What is the difference between water vapor and all the other greenhouse gases, and how are they alike?
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The fundamentals are quite clear and well-known, but let’s make a quick review anyway, with the aim of putting everything in the best perspective. The so-called greenhouse gases all absorb incoming infrared energy, but unlike the denser forms of matter, like the solids and ordinary water on the planet’s surface, they are all unable to capture more than a fraction of the many different wavelengths that radiant energy is composed of. Every gas has its own list of favorite wavelengths, each list being longer and stronger for some than for others. Water vapor is known to be the leader in that respect, covering the largest part of the spectrum, with carbon dioxide second.
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Water vapor also has the highest concentration in the atmosphere of any of the gases, but that circumstance is complicated and mainly highlights the biggest difference of all. That is, water vapor’s actual concentration varies all over the place, from just a little more than nothing (during winter in the heart of Antarctica) to many times the total of all other greenhouse gases. Moreover, the variations are highly noticeable throughout the world at all times, and as a further complication they are always subject everywhere to changes that may come along in rapid order. Every one of the other gases has a completely different way of life, starting with regularly even distribution around the globe, plus little capacity for making changes in concentration at anything more than a snail’s pace. As an aside, all of the gases, including water vapor, just like the main body of air in its entirety, tend to thin out and fall off in quantity the farther away they are from sea level, purely as a result of gravitational reduction.
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The enormous disparities in concentration leave us with two main classes of greenhouse gas. Those that have great stability are in one class, often simply designated as ‘well-mixed,’ while water vapor is in a class by itself, with no special name. Because of these fundamental differences, the very strong and highly variable greenhouse effect of water vapor is able to produce big changes in local temperatures, hour by hour, day by day, season by season, and even year by year, while all of the other gases can only sit passively by, doing no more than their same old regular thing. And besides all of that, which is only about temperature remember, water vapor has a deeply dominating role in both cloud formation and precipitation activity, making it the true ‘work horse’ of all weather change. No other greenhouse gas comes even close.
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Now, what more can we say about those other gases? What, if anything, do they do besides adding a more or less ‘fixed’ amount of greenhouse-type heating to Earth’s atmosphere—which by the way is not a small thing—day after day, without fail, over stretches of time that go on for eons without end? Maybe it is not really so fixed after all. Rather, the two strongest of them, carbon dioxide and methane, and to a lesser extent nitrous oxide, have a longstanding habit of slowly changing their respective concentrations, for any number of reasons. The changes are often large enough to have a material effect on both air and ocean temperatures over hundreds or thousands of years. More recently, for truly unusual reasons, that timing factor has dropped down to where it is just decades or less. They still don’t compete directly in the making of everyday weather, but the extra heat they are continually adding to the oceans keeps accumulating, facilitating changes in its everyday surface temperature. That particular kind of warming action translates by evaporation into an important new source of water vapor, thereby adding great potential to its muscle power as a weather maker. This entire process underlies the step-by-step reality of what we call climate change.
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We must not forget that putting more water vapor into the air, along with its powerful greenhouse effect, also helps to heat up the oceans to a significant degree, augmenting what the well-mixed gases have already been doing, with similar results. It is also worth noting that if the well-mixed gases were unable to keep warming up the ocean water for any reason there is no other known pathway that would lead to meaningful increases in water vapor. That dog would stay leashed. Or, if the oceans were allowed an opportunity to cool off, we could expect to see declines in the production and airborne concentration of water vapor.
Carl