Followup: More thoughts about climate science policies regarding water vapor. The fundamental presumption is that the total effective greenhouse warming power of water vapor cannot expand at a rate faster than the growth of warming generated, on balance, by all of the other agencies that have a forcing effect on global temperatures. The powers of those agencies, as opposed to water vapor can all be independently monitored with varying degrees of accuracy. They are expressed in terms of watts per square meter, with error bars indicating a range of uncertainty added on. It is widely recognized that each net increase of one watt per square meter, as actually measured, will result in a gain of approximately 3/4 of one degree C in mean average global temperature at the time of equilibrium several hundred years into the future. (About 60% of the final warming should be felt and recorded in the air in the near term, with supplements added throughout the long waiting period.)
The graph shown in yesterday’s letter, now a few years out of date, contains an estimate of 2.29 watts per square meter for the end result of warming already in place, with a substantial range of uncertainty added in both directions. Most of the uncertainty is attributed to doubts about the effect changes in cloud cover will have in coming centuries. Many researchers are actively pursuing this issue, generating some startling results from their models along with a great deal of controversy. Nothing of the sort is going on with respect to water vapor, just dead silence, because water vapor has been put to bed with the understanding that its ongoing effects, regardless of how powerful, will always be at a rate of change proportional to whatever effects come about through the actions of carbon dioxide, allowing them to be combined as a unity. This relationship is not being questioned. It exists as a great convenience to the climate modeling community, which already has its hands full with the cloud problem. But does that make it true? My thought runs along the line that if water vapor actually has a life of its own, or is found to be partly under the influence of phenomena that are not included in the table of forcing, the current policy toward it would not be justified. Water vapor would then have to be treated more like cloud cover, which is indeed subject to all sorts of outside phenomena, leading to all kinds of new uncertainties, on a scale potentially much too large to ignore.
Adding water vapor’s effects to carbon dioxide alone, instead of spreading them out over all the forcing agents, was always a questionable idea, just because there is no evidence at all for any such tight linkage. Water vapor increases can be properly linked to the warming of ocean surfaces, and to watery surfaces everywhere else, but these are the result of warming due to the combination of all forcings—including cloud cover (!)—not just CO2. Stopping CO2 in its tracks, which would indeed be of great value, would not necessarily stop the others. But that is not the real concern. The real concern is over whether or not water vapor has a life of its own. This boils down to a simple question: Is the amount of water vapor held within the air in fact determined by the temperature of the air? Climate science says yes, based in large part on something called the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which is said to govern the behavior of all condensable gases. You can look it up and then imagine why it is so difficult to explain, or to be proven inviolable in all situations.
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If you have been reading these letters in recent months, or if you have been following my guidelines for investigating the large temperature anomalies that appear every day in the weather maps, you know where this is going. As for the “laws” governing condensable gases, maybe they really do work at ground level, but what happens when gases have risen a few miles high in the atmosphere, where temperatures are much, much colder, and they have still not condensed, or may yet have occasion to do so at that altitude? What laws of nature, if any, are we best able to rely upon? This week has been difficult for me, but now I’ve said what I had to say about climate science. Next week we’ll start looking at the maps again.
Carl