Climate Letter #1948

What is the purpose of Carl’s theory? As you probably know by now, it involves more than one specific theory. In science, a true theory springs from a radically new explanation of how nature really works, usually based on observations that were previously shrouded in mystery and are still in need of further verification. Broadly, Carl’s theory relates exclusively to the greenhouse energy effect of precipitable water (PW), but this effect can be broken down into several parts, each of which constitutes the makings, by definition, of a separate theory. The two main parts already identified can each be broken down into parts bringing separate theories into play. There is a potential third part, still in incubation, which may turn out to be too speculative to qualify as a true theory. Parts 1 and 2 are both ready for verification. They have been fully expressed in material found in these letters over the past year but could still benefit from more compact formatting—something I am unfortunately unable to promise.

So what about the purpose?  A bit of background may help.  Just over eight years ago, as a healthy 82 year-old with a lifelong interest in science, I picked a copy of James Hansen’s book, Storms of My Grandchildren, off the shelves of my local library and quickly got hooked.  Climate science was truly serious stuff, highly accessible to study, and deserved a much higher spot on my radar.  So practically all I’ve done for the last eight years has been to read everything I could lay my hands on about the workings of climate science, the dangers it exposed, potential mitigation pathways, and how humans were responding.  That led to the creation of Carl’s Climate Letters later in 2013, at first delivered only by email, in hopes of stirring up more interest, which back then was far below today’s level and deniers were everywhere. Meanwhile, with all the reading I was doing, I began to have reservations about certain dogmas found in the “voice content” of climate science, as presented by the universities and the IPCC and heard by the public.  (To be clear, I have nothing but admiration for climate field researchers and their steady flow of amazing discoveries.) 

At the same time I had a growing sense of fascination with the map work being done at the University of Maine, called Today’s Weather Maps, which have a strictly meteorological orientation but at the same time contain an endless amount of information that I thought should be taken into greater consideration by the climate professors.  For a long time I labored under the “error” of confusing PW and its effects, which are of great interest in meteorology,  with water vapor, the effects of which are treated in a completely different way in climate science.  With the help of the weather maps, I started watching concentrated streams of PW fly through the atmosphere, at an altitude where the jetstream winds are located, all the while mislabeling it as water vapor, and soon noticed the remarkably consistent relationship, day after day, between PW (just water vapor for me) volumes on one map and surface temperature anomalies at the same locations on another. In reference, I had read enough to know that climate professors had not one word to say about this unexpected phenomenon.

That’s what got me going on a new track.  It’s now a year since I converted the letters to a new purpose, which was to find out as much as possible about the reality of PW as a substance and what nature was trying to tell us about how things really work.  PW almost surely had to be involved, so that’s where my attention was focused, and the weather maps continued to cooperate with more wholly unexpected sources of information.  In particular, part 2 of Carl’s theory is dependent on imagery keyed to the formation of high-altitude air pressure configuration, how it changes, and how it regulates jetstream activity, which in turn has a direct impact on the movement and destination of PW stream concentrations, with extensive consequences for the relative strength of PW’s greenhouse effect.  A conclusion was reached that, for any given quantity of PW positioned in the upper troposphere, an increase in its freedom of movement is very likely to increase the power of its greenhouse heating effect on the surface below. The surface below will always be changing, and since PW streams tend to move poleward the new surfaces being encountered are likely to progressively become drier and more subject to leveraging of the greenhouse power.  (In addition, the thought occurs to me right now that simply extending the movement of a PW stream in time as well as distance, avoiding premature precipitation, adds more power to PW’s ultimate greenhouse warming effect.) 

Climate science divides the greenhouse effect of PW into two distinctly separate categories, one of which belongs to pure water vapor, the other to the different varieties of cloud cover.  Results in both cases lead to conclusions that are not necessarily immune to further questioning.  When the two effects are holistically combined, which is easily accomplished in practice—in fact amazingly so—the conclusions that emerge, based on visual evidence of starling clarity, are quite different.  The purpose of Carl’s theory is to gain the benefits to science that should accrue once this door has been fully opened.  

Carl