Lots of news about the recent water vapor study which suggests that about 30% of the warming in the last 30 years was caused by an increase in water vapor in the stratosphere and the lack of warming in the last 10 years caused by a decrease. NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - Stratospheric Water Vapor is a Global Warming Wild Card RealClimate: The wisdom of Solomon On Water Vapor and Warming - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com Slowdown in Warming Tied to Less Water Vapor - WSJ.com Stratospheric water vapor decline credited with slowing global warming : Wunder Blog Haven't had time to fully digest it yet, but on the surface doesn't seem to really change any basic understandings of climate (though I see some twisting the finding of the report already), just highlights that we should aim to understand why water vapor changes in the stratosphere so much.
The sun has been in a deep solar minimum. One of the effects of solar minimum is that the amount of UV radiation coming from the sun is significantly less. The UV is absorbed by ozone in the upper atmosphere, heating it. So the upper atmosphere is colder during these episodes. This happens every 11 years and is one of the drivers in the nonuniformity in the temperature record. This solar heating does probably affect the water content way up there. I guess this means we don't know what it means
"Lack of warming for the last 10 years" = cooling for the last ten years. If you aren't warming, you're cooling. Phil Jones, Mick Kelly, etc, all admit it. Glad to see you finally admit it. Anyway, thanks for posting this. This highlights the problem with computer models being extremely sensitive to changes in CO2. The more we learn about the earth the less credit we can give CO2 for warming. Eventually we explain CO2 away into a tiny forcing. Water vapour caused one-third of global warming in 1990s, study reveals | Environment | The Guardian It's The Water Vapor, Stupid! | The Resilient Earth
"Lack of warming for the last 10 years" = cooling for the last ten years. If you aren't warming, you're cooling. Phil Jones, Mick Kelly, etc, all admit it. Glad to see you finally admit it. " In an attempt to be clear, (and to introduce what can only be described as "nuance"), lack of warming does not necessarily mean cooling! It could mean stability. (Not just a semantic difference by the way)
P.S. You gotta love that Gavin is already doing damage control on the ClimateGate propaganda website. I wonder how awkward it is for him and Hansen to sit up in their offices and stare out the window at the Hudson river and wonder why it hasn't flooded the West Side Highway yet.
It is comforting to see radioprius1 bring mis-information, bad quotes, and personal attacks to threads I was not involved in. "The constant in all your dysfunctional relationships is you" - fortune cookie He is here too, so my fortune is wrong.
Please don't come in here and muck up another thread. I haven't posted any misinformation, bad quotes, or personal attacks.
Green car congress had a nice nutshell graph: With this description: "Decadal warming rates arising from (i) greenhouse gases and aerosols alone (black); (ii) that obtained including the stratospheric water decline after 2000 (red); and (iii) including both the stratospheric water vapor decline after 2000 and the increase in the 1980s and 1990s (cyan). Credit: Solomon et al., Science. Click to enlarge." From this brief story: Green Car Congress: Study Finds Stratospheric Water Vapor Is An Important Driver of Decadal Global Surface Climate Change
Temperature "stability" on Earth occurs during prolonged ice ages. Periods of brief warming spikes are transitions. Enjoy it while it lasts because its not ever going to stabilize at current levels.
