On 12/13/2014 10:42 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 LizR <[email protected] <mailto:[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,
It's more effective as a greenhouse gas. But it's not more important than CO2 because it
tracks ocean surface temperature. Burning fossil fuel puts lots of water vapor into the
atmosphere too, but it condenses out before it rises to heights from which IR can escape
directly to space.
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.
Citation?
Brent
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