Water vapor confirmed as major player in climate change

Five points ignored above.

1. Currently, water vapor concentration is observed to be increasing in our atmosphere only below 4 km while decreasing above 4 kw. So in the upper tropophere (8 - 12 km), where the greenhouse effect is supposed to occur, water vapor is declining.

2. The above article ignores cloud formation which results from higher levels of water vapor; upper ice clouds are strong IR absorbers while low weather clouds are weaker IR absorbers but strong solar radiation blockers (negative feedback). The IPCC has suggested, without scientific proof, that warming increases upper clouds at the expense of the lower weather clouds. Dr Roy Spencer has shown, that in the tropics, warm low fronts cause the opposite effect to occur. Nine consecutive events all show that when the air warmed, both cloud types initially increased, but it is the upper clouds that start to decrease half way through the warming. In fact, they decrease to a point below their starting concentration only to return to the initial amount when the heating event had ended. This definitely suggests that mother nature is countering the warming with a negative feedback.

3. If one examines the ice core data, warming precedes CO2 increase and cooling precedes CO2 decline. This cast doubts on the theory of the greenhouse effect. It is a well established scientific fact that colder water traps greater amounts of CO2 than warmer water. If you pour cold soda into a warm glass, you get much fizz. Since this CO2 reservior (our oceans) far exceeds the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, warming our oceans will produce higher levels CO2 in the air. This is a major portion of the increase in CO2 today.

4. The whole idea of the greenhouse effect was countered 100 years ago by R. W. Wood. He showed that it is convection processes (warm air rising, cool air sinking) that dominates the heat removal budget from the surface of earth; convection is initiated by conduction on land and evaporation from our oceans. In fact, drawing on this experiment, I estimate that blackbody (IR) radiation accounts for less than 5% of the heat removal budget; probably about 2%. If this is so, than a small increase in a trace gas (CO2) will delay slightly only a small amount of the escaping heat. Maybe this is why no one has been able to detect much heating in the upper troposphere in the last 30 years. If the claimed (IPCC) 0.47 degrees gained at the surface is mostly agw, then according to their own model, the hot spot centered over the equator at 10 km height should haved warmed at least 1 degree C. However, less than 0.1 degree warming has occurred as measured by over 100 radiosonde weather balloons supported by 10,000s satelite measurements. This is a gross failure by NASA and IPCC to prove the greenhouse effect. This means that if the upper troposphere fails to warm substantially, then the CO2 greenhouse mechanism is only a very minor contributor to climate warming.

5. The idea that water vapor can amplify, by a factor of 2.5 to 5 times, the 1.5 degree maximum warming produced by CO2 is counter intuitive. If a gentle warming of 1 degree over a period greater than a century would cause an unending chain reaction; more CO2, more warming, more H20, more warming, more H20 and CO2, more warming, etc. If this were possible, why didn't our exit from the last ice age (a rise of 7 to 10 degrees in a few decades) trigger such an event. In addition, it should be noted that most past inter glacial periods where 2 to 3 degrees warmer than today's period.

6. Remember that CO2 is plant food; CO2 + H2O + solar radiation is what is involved in photosynthesis and plant building. Without the current increase in CO2, starvation would be far worse today. There is no ideal earth temperature; warm is better than cold. Mankind might fail to survive the next ice age. Interglacial periods last 10,000 to 20,000 years (most less than 15,000 years), while ice ages last about 100,000 years. Our current interglacial period is now approaching 11,000 years old. That is the danger we face.

p bartner 3/28/09

I agree with anonymous that it is absurd to reason that there is only positive feedbacks associated with anthropogenic CO2 and alleged resulting evaporation.

There is an inconsistency in Kyoto dogma.
In the Kyoto text, it states that water vapor results from a natural process, and besides it is too difficult to model. The bulk of CO2 is also produced from natural processes.

In the US/Boundary Waters Treaty and water apportionment agreement between the three Canadian prairie provinces, evaporation losses from reservoirs are considered anthropogenic and charged as a water use to the upstream jurisdiction. From regional evaporation charts, for the reservoirs in Canada I estimate annual water vapor loading of 2,600 megatonnes which does not include the probably considerable greater loading from evapotranspiration associted with irrigation. The anthropogenic CO2 loading currently attributed to Canada is about 950 megatonnes for a relatively minor greenhouse gas as compared to water vapor.

Don Farley Water Resources Engineer, Gatineau Quebec Canada
don.farley@sympatico.ca