On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > The point is that none of these previous events involved such rapid > change as we're seeing now, but even if they did, so what? We know what's > going on, it isn't hard to monitor. We've known how the greenhouse effect > works for more than 2 centuries, we can measure the amount of carbon > dioxide in the atmosphere, we know it's gone up just over 40% since the > industrial revolution, we have a reasonable model of the likely results >
We can't even answer very basic questions about our planet's climate. Clouds are what determines how much of the sun's energy gets reflected back into space and how much is retained to drive the planet's weather machine, so will increasing temperature cause more clouds or less? If all things are the same (and they're not see below) increasing air temperature will cause more water to evaporate into the air from the seas, but higher temperature also means the air can hold more water until clouds must form. And although you'd never know it by listening to environmentalists, water vapor (but not liquid water droplets or ice particles) is by far the most important greenhouse gas, vastly more important than CO2, and unlike CO2 water undergoes phase changes from gas to liquid to solid and that makes it enormously more complicated to figure out than CO2. And everybody talks about global warming but there is something else going on too, global dimming. For reasons that are not clearly understood but may be related to clouds, at any given temperature it takes longer now for water to evaporate than it did 50 years ago. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
