Climate Letter #1592

Why climate science has a problem when accounting for water vapor effects.

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Climate science is greatly concerned with all the things that cause changes in Earth’s climate, in either a positive or negative way, by having lasting effects on temperatures.  There is special interest in the most fundamental agencies of change, collectively known as forcings, that directly result from human activity.  Prominent among these are certain  atmospheric gases that have a greenhouse effect, the most important of which is carbon dioxide.  There is another atmospheric gas, in the form of water vapor, that is not classified as a forcing even though it makes a stronger contribution to temperature change, both long-term and short-term, than CO2 or any other forcing or combination thereof.  This is because the effect of water vapor is never seen as a primary, or root cause of temperature change but only as a positive feedback response to actual changes that have been initiated from within the forcing group.
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Changes in the concentration of forcings occur for a wide variety of reasons.  Changes in the concentration of water vapor occur largely in response to the temperature changes in various waters from which the vapors originate, as produced with regularity by the preceding activity of the forcings group.
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Once the vapor becomes airborne it immediately supplements the greenhouse effect of forcing gases in its own peculiar way, which is indeed powerful but also highly erratic with respect to the timing and targeting of its temperature effects.  That erratic behavior, unlike the behavior of all other greenhouse gases, is impossible to accurately reproduce in climate models, but its net effect can be estimated in a general sort of way.  Climate models then make predictions based on extrapolation of those estimates in spite of their inherent uncertainty, a solution that is a practical but not entirely satisfying or worthy of complacency.  That is the basis of my complaint, along with observations that the erratic effects of higher water vapor concentrations are already having exaggerated temperature impacts—in addition to precipitation impacts—in a good many regional locations, like Australia, in the real world of today.  We need to give them a better accounting.
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How does climate science actually handle this problem?  You can get this information directly by referring to the last IPCC report at this link:  https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf  Jump to page 666 for a brief summary, and also page 697 to see the standard table of radiative forcings, as measured between 1750 and 2011.  Note that the IPCC does not include water vapor in its table of forcings, nor is any line item to be found disclosing an estimate of water vapor’s radiative impact in terms of watts per square meter, like it does for each individual forcing.  Instead, as a way of treating this impact as a feedback to the forcings, the IPCC assigns the radiative impact of water vapor in a proportionate way as an addition to the impact of each individual forcing in the table.  It does so in combination with the effects of several other agencies of a similar nature, mainly attributed to cloud cover or composition and to sea ice albedo.  This whole approach of combining the effects of feedbacks with forcings, while perhaps justifiable, can present difficulties for outside viewers from an analytical standpoint.
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One more thing for today, and that is, climate scientists as individuals, recognizing the uncertainties attributed to the effects of temperature changes on cloud cover and composition, do countless studies and write countless papers that seek to limit those uncertainties.  Much less activity of the type is assigned to water vapor, almost as if no such uncertainty even existed.  Is everyone really that satisfied with the current assumptions?
Carl

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