ilmasto ilmakehä valtameri aurinko pilvi albedo

…which gives me 3 results, that’s not much but still better than zero. Albedo may be replaced with the finnish word for reflectivity, “heijastavuus” or “heijastuyskyky”, but with both of those the number of hits drops to 2.

Yes. My post above goes through some of the problems there. I think Google has gone a bit too far in what they consider to be “scholar” documents.

It is interesting that your search still results in 14700 papers while I got far larger number. It is possible that Google Scholar returns different results for different locations.

climate atmosphere ocean sun cloud albedo

About 14,700 results
Page 2 of about 15,300 results
Page 3 of about 15,500 results
Page 4 of about 15,700 results
Page 5 of about 15,700 results
Page 6 of about 15,800 results
Page 7 of about 15,800 results
Page 8 of about 15,800 results
Page 9 of about 15,900 results
Page 10 of about 15,900 results

climatique atmosphère océan soleil nuages albédo

About 538 results
Page 2 of about 514 results
Page 3 of about 521 results
Page 4 of about 525 results
Page 5 of about 528 results
Page 6 of about 521 results
Page 7 of about 523 results
Page 8 of about 525 results
Page 9 of about 526 results
Page 10 of about 510 results

Климат атмосферу океан солнце альбедо облаков

About 180 results
Page 2 of about 187 results
Page 3 of about 190 results
Page 4 of about 190 results
Page 5 of about 189 results
Page 6 of about 189 results
Page 7 of about 190 results
Page 8 of about 190 results
Page 9 of about 191 results
Page 10 of about 191 results
Page 14 of 192 results
Page 18 of 192 results
Page 19 of 192 results

I also notice that the Google Scholar results are only an indication of scientific papers. For example, the last page of Russian results includes:
Чудо Корана — Х Яхья, А Октар, H Yahya – books.google.com
Home> Фотодизайн> Современные системы закаливания. Плюсы и минусы — СВ Попов – referats.net
Современные системы закаливания. Плюсы и минусы — СВ Попов – referatcollection.ru
История неба — К Иванов – Логос, 2003 – magazines.russ.ru
Проектирование и реализация профессионально-ориентированной системы обучения в профильной школе — ТЕ Лапшина – 2005 – dl1.lib.ua-ru.net
Без пощады — А Зорич – books.google.com
(The last hit appears to be a science fiction novel. Chapter 1 is set in a prisoner of war camp on the planet Glagol in an unknown system in February 2622.)

climate atmosphere ocean sun cloud albedo 18900
Klima Atmosphäre Ocean Sun Wolkenalbedo 3
(Klima Atmosphäre ozean sonne Wolkenalbedo 24)
climatique atmosphère Ocean Sun albédo des nuages 126
(climatique atmosphère océan soleil albédo des nuages 541)
(climatique atmosphère océan soleil albédo 730 – “albedo des nuages means cloud albedo”)
Климат атмосферу океан солнце альбедо облаков 225

There are some differences. Some of it might have to do with taking the result in different times.

Bill, as you already mentioned yourself, your search highlights some problems with this kind of approach. Google Translator has only limited abilities to translate different languages. This becomes more of a problem when you use more complex search terms (I have experimented with some myself, but not so complex you did). For example the Finnish search you did has one wrong word that you don’t expect to find in climate related papers – the “ilmapiiri” can be used as a translation of atmosphere but only if you describe what kind of feeling you have among your friends or in some other group of humans. Correct translation would be “ilmakehä”. Changing this would give you 3 search results instead of 0.

There’s lot of interesting stuff you can do with Google Scholar. For example long time ago I checked the situation on temporal distirbution of “climate change” vs. “global warming” usage in scientific papers. Result of this is used in Skeptical Science’s rebuttal of the argument “they changed the name from global warming to climate change”. It’s this one:

climate atmosphere ocean sun cloud albedo — 14700
Klima Atmosphäre Ocean Sun Wolkenalbedo — 7
climatique atmosphère Ocean Sun albédo des nuages — 126
ilmasto ilmapiiri valtameri aurinko pilvi albedo — 0
Климат атмосферу океан солнце альбедо облаков — 180

I cheated by changing the Google Translate result for Russian, which was Климат атмосферу Ocean Sun альбедо облаков. A similar change for the German and French versions would probably affect the search results.