The global precipitable water time series. from ERSL/NCEP Reanalysis, is here:
http://davidsmith1.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/0622082.jpg
These reanalysis plots are a mix of both observations and computer “guesses” about water content, so use with some caution.

That looks important.

This “trend” in precipitable water with time appears to decline and then increase.

Could this evidence that the precipitable water is negatively (or inversely?) related to the global temperature?

If solar cycle 24 is longer and colder as is being predicted – then this would suggest an INCREASING trend in precipitable water over the coming decades.

Miskolczi’s theory is based on equilibrium for a given solar flux and albedo. His prediction of declining precipitable water content vs increasing CO2 would appear to be a second order effect compared to the primary effect of the larger changes with global temperature.

in fact Ian is quite right. Though I don’t think he addresses some of the real issues of the paper, including completely misunderstanding Kirchoff’s law, and he thinks his applications of the Virial theorem somehow relate directly to atmospheric and surface radiative fluxes. But like usual, it’s always better to scream that “I’m the new Galileo” than to read a textbook.

Global warming is very dangerious for all countries.
It challange the world’s future.
Close chacol turbines.
Maintain evergreen forests.
Use electric cars.
Clear Nuclear Weapons from earth.

Welcome with good environments to the next generations.

http://hlaingmore.wordpress.com

Hlaing of Myanmar

From: Ian Ford
Sent: 23 June 2008 17:58
To: Marshall Stoneham
Subject: Re: FW: “Saturated Greenhouse Effect” Wrecks Climate models

Dear Marshall,

This email carries the implied message ‘All these so-called scientific experts have missed some basic physics which when treated correctly eliminates the Greenhouse Effect’. There are a lot of people out there who wish to make such a claim. The basic physics he mentions is the dynamics of water exchange between ocean and atmosphere. The partition of water between gas and liquid phases is modelled phenomenologically, I imagine, but it is surely incorrect to claim, as he does, that the relative humidity is assumed to be fixed. I am not totally au fait with the inner assumptions of GCMs, but I cannot accept that everyone in the field has ignored this extremely important question. There will be dynamics of evaporation and condensation, which depend on temperature. So my view is to disregard this claim.

In any case, the article makes much of a model by Miskolczi describing the self-stabilisation of a climate system. This is the first I’ve heard of this model. It appears in a rather obscure journal. The description of it makes me wonder. The reference to a virial theorem with radiation considered as potential energy here and kinetic energy there sounds screwy. This is central to a claimed fraction of surface-emitted radiation that escapes into space. I am dubious.

He says that adding CO2 to the atmosphere raises the temperature but the relative humidity declines. Possibly, dependent on the evaporative dynamics. He goes further to say that adding CO2 reduces the content of water vapour. Adding one greenhouse gas is compensated by the removal of quantities of another. This is such nonsense.

So my view is that it is wishful thinking!

Ian

Marshall Stoneham wrote:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dear Ian

Do you have a view on this?

Best wishes

Marshall

Professor Marshall Stoneham FRS
Emeritus Massey Professor
London Centre for Nanotechnology and Department of Physics and Astronomy
University College London, Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
ucapams@ucl.ac.uk
marshallstoneham@tiscali.co.uk
+44 207679 1377 (direct) 1308 (secretary) 1360 (fax)
From: Jack Sarfatti [mailto:sarfatti@pacbell.net]
Sent: 22 June 2008 22:23
To: Jeremy Asher
Cc: Marshall Stoneham
Subject: Fwd: “Saturated Greenhouse Effect” Wrecks Climate models

“Do you know how the radiation curves are generated? Do they just take the average temperature of the earth and draw a curve from that value?”

I suspect there is no empirical data in the radiation curves. While I have no connection with the source, I think they generated one black body radiation curve from Planck’s Law (or drew it by hand) and put four copies on the graphic at the appropriate points.

I haven’t looked at that in detail and don’t intend to – too much other stuff demands attention first!

“Seems to me that the most accurate way to do such a chart would be to grid the entire planet, calculate the radiation curves for each grid, then average the curves together. That sounds like a lot of work, but it seems to me like something worth doing. If we don’t know exactly how the earth is radiating, how the heck are we ever going to figure out what is being blocked.”

Well, we have satellites telling us what’s getting radiated away. And reflected away – that’s a key part of the cooling and it’s not part of blackbody radiation. As for what’s being blocked within the atmosphere, I’d think there’s both lab and satellite data for that, though in real life clouds provide complications.

That’s the kind of beautiful homeostasis that makes me go all misty-eyed about Gaia again. Shame Lovelock himself no longer seems to believe it’s powerful enough to deal with our puny efforts at messing things up.

If you ever feel like it, I would love to read a post about dry lightning, a somewhat related subject, and one that has my attention as a forester and fire guy. Possibly it has your attention, too, as a Chicoan and CA meteorologist, during this unusual fire bust there.

They love swamp coolers in Asia. Even non swamp cooler AC systems add moisture to the air.

Although the latter has the best description I’ve seen of why the greenhouse effect works and how it differs from the atmosphere, they seem to go too far in several arguments: denying the existence of an average surface temperature of a body (because it cannot be calculated from first principles), the proposition that because the atmospheric greenhouse effect as commonly described constitutes a perpetuum mobile of the second kind the atmosphere does not provide overall warming, and their questioning of the meaning of the arrows in the radiative heating diagrams (the obvious answer being “energy”, which is conserved). On they other hand, their description of the folly of trusting GCMs, especially those that would purport to give accurate solutions to the Navier-Stokes equation from uncertain initial conditions over dozens of years, is exactly right. Their analysis left me puzzled by certain observations, such as why it becomes much colder at nights where there is no cloud cover than on nights where there is.

The analysis by Miskolczi has much more explanatory power, in my opinion, taking into account convection and the optical depth; it also makes predictions that are upheld by current measurements.

–Mark

Very good point. Yet another negative feedback?