Climate Letter #1997

The new IPCC report covering the physical science of climate change has been published   If  you have not seen a good review of its content here is one that is reasonably thorough and makes it easy to understand the real meaning of how deep the problems have become:  https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/09/ipcc-report-un-climate-report-delivers-starkest-warning-yet.html.  The IPCC is no longer as cautious about delivering warning signals as it was in the past, and might have gone even further in that respect if the written content had not been finalized before the recent cascade of extreme events that go well beyond anything being predicted in the models.  Something has actually changed in a most abrupt way that the physical sciences have not predicted and are still unable to explain.

I have been working on a theory that focuses on the greenhouse energy effect of precipitable water (PW), perceived holistically as a single unified material, which could help to explain what is going on. PW behaves in a manner that is profoundly different from the behavior of all the “regular” greenhouse gases that are evenly distributed in the atmosphere and have much, much longer lifetimes in the atmosphere, per particle, than any of the contents making up PW. What makes the content of PW so interesting is the fact that, relative to a location of any size, it often undergoes changes of state, by processes of condensation and to a lesser extent its reversal.  The total amount of molecular substance involved in these changes, being made up of only one kind of molecule that can be measured by weight, is not affected one way or the other.  Moreover, based on all the observations I have been able to make, based on information provided by Today’s Weather Maps, the amount of energy produced is not conspicuously affected by varying the proportions between gas and liquid droplets.  The even larger condensation products, which tend to quickly precipitate back to the surface, do cause losses of molecular volume but otherwise seem to have no ultimate effect on the amount of energy production, as adjusted with respect for whatever molecular weight remains in the air.

If my observations are correct, one implication is that cloud droplets and water vapor have about the same power of energy generation per unit of weight. We can measure the total weight of PW in a given location at any one time, and apparently it doesn’t matter whether the content is 100% vapor or 50% or whatever. The outcome for surface temperatures, by total weight, will always be about the same. This would seem to give us a pretty good handle on the power of water vapor, from a practical point of view, once it has been lifted up to a level of the atmosphere where it can condense into droplets that do not disappear like dew on the ground. They just stay in the air and keep on producing greenhouse energy, per unit of weight, as if there had been no condensation. The total weight does not grow except for whatever is added to the upper atmosphere from new evaporation occurring at the surface. When total weight is lost by precipitation the measurements at that location quickly record the decline. I am going to stop writing now because there are some things here I want to think about, that may be of interest.

Carl