Last week I pointed out that soot or carbon black has a bigger effect on climate change (melting Himalayan glaciers and extreme weather in China and India) then CO2..now we see that natural cycles of water vapour concentrations are equally suspect.
New Scientist (vol 2746 pg 16) writes this week
Water vapour worse climate change villain than thought
A rise in water vapour in the atmosphere fuelled 30 per cent of the global warming that took place during the 1990s. This discovery suggests that the potent greenhouse gas plays a bigger role in climate change that we previously imagined.
Susan Solomon and colleagues at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration combined satellite measurements and weather balloon data to track changes in the concentration of water vapour 16 kilometres up in the stratosphere, between the 1980s and today.
Water vapour levels in the stratosphere increased in the 1990s but dropped by 10 per cent in 2001. After feeding their measurements into a climate model, the team suggests that vapour was to blame for almost a third of the warming that happened in the 1990s.
The model also suggests that the decline in water vapour concentrations that occurred in 2001 slowed down the rate of global warming in the last decade by 25 per cent.
"This research does not change the consensus view that human emissions drive climate change," says Fortunat Joos, a climate modeller at the University of Bern, Switzerland. (i.e. Carbon Black or soot more then CO2--Walter Derzko)
Journal reference: Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1182488
Along with temperature readings, maybe the government should be telling us Water Vapour concentrations and Carbon Black (soot) and CO2 levels (a plant growth promoter) in the atmosphere..for all the gardeners. Geoengineering enthusiasts should take note of water vapour as a key variable.
Walter Derzko, Smart Economy, Toronto
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