It was a pretty interesting read. And if you don’t have time to read the entire study, do check out the slide presentation (it’s available in both powerpoint and pdf formats).

OK, so anthropogenic sourced increases in atmospheric H2O are coming from dams and fossil burning;”

I apologize for not having hard data, but I suspect that agricultural irrigation needs to be added to the list. Anyone who has flown across the Great Plains and appreciates a good window seat has seen hundreds or thousand of the circular “center pivot irrigation systems” that have a well in the origin and a half-mile long radial arm with sprinkler heads. They cover a huge area and must release vastly more water vapor than dam pools do. Much like burning fossil fuel, they tap “fossil water” and put it back into the hydrologic cycle. Hmm, I wonder how much influence they have on ocean levels.

I finally got close to one, well, the end of the arm, at least, on a bicycle tour through Oregon, Idaho, and Montana in 2003.

http://www.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/resource/tour/38/38scene3_e.php

As long as I have the floor:

2003 was hot – a couple days before the heat broke (and the forest fires took over) I bought a thermometer and recorded 106F in the shade under my handlebar bag, but above hot pavement. See http://wermenh.com/biketour/idaho.html et al. Nightfall in that area doesn’t help much – canyon walls are volcanic rock that soak up heat during the day to bake bicyclists at night.

If you want to see serious desert cooling, the area around Flagstaff Arizona is good. Flat ground, porous soil, few plants, thin dry air. When the sun goes down the ground just can’t offset the radiational cooling. Here in New England, radiation cooling is usually limited by dew or frost. Especially on humid summer nights, dew forms and releases the latent heat in water vapor and what was a nice exponential curve flattens out.

But if CO2 does have a heating effect is that effect limited by such negative feedbacks or something inherent in the CO2 heat ‘trapping’ process. The Kauffman paper shows the spectographic sensitivity of CO2 to be at 15 and about 10 microns. Richard Petschauer in this paper shows the same thing;

http://www.junkscience.com/jan08/Global_Warming_Not_From_CO2_20080124.pdf

So the effect of CO2 is dwarfed by H2O and cutailed by the H2O negative feedback, but presumably the CO2 heating potential will persist if CO2 levels are maintained or increased. The Stefan-Boltzmann emmissions roughly double from 0F to 100F and the Wien peak energy wavelength moves about plus or minus 10% during that range which occurs diurnally and regionally. Given that the CO2 sensitivity is so concentrated it appears that the SB/Wien combo can put a brake on CO2 heating regardless of the difference between the rate of IR excitment and the much quicker rate of collisional deexcitment because the wavelength shift will prevent, or drastically reduce, IR excitment; in fact if IR excitment is mitigated, the quicker rate of collisional deexcitment will act as an additional cooler with the CO2 molecules losing or transfering their heat and not recapturing more.

Trouble is, there ain’t no positive reinforcement.

The water vapor won’t oblige by forming high-level cirrus clouds or hanging around as ambient vapor as the models predict. Instead a big chunk of it appears to be going into low-level cloud cover which increases albedo and acts as a negative reinforcement, leading to homeostasis. Which is why we had 10 years of flat temps in spite of the PDO, AMO, NAO, and AO blasting away at max. warm plus a 4% CO2 increase to boot.

Now PDO is gone south and Solar Cycle 24 is dudding out on us.

DeVries. (Rhymes with “Freeze”.)

Personally I don’t believe in the Ideomotor Effect, I believe in con men.

This is simply not true.

Not sure what “vapor as clouds” means; clouds are condensed water or ice suspended colloidally.

If by “the” climate models you mean GCMs, i.e., models built from small scale physics, this claim is in any case false. All GCMs include dynamic water vapor. It is obviously crucial to have water vapor as one of the varying quantities, since without tracking water vapor you can’t have realistic storm patterns emerge from first principles. No GCMs have “static” or “left out” clouds or water vapor.

REPLY: I beg to differ. I’ll let my buddy Craig James at WOOD-TV explain it in his posting That darned water vapor

Here’s a better one: the products of the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels are of course CO2, but also H20. If I balance the equation properly, isn’t (by vol) half of the tailpipe emission water vapor? If so, that’s a lot of forcing right there.

This may be true. However in my case, I had no idea a well had ever been on my property much less capped off and buried under ~8″ of grass. I also had no idea a drainage pipe was in that location. I had thought the drainage pipe would have gone under a porch instead of around it since the porch was relatively new in relation to the house.

As far as being able to just about drill anywhere and hit water, in this case, therein lies the snag: it turns out all homes in this area had wells but because they ran dry, they had to bring in a municipal supply. The amount still in the well was very small.

Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com

As for water, you can drill pretty much anywhere and eventually hit water.

Jeff, as far as I’m concerned at this point, I can’t comment on whether the article is any good or not. I did download it and print it out for later reading and found the first couple of pages interesting. It seems like the only time I have left for reading anymore is when I’m sitting on the thunderjug.

However… With respect to dowsing, that’s another matter. As a lifelong researcher, I’m inclined to try just about anything once. And I did just that with a “dowsing rod” I purchased over the ‘net.

Jeff, I couldn’t believe my eyes, that dowsing rod located an old well on my property as well as a PVC sewage line (that did not have a trailer wire imbedded in it). I opened the well and sure enough… water. As far as the PVC pipe is concerned, it always has some type of water in it whether it’s raw sewage or dishwater.

It was an interesting experiment, and one I’ll always remember!

Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com

These researchers are full of cowpoop.

ATTN: Everbody!

I have finally found a really nice IR spectrum of ambient air which shows the absorptions of H2O and CO2 that are on scale. GO:

http:www.nzclimatescience.images/PDFs/ccr.pdf

The JSE is a very dubious source. They also think Dowsing is something that should be taken seriously.

The CO2 issue of forcing is rather ‘forced’; the IPCC give a forcing value to increased levels of CO2 based on its ‘forcing’ of a stable (which is incorrect for the reason above) quantity of H2O to increase its forcing effect. The other problem I have with the forcing effect of CO2 is its alleged heat trapping and transfer properties; Harold and Fucaloro, amongst others, have touched on the complex facility of CO2 to absorb IR; Wien does not appear to have a limiting effect on CO2 absorbtion because the temperatures are not sufficient to shift the wavelength to non-absorbant windows; Beer and the linear-sq root-log decline also appears to not be a dampener of CO2 sensitivity because of the difference between the rate of excitation due to thermal excitation and the rate of collisional deexcitation; Fucaloro’s observation seems to confirm that. Given that, what is the limit to CO2 heat trapping and transfer properties other than limiting the amount in the atmosphere and waiting for the ‘opaqueness’ of the stuff already there to gradually lesson?

That is patently absurd. There’s PLENTY of water vapor in the desert. Obviously not as much as in other places, but clearly more than you appear to think is there.