mechanism appears to explain past warm periods in the paleoclimate record, not just modern warming.
This is the part mainstream climate science has the hardest time with, because it flips the causality. The establishment treats clouds as a feedback, something that responds to temperature changes caused by CO2. The new work treats clouds as a forcing, something that changes on its own, driven by solar and ocean processes, and drags temperature along with it. The difference matters enormously, and it is worth explaining plainly.
Feedback vs. Forcing
Imagine a thermostat in a house. The thermostat setting is the forcing. The way the furnace responds to the temperature is the feedback.
If you turn the thermostat up, the temperature rises, and then the furnace, the feedback, responds to that change. The key point is that the feedback follows the forcing. It amplifies or dampens what the forcing started, but it does not start anything on its own.
Now apply this to climate. The mainstream story treats CO2 as the forcing, the thermostat setting. You turn it up, the temperature rises, and then the feedbacks kick in: water vapour increases, clouds change, and these either amplify or dampen the CO2 warming. In this view, clouds are purely reactive. They cannot cause warming; they can only respond to it.
The cloud-solar story is the opposite. It treats clouds as the forcing, the thermostat setting itself. In this view, cloud cover changes on its own, driven by solar cycles, ocean oscillations, and atmospheric circulation patterns that have nothing to do with CO2. When clouds thin, more sunlight reaches the surface, and the planet warms. When clouds thicken, less sunlight gets through, and the planet cools. The temperature follows the clouds, not the other way around.
Why does this distinction matter so much? Because it determines whether reducing CO2 can do anything at all. If CO2 is the forcing, then cutting emissions turns the thermostat back down, and the feedbacks follow. Policy works. Carbon taxes make sense. Net zero is a rational goal.
But if clouds are the forcing, then CO2 is at best a minor feedback, a small response to temperature changes driven by something else. And if that is true, no amount of carbon reduction will meaningfully control the climate, because you cannot control the clouds. You cannot legislate the sun. You cannot tax a natural cloud cycle into submission.
The entire policy apparatus rests on CO2 being the thermostat. The cloud evidence says CO2 is, at most, a dial on the furnace, and the thermostat is in the sky, where no parliament can reach it.
Clouds have been the acknowledged Achilles heel of climate modelings from the beginning. The models cannot simulate clouds well. They are too small, too complex, too chaotic to resolve at the grid scales the models use. So, the models parameterise them, which means they guess. And the guesses are systematically wrong. A NASA multi-satellite experiment found that clouds cool the planet more than they heat it, contradicting the assumptions baked into many models.
Cloud feedback is, by the admission of the field itself, "the most uncertain of the individual feedback gains in climate models, and there is no direct experimental evidence one way or the other." Thus, the central variable in the climate system, the thing that controls how much sunlight reaches the surface, is the thing the models are least able to represent. And the models built on those guesses are then used to justify dismantling the energy infrastructure of the West.
The picture that emerges from this work is coherent and, frankly, more elegant than the CO2 story. The sun heats the planet. Clouds modulate how much of that heat reaches the surface. Water vapour controls how heat moves through the lower atmosphere. Natural variation in cloud cover, driven by solar cycles, ocean cycles, and atmospheric circulation, produces warming and cooling on timescales from decades to millennia. CO2 plays a role, but a smaller one than claimed, and possibly a negligible one in the region where the models are most confident.
This is not a fringe position. It is the conclusion that follows from taking the model failures seriously instead of explaining them away. McKitrick and Christy, Po-Chedley, and others have documented for years that the models overstate tropospheric warming. The May-Mulholland work shows why: the models overemphasise the greenhouse effect and underemphasise water vapour and cloud dynamics.
The tragedy is that this is knowable, and increasingly known, and yet the policy machine rolls on as if nothing has changed. Carbon taxes. Net-zero mandates. The deindustrialisation of entire economies. All of it justified by models that cannot reproduce the observed atmosphere, built on cloud physics that the field itself admits it does not understand. The problem is that those who oppose zero net don't know much science and conservatives in politics generally don't have science backgrounds. So really important questions like this don't get considered. Mainstream scientists come mainly from the Left, so it is an uphill battle for the truth.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/08/04/modeling-the-troposphere/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2026-08-14-study-modern-past-global-warming-cloud-cover-changes.html