CEI and WUWT attack the messengers, and the strange role of Judith Curry and Peter Webster

Deniers get very excited when they get their grubby paws on private emails between scientists. It doesn't matter what is written in those emails. The very fact that academics have been using email to communicate from a time before most people had heard of the Internet is sufficient for them to claim that climate science is a hoax.

Yesterday Anthony Watts posted some emails released through yet another FOI demand by Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) (archived here). They were related to the support from some scientists of a RICO investigation, proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, into fossil fuel companies and other organisations who have allegedly "knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change". The emails contain nothing that shows anything more than the very real concern by scientists that there are wicked people who are trying to thwart efforts to mitigate global warming. That there are evil people in the world who have been knowingly working to deceive the public by by saying that global warming either doesn't exist or is not dangerous. They've even got some people believing that climate science is a hoax.

Anthony Watts of WUWT is one of the low-level tools used by anti-mitigation activist organisations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that wish harm on the world.

Reflections from surface and clouds - is there an albedo expert in the house?

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is a mite upset (archived here, latest here) because scientists aren't telling him he's right. In fact, they aren't telling him anything at all. And few of the readers at WUWT are helping him out, though a number are encouraging him with "scientists don't know nuffin'" comments.

Warnings - This article is long and meanders a bit - I have to call a halt at some point. This is just a blog article after all :) If you are looking for definitive answers about albedo, you won't find them. What you will get are some of the interesting bits and pieces I discovered as I went looking. There's no guarantee I've got it all right, either. This is something I've not explored in depth before now. So feel free to quibble in the comments.

Back to Willis Eschenbach. He thinks he's found a problem with a chart in a paper by Graeme Stephens of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (and elsewhere), and colleagues. The paper is about planetary albedo, which is the the fraction of the incoming solar energy scattered by Earth back to space. It's not a bad introduction to the subject, with some caveats as you'll see. The authors make two main points, as described in the abstract:

1. the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (NH, SH) reflect the same amount of sunlight within ~ 0.2Wm 2. This symmetry is achieved by increased reflection from SH clouds offsetting precisely the greater reflection from the NH land masses. 
2. The albedo of Earth appears to be highly buffered on hemispheric and global scales as highlighted by both the hemispheric symmetry and a remarkably small interannual variability of reflected solar flux (~0.2% of the annual mean flux).