Climate Letter #2017

Climate change is here.  Serious impacts are now highly visible and widespread, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.  You will hear individuals and whole groups of climate scientists say that the impacts are worse than expected at this stage in the underlying trend of development.  The most highly respected climate forecasting models end up with basically the same conclusion, which suggests they are missing something.  Many scientists are searching for the identity of the missing factor, or factors.  Carl’s theory actually provides an explanation, inadvertently stumbled upon, since it was never my objective.  My attitude has simply been to report and perhaps interpret the remarkable relationships I was observing while engaged in regular cross-over examination of imagery found in the Today’s Weather Maps website.  I remember several years ago telling readers about the “goldmine” of information contained in these maps, which I found endlessly fascinating, and still do.  In recent months certain conclusions became practically inevitable because of all the persistent relationships that had turned up, and these formed the foundation of Carl’s theory.

What the theory essentially tells us is that Earth’s surface is actually receiving more heat-producing energy (or “radiative forcing”) than the amount calculated in the climate models. The source of this additional energy is not sunlight, or anything weird. It is generated in an ordinary way by what we call greenhouse effects, but not because of any change in the trend or behavior of any of the regular and most talked-about greenhouse gases. It’s all because of the one most extraordinary greenhouse gas, the outsider, that we seldom hear about except in weather reports—water vapor. The atmospheric content of water vapor may very well be increasing at a greater rate than it is supposed to, of as models predict.. I am not sure about that, but I think it is quite possible, even likely. What I do know is that its behavior is changing in certain ways, and certain places, which could be causing its extraordinarily large greenhouse energy warming power to be circumstantially magnified.

This is something that I can see quite directly by studying and comparing the weather maps. It is something climate scientists have probably overlooked, because the great volumes of information they work with present their data in a more complicated and less visually accessible format. The weather maps still need to be studied in a particular way, with a completely open mind, while especially keeping an eye out for the different kinds of close relationships that keep showing up. Water vapor down near the surface behaves in a manner that scientists are very familiar with, following a set of rules that cannot be broken. It’s the small fraction of all vapor, maybe about 10 percent of the total, that finds a passage into the upper part of the troposphere, but only on either side of the tropical belt, that seems to be capable of breaking many of the rules. The fraction itself could be growing—I am not sure about that, but it looks like a possibility. I am only sure that once water vapor gets into that situation it does things that are not in keeping with what it does at lower levels, or in the upper atmosphere of the tropical belt. Importantly, while doing these things, and for as long as it survives in this position, it never seems loses any of its regular greenhouse power, even after it has partially condensed into clouds and the more precipitable forms of aerosols.

Anyone who takes the time to study the maps will soon learn about all kinds of peculiarities that characterize vapor’s follow-up behavior in these high-altitude regimes.  Using the separate animated website completes the story with an enrichment of details, by adding on the dimensions of time, sense of direction, and constant motion, with the latter two marked by extensive twisting, turning and meeting of resistance.  The original formation of vapor into highly concentrated streams, well-separated from one from another, and how they erode and dissipate, is of great interest because it is unique to one kind of greenhouse gas in one very special situation.  Condensation within the streams and precipitation out of them is marked out on the maps, and so are the streams’ interactions with jetstream wind currents. All of these phenomena are curiously intermittent, and to some extent interrelated.  The relative strength and positioning of jetstream winds clearly has a major influence on the forward progression of the streams, normally inhibiting their movement toward higher latitudes, which is an inherently preferred sense of direction.  A current trend toward general weakening of the strength and positioning of these winds in the Northern Hemisphere can be detected, as opposed to those in the SH, for reasons that become clear upon separate study.  That weakening trend is what allows the concentrated streams to better hold on to both their contents and their shape, and to progress farther to the north than they otherwise would have. This is a point of great significance, because all of the power to generate greenhouse warming effects from the content of the streams remains intact as they do do.  These effects will then be regularly added to the similar effects generated by the same kind of contents within the vertical bounds of the lower level, often outweighing the latter by a considerable margin, always for intermittent spells as they pass across the overhead sky. The last couple of letters explain how these special effects translate into higher temperatures on the surface, and how the final effects can be accurately measured.

Carl