NASA says AIRS satellite data shows positive water vapor feedback

Wow. I had no idea that water vapor was a “feed back”. I guess without anthropogenic CO2 there would be no water vapor. /sarc.

Notably missing is a discussion of clouds.

yes but does the study include the feedback of clouds resulting from the water vapor increase ??
More interesting is the inhomogeneous distribution of CO2 ?

[AIRS temperature and water vapor observations have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.]
How can this happen when the models are false? They are matching a fraudulent model. I’m puzzled unless the same trick is being used.

“JPL scientists have shown a major consequence of global warming will be an increase in the frequency and strength of severe storms.”
Could have sworn we’re seeing less, not more?

Well, NASA press release speculation has a dubious track record. Let some independent thinkers have a go at the data before doing the Chicken Little routine again.

My understanding is that increased water vapor means an increase in low-level cloud cover, which is a negative feedback. The end of the story states that AIRS observes and records clouds but there was no mention of the cloud cover measurements in the body of the story.
Also, my BS flag went up when the story stated that the CO2 patterns are different than the climate models assume, yet the satellite data corroborates the models. If the models were updated to match the true CO2 distributions, would they still validate the satellite data?
I don’t think we are getting the full story here. This is merely another advocacy piece.

If they have a history match with false results then they don’t have a match. You have been duped. Something is fabricated here is what I’m saying. Interesting measurements but we only have 7 years worth. We need hundreds of years of data.

We know the air holds more water vapour when it warms.
The question is whether the warming is caused by extra CO2 or by some other cause such as increased ocean energy release during a positive PDO phase.
Then we need to know how much warming is caused by human CO2 as compared to the natural warming.
Then whether a warming of the air alone from more CO2 is capable of defeating the ability of the oceans to cool the air above the sea surfaces.
Then there is evidence that global air humidity varies vary little because the hydrological cycle simply speeds up to eject extra energy to the stratosphere
thereby ensuring that surface air temperatures do not diverge from sea surface temperaures.
The models and the above assertions seem all to be based on the recent 30 year period when there was a correlation between rising CO2 and rising air temperatures. The cause of the warming was attributed in the models to the CO2 but more likely it was the warmer sea surfaces during that period.
If we now see cooling of the air due to cooling ocean surfaces (already looking likely and partly accepted following the recent powerful La Nina event) then the role of CO2 needs re-assessment despite the overconfident assertions in the above report.

“virtually certain ” = “wild assed guess”

They timed it wrong. It was supposed to be released 4 weeks ago. Now it’s too late to save the farce in Copenhagen.

I’ll see your seven years of data and up the bet with sixty years of radiosonde data:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/The_Saturated_Greenhouse_Effect.htm
Radiation transport of energy is not nearly as important as convection in the troposphere. Above the tropopause, radiation transport becomes much more important as there is little convection in the stratosphere. At the 300 millibar level the humidity has been dropping over 60 years even as CO2 has risen. The amount of CO2 in the convective troposphere is irrelevant as far as climate is concerned. If the AIRS data is including ground level humidity then the conclusions about climate are bogus.

For how long have we been told CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere?
Apparently that assumption was wrong.

“For example, the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere” I think sceptics have been saying that for years!
Some observations:
Increasing watervapor will lead to increase storminess to remove the additional heat build up, increased clould cover and change the optical transparacny of the atmosphere, I suspect these moderate the water vapour feedback so a “runaway” green house effect does not occur, otherwise it would have happened before!
How does increasing water vapour effect high level ice crystals which are not included in climate models?
The above video of co2 concentration shows a belt around the equator wth low concentrations, hence at the equator extra heat is not be trapped and fed into the ocean which is the IPCC theory of how the earth will warm. The increase water vapour however, seems to be in this area with low co2 concentrations.
Will heat not just escape around the lumps? wasnt a well mixed co2 layer essential to the IPCC climate models for their large predictions of warming?
They should first study the data carefully before making the compulsory “its worse than we thought” statement!

Long time lurker….
I was looking at the animation and notded that for the most part the CO2 concentrations seemed to be oriented around deserts and low plant life areas(I think). I also noted that deeply forested area had very low CO2 levels. Could this not be an illustration of natural sequestering. I would also be inrested in how the trade winds seem to confine the CO2 into streams (no real mixing).
I’m just an engineer, but that’s what it looks like at first blush.

Anthony – this may be old news being rehashed for political purposes.
Here is Roy Spencer thoughts on Dresser from Feb, 2009
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/02/
The other half of the feedback story which Dessler et al did not address is the reflected solar component. This feedback is mostly controlled by changes in low cloud cover with warming. The IPCC admits that feedbacks associated with low clouds are the most uncertain of all feedbacks, with positive or negative feedback possible…although most, if not all, IPCC models currently have positive SW feedbacks.
But I found from the CERES data a strongly negative SW feedback during 2002-2007. When added to the LW feedback, this resulted in a total (SW+LW) feedback that is strongly negative.
Is my work published? No…at least not yet…although I have tried. Apparently it disagrees too much with the IPCC party line to be readily acceptable. My finding of negative SW feedback of around 5 W m-2 K-1 from real radiation budget data (the CERES instrument on Aqua) is apparently inadmissible as evidence.

“AIRS temperature and water vapor observations have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.”
Only doubled? IMO an accurate summary is, “We found evidence of positive feedback but it looks to be much lower than forecast by IPCC models, which are in the 3x – 5x range” This only gets them to a little over 2 C for 2xCO2. What’s the big deal?

I would like to know where those plumes originated. At those altitudes there are jet streams. Also the air is thin and the absolute concentration (molecules per cubic meter) is a lot less than it is at the surface. I suspect it got to those altitudes in tall clouds and traveled with frozen anvils. The equitorial regions (where I suspect the CO2 originated) have been cleaned out.

This sounds very unlikely to impossible to me. “AIRS can observe the concentration of carbon dioxide in the mid-troposphere, with 15,000 daily observations, pole to pole, all over the globe, with an accuracy of 1 to 2 parts per million”

“As the climate warms, the atmosphere becomes more humid. Since water is a greenhouse gas, it serves as a powerful positive feedback to the climate system, amplifying the initial warming”.
Following this logic, the seasonal variation known as “summer” should cause excessive water vapour formation as the atmosphere becomes more humid causing a powerful positive feedback leading to more evaporation and hence more humidity and further warming as a rersult leading to an unstoppable heating with the eventual result that the oceans boil into space, all without the help of CO2.
Thus life on earth was wiped out millions of years ago, human kind has never existed and this whole discussion is a figment of our own imaginations.
OR:-
Water vapour traps heat radiated from the earths surface and by an equal amount prevents radiant heat from the sun reaching the earths surface. This means that earths days are cooler than they would be and earth’s nights are warmer than they would be, thus making life possible. Otherwise temperature variations would be as they are on the Moon (ranging from +122Celsius to -233Celius) and life would never have begun. This is the real “greenhouse effect” as proposed by Tyndall and far from being dangerous this insulating blanket is positively crucial to life on earth.

Hi,
I think this article in the WSJ by Richard Lindzen is insightful.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html

I am sure the timing of the release has been arranged to coincide withe the last phase of negotiations in Copenhagen.

I like this study. It’s big, uses satellites, has lots of fine-grained data for the entire globe, appears to not need heavy data adjustment, and conclusions are relatively straightforward. It’s a welcome change from past studies, such as “Antarctica is warming” from cheerleading scientists that heavily manipulate what little data exists. This study correctly focuses on CO2 not being a leading greenhouse effect, but seeing if CO2 increases water vapor, which can have a major effect. It makes new discoveries (the CO2 belt in the southern hemisphere). The conclusions are even well stated “CO2 increases water vapor, which is a big positive feedback. That will cause things to warm, unless unknown negative feedbacks exist” This study is very welcome in comparison to what we usually see.
Like the others have said, I’m interested in cloud formation as a result of increased water vapor. How does that fit into the study? Also, did climate models predict the southern hemisphere CO2 belt? It doesn’t seem so.

The thing I wonder about with positive feedback loops, is whether there is evidence of them in the past?
If positive feedbacks are real, wouldn’t the temperature record show a series of rapid swings in global temperature caused by small temperature change?
A large volcano eruption would cause a cold year, which would then lead to an ice age.
Does it makes sense that the world would still be habitable today if it exists in a sensitive equilibrium that can be easily pushed over the edge into extreme temperatures?

Slightly off topic 😉
With just days to reach a deal, the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen has erupted in chaos.
At least 240 protestors were arrested on Wednesday when they tried to get past the perimeter fence at the venue, Bella Centre.
Danish police in riot gear were firing teargas.
Turmoil also marked the talks with Danish environment minister Connie Hedegaard stepping aside to allow the prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to take over as president of the conference.
Ms Hedegaard says the move is procedural.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister and UN development programme head Helen Clark is in Copenhagen. She says it’s a very unusual conference.
Miss Clark says it’s been described as “WTO meets Woodstock”
Copyright © 2009 Radio New Zealand

I love how they color the CO2 concentrations in their animation brownish “smog” color to give the impression of CO2 as a pollutant.

“The timing of this release is interesting.”
I’m deeply suspicious about why someone would time the introduction of a cool new earth-related dataset with, I don’t know, an AGU conference.
I continue to be intrigued by how this community approaches new information with an open, inquisitive attitude.

O/T – the Climategate story just got a whole lot bigger –
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/sheeet.html
This is SERIAL!

Interesting…
How were Mann and his cohorts able to get a mean CO2 value for the entire globe before this data was available?
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/ and others say CO2 varies by the time of day, the season and, probably has a lot of other variations too.
Seems the very basis of alarmism has eroded to nothing.

Yes I also noticed that clouds are not mentioned, however Dr. Spencer is supposed to do a presentation that started at about 2pm EST at AGU on Feedbacks from clouds with Satellite evidence. Will be interesting to see what happens after that.

Jack Green (10:32:24) :
We need hundreds of years of data.
Wave those arms any harder and you might take off.
The short record of the aqua data is the reason the Lindsen used mixed data sets to do his analysis last summer. However even his analysis uses much less than 100 years of data.
True, Lindsen’s analysis is weakened by both the (still) limited length of the record and the mixing of more than one data set, but it is still a better analysis that what a press release can provide.
I did find it it interesting that who evever wrote this had to go outside of NASA JPL to get a quote that supports climate models and positive feedback.
And also interesting they do not mention Lindsen, while clearly adressing what he claims. Kinda like RC and their never mentioning McIntyre by name.

Dear Andrew
““AIRS temperature and water vapor observations have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.”
Respectfully
B.S.
Supporting models that are already disproven by the actual temperature data doesn’t suggest they are right. It suggests your method is crap.

– At 5 to 12 kilometers, the water vapour concentration must be very low.
– Are the two pretty pictures animations taken at the same time of year?
– Maybe the measurements at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, are useless.
– Can someone match the temperature distribution during that time, at that altitude… was there a hot spot?
– Could it be the other way around? The increase of water vapour (due to SUMMER warming) displaces the CO2 in those bands, making their concentration go up at those latitudes? The warmer the water in the ocean gets the more CO2 that degases, the more CO2 that get displaced by water vapour to those locations?

“Chahine said previous AIRS research data have led to some key findings about mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide. For example, the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere, but is rather “lumpy.” Until now, models of carbon dioxide transport have assumed its distribution was uniform.”
What does that mean to the Holy CO2-measurements in Mauna Loa? Are they lower or higher than the global average? What about earlier chemical measurents? Can we now assume some validity for them.
How important impact that mixing has to the results of the climate models? Is the science settled or not?

Juraj V. (10:30:04) :
Does not look like this at all
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/10/20091030_ibuki_e.html
(scroll down)
The difference between the JAXA CO2 map from 2009 and NASA animation are quite profound, suggesting that CO2 distribution is not only non uniform, but subject to nearly as much chaotic variability as the atmosphere. I would note also that the measurements displayed seemed to indicate that the 388 ppm number in Anthony’s widget is hardly representative, by my eyeball avg. I’d say at least 15 to 20 ppm on the high side.
It seems a more appropriate headline for this PR would have been “New Data Shows GCMS to a Complete Crock”.

oops, to be a Complete….

This IS interesting. Before we have dismissed the models because the warming of the 6000 – 12000 m in the tropics just weren’t there, therefore the models looked suspect, while the explanations of Lindzen were more according to the observations.
Now, the assumptions behind the models seem to be confirmed by observations. If so, the hypotesis of global warming is certainly more likely than before.
One thing that strikes me: CO2 is supposed to be a long lived gas in the atmosphere, why is it not then well mixed in the air? Why is it “lumped together”?
I will wait until further information to draw any conclusions; this science is so politicized that anything is possible.

http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/12/14/another-defection-from-warmism-un-ipcc-coordinating-author-dr-philip-lloyd-calls-out-ipcc-fraud/hello!!!!
You have to read this!!!
Is it saying what its really saying???? And this is written BEFORE “climategate”!

This doesn’t make sense to me. If water vapor feedback is positive, I expect to see more warming over the oceans where there is obviously more water available for a positive feedback loop to operate.
But isn’t most of the warming supposed to be over land? From this is I conclude this must be due to one of these:
A) Water vapor feedback is negative
B) The observed warming over land is polluted by other effects
C) It’s more complex than I am making it
D) All of the above

November temperature data is up. 4th warmest November on record:
http://akwag.blogspot.com/ 2009/ 12/ global-cooling-at-sarah-palins-house.html
But there’s global cooling both at Sarah Palin’s house AND the country she can see from her house.

Russia says the CRU appears to have cherry picked which Russian weather stations to use:
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.
Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
Source: http://en.rian.ru/papers/20091216/157260660.html
(May have to page down to see this item – the above is worthy of a front page item at WWUT)

the reason this cannot be correct is that pesky historical record that shows CO2 going up after warming, and ahead of cooling.
If what Dessler is promoting were accurate, we would see it in the historical record.
It is not in the historical record, so it is yet more AGW hype and fear mongering.
How much data do these AGW promoters get to torture before the human rights people movee in on these cruel torturers?

Ah! So it IS the humidity. /sarc

Wondering Aloud says: “Supporting models that are already disproven by the actual temperature data doesn’t suggest they are right. It suggests your method is crap.”
Actually, the fact that Dessler’s OBSERVATIONS corroborate what models predicted shows that the models are correct. Also, temperature data confirms the models are correct – the meme that “temperature doesn’t match the model” has no basis in the evidence. See here (solid lines are actual temps, and they fall toward the upper end of model predictions):
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/rahmstorf2.jpg
And if you think the temperature data is all faked anyway, how are you going to now say that this flawed temperature data proves the models incorrect?
What your statement shows is that you should not be drawing your own conclusions on climate science based on your layperson’s understanding the issue.

Brilliant headline on the BBC website today:
“Met was dysfunctional”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8415000/8415634.stm
Unfortunately the Met in question is not the one which issues scarey forecasts about 2080 but the one which is responsible for policing in London.

If CO2 warming leading to temperature amplification via water vapor were that straightforward, the IPCC models wouldn’t be failing.
It also contradicts Lindzen’s recent ERBE results.

Of course, just because this come from a NASA press release timed to coincide with the Copenhagen three ring circus, it doesn’t HAVE to be crap. (But my BS detector is flashing like mad.)
It has to be good from the paper that “The product represents the first-ever release of global carbon dioxide data that are based solely on observations.” But are these real observations, I wonder? Or just observations of what the output of his X-box looks like?
I wonder if he found that pesky missing tropical hot-spot whilst he was poking around? Did he say?

A cold warmist (11:09:04) : O/T – the Climategate story just got a whole lot bigger – http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/sheeet.html … This is SERIAL!
Nice one, might warrant a thread to itself? FYI, it’s about Russian scientists saying CRU cherrypicked only a small proportion of the available Russian station records, and it appears CRU picked the ones that show warming…
[REPLY – Check it out. ~ Evan]

Aha! as usual Anthony got there first (Russian stations)

Hmm; a few initial speculations:
Strange that there seems to be low CO2 in the tropics, and at the poles, and also over the himalayas.
I’d be interested to find out if there are any interference effects with this instrument. For example: if there is a high measured level of atmospheric H20, will that mask the measurement of CO2?
And what about albedo? For example, could the reflectance from Cumulus, and from Icecaps, somehow reduce the instrumental sensitivity to CO2?
Could it be, that a major sink of CO2 is actually clouds? And can the instrument measure CO2 that is absorbed within water-vapour? All those microscopic droplets with a combined huge surface area, and enormous changes of partial pressure as they go up and down in their great convective loops, would seem to be the ideal CO2 ‘scrubber’
Then there is the question of icing; if CO2 comes out of solution when water droplets turn to ice-crystals, could this account for the increased concentrations of CO2 in the just those zones we see, where the highest combination of water-vapour and atmospheric freezing occur ?

Steve (11:27:33)
“So the AIRs data for five years, 2003-2008, a period of FALLING global temperatures, and increasing humidity is taken as positive feedback?
Uhmmmm isn’t that really proof of NEGATIVE feedback?
And the entire raob record, marked by RISING global temperatures and decreasing humidity is ignored as NEGATIVE feedback?
Hooo boy.”
Good point. It’s almost as if the increasing water vapor was cancelling out the possible CO2 warming effect during that time.
Another problem – this is only 7 years of data. It’s all great information, but such a short time frame isn’t enough to draw firm conclusions one way or the other, though initial indications are that the water vapor could be a negative feedback rather than a positive one. The AGW’ers have been hanging their hat on satellite data that started in 1979. But since we’ve only been using Mauna Loa for credible mean CO2 measurements from 1979 to, the theory that water vapor feedback mechanism was positive was that – just a theory.
As for Dressler’s comments, as Chris R. said earlier, this guy is all over the lot. First his feedback multiplier was lower than the IPCC’s in 2004, then far higher in 2008, and now lower assuming I’m right that the IPCC projected a feedback of 3-5 times CO2’s influence, he’s lower.
One thing I look forward to is for scientists to take a look at and analyze localized conditions for the correlation of CO2 concentration, water vapor density and temperature changes on a regional level (i.e., Arctic, Antarctic, continental, etc.) to see if the AGW theory holds water.

Steve Sadlov (11:41:45)
I don’t think there’s any compelling evidence for a cosmic ray atmosphere interaction effect that is significant for climate. Since the secular trend in the cosmic ray flux has been pretty flat (drifting slightly in a cooling direction since the cosmic ray has been measured in detail from the late 1950’s), we know any putative CRF effect can’t have contributed to the marked late 20th century and contemporary warming.
What did you have in mind?

need to first prove it’s warming (and please show your work), then we’ll look for causes.

“tunka (11:26:13) :
One thing that strikes me: CO2 is supposed to be a long lived gas in the atmosphere, why is it not then well mixed in the air? Why is it “lumped together”?”
That was exactly the first thought that came to me, but as Syphax pointed out above, the color scale ranges from about 381 – 389 ppmv, so the CO2 is indeed well mixed. However, I don’t understand why the science team leader would say this:
“For example, the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere, but is rather “lumpy.” Until now, models of carbon dioxide transport have assumed its distribution was uniform.”
A variation of one part out of 38 does not seem “lumpy” to me – indeed I would call it pretty well mixed.
Anyway, it’s good to have a new comprehensive data-set that might be able to answer some questions.

Here’s my take on the following comment:
“Dessler explained that most of the warming caused by carbon dioxide does not come directly from carbon dioxide, but from effects known as feedbacks. Water vapor is a particularly important feedback. As the climate warms, the atmosphere becomes more humid.”
So if humidty is DECREASING; http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/GlobalRelativeHumidity300_700mb.jpg
and co2 does not cause most of the warming, as stated above,when it is actually cooling, and becoming less humid. Then what is actually going on here floks?
Is the entire study based on tainted temperatures, false feedbacks and lacking logic oh my? tainted temperatures, false feedbacks and lacking logic oh my?

“supercritical (12:04:02) :
Could it be, that a major sink of CO2 is actually clouds? And can the instrument measure CO2 that is absorbed within water-vapour? All those microscopic droplets with a combined huge surface area, and enormous changes of partial pressure as they go up and down in their great convective loops, would seem to be the ideal CO2 ’scrubber’”
I recently had much the same idea. The water-droplets in clouds provide a lot of surface area for the uptake of CO2. If the clouds then rain out over the ocean, that might be a more efficient mechanism for the exchange of CO2 between air and sea than the direct adsorption at the air-sea interface. Or alternatively, if they don’t rain out, it might be a mechanism for the transport of CO2 across the earth’s surface (as the clouds drift with the wind). I suppose that some of the CO2 could become sequested in the land too (in ground-water that is) as the clouds rain out over land.
These are all interesting questions, which I would hope some enterprising atmospheric scientist or oceanographer would also be asking, and attempting to answer. Do climate scientists ask interesting questions anymore? Are they even curious anymore? Or do they simply assume that they already completely understand how the Earth works?

Martin B (12:22:03)
Yes, you’re right. It’s really a question of timescales. CO2 is pretty well mixed on the annual timescale and rather less well mixed on the monthy timescale. But overall the spatial difference in CO2 levels is small (since CO2 levels mix rather well on the annual timescale!).
One can get a better picture of the spatial variation in CO2 levels from the AIRS data; e.g.:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA11194_modest.jpg

How much of the CO2 shown is caused by humans burning fossil fuels? 1 % ?
[REPLY – 3% or so per year, supposedly. Around half of that accumulates. So it’s likely that the CO2 increase is anthropogenic. But what effect that has (if any) is very questionable. ~ Evan]

I love water vapour positive feedback because it defies logic!
Think about it, they claim evaporation causes warming, which means warming must occur if evaporation occurs! Evaporation has been occurring for billion of years yet the world hasn’t boiled to its death! But apparently it will now that man is putting back a tiny amount of CO2 that has been sequestered by plants.
Often these water feedback proof articles forget to compare the increases in water vapour to increases in temp, ie they compare over a period when the earth cools. Increases in water vapour in the upper atmosphere always lead to subsequent decreases in surface temp (due to those cloud things cutting off the energy supply.) I always wonder if these model forget to use the big climate forcing, such as the difference between day and night.

To answer Martin B… as any geochemist will tell you, average rain water is rather acidic (pH of 5.2) and is very effective in developing Karst topography (holes of sizable dimensions) anywhere the country rock is limestone/dolostone. The carbonic acid contained in the rain is due to absorption of CO2 in the atmosphere, and you’re right–the surface area of droplets in clouds is HUGE, perhaps exceeding the surface area of the ocean. Besides, constant movement among the clouds allows for greater transfer than a relatively static ocean surface, and involves most of the air column over both land and sea.

I’ve been watching videos out of COP 15. It looks like a three ring circus over there. Investment advice, Sell everything related to alternative energy and carbon credit trading now.

Is the Pajama still going over there?

well yes Ryan Stephenson (12:46:56)…
that’s why I said: “It’s perhaps easier to think of the water vapour feedback as an “amplification” of the primary forcing.”
One can’t use semantic “arguments” to attempt to negate real phenomena! “Feedback” is used in a rather straightforward manner in characterising climate-related radiative forcing (a positive feedback is essentially a positive amplification whereas a negative feedback opposes the primary forcing). That may not be the manner in which “feedback” is used in engineering applications, for example, but that’s a matter of semantics…..

After doing a bit of research (The Canadian Encyclopedia), I found this:
“The droplets in a small cumulus cloud have a total surface area of about 1000 km2. Thus even a small cloud reflects 90% or more of the incident sunlight, making it appear brilliantly white when seen from above or from the side. Viewed from below, however, clouds appear dark, because most of the sunlight that enters them has already been scattered back to space or absorbed by the cloud droplets.”
Who wudda thunk?

foinavon (12:07:42) :
“It’s perhaps easier to think of the water vapour feedback as an ‘amplification’ of the primary forcing.
That’s all pretty well established science…”
Except… that over the RAOB era, a period reputedly marked by ‘global warming’,
relative AND absolute humidity as measured by the imperfect but best we’ve got measurements,
indicate a NEGATIVE FEED BACK!
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/GlobalRelativeHumidity300_700mb.jpg
The errors of the water vapor feedback are pretty obvious,
even without the RAOB data falsifying it.
For one thing, the source of water vapor is the surface, namely the oceans,
so subsiding air is largely impervious to additional water vapor.
And by surface area, most of the atmosphere
(by surface area, not mass which must balance) is subsiding.
And rising air is precisely that from which precipitation is likely to occur.
In addition, dynamics drive water vapor. Notice in the animation the ITCZ.
Cold air masses plow humid air back toward the equator, a process that will not cease with CO2.
But the biggest logical issue with water vapor as a positive feedback is the obvious: Why isn’t water vapor a feedback to WATER VAPOR?
Clearly there are times with lesser and greater water vapor.
Why wouldn’t a period of greater water vapor lead to warmer temperatures which would lead to greater water vapor which would lead to higher temperatures, which would…

Barrasso demands independent UN Climategate Investigation
http://www.littlechicagoreview.com/pages/full_story/full_story?content_instance_id=5178645

Steve said:
“Clearly there are times with lesser and greater water vapor.
Why wouldn’t a period of greater water vapor lead to warmer temperatures which would lead to greater water vapor which would lead to higher temperatures, which would…”
Eureka! You may have hit upon the very crux of this entire argument. Kudos!

Jean Parisot (12:58:03) :
atmospheric CO2 levels are directly measured at a large number of sites around the world:
http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/wdcgg.html
one can make lots of intercomparisons of the data. For example,
compare the two data sets here (Mauna Loa and the averaged sea surface sites):
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
or look at an entirely seperate data set. For example the atmospheric CO2 measure at the South Pole:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/csiro/CSIROCO2SOUTHPOLE.JPG
These differ by very small amounts (less than 1%).
Very small local differences in CO2 are unlikely to be climatically significant. The equilibrium temperature rise from a change in atmospheric CO2 levels is small (it’s somethng like:
Temp rise = ln([CO2]2/[CO2]1)*3/ln2
within the median value of the climate sensitivity), and one can determine that the difference in forcing between a value of 386 ppm and 378 ppm (say) is not very significant.
I don’t know what the altitude depndence of CO2 mixing is. I expect it’s likely to be more efficiently mixed at higer altitudes because the major differences must relate to the CO2 sources which are ground level (apart from methane oxidation to CO2). Once CO2 levels mix, they’re not going to “un-mix”. The climatically relevant altitudes for the CO2 greenhouse effects are the high ones since it’s the average height from which longwave IR is emitted to space that is relevant to CO2-enhancement of the greenhouse effect.
That’s what comes to mind.

Steve (13:09:28) and RockyRoad (13:21:38) :
I answered that point here:
foinavon (12:07:42) :
“If some forcing (solar, greenhouse gas or whatever) results in a 1 oC warming of the atmosphere, and the resulting water vapour feedback adds an additional x of warming then the total warming from the primary forcing+ water vapour feedback is something like 1 + x + x^2 + x^3 + x^4 …
which is 1/(1-x). ”
So water vapour is a feedback (or amplification) to water vapour (that’s where the decreasing series comes from). That’s really straightforward. It would only be the “runaway”-style effect that you insinuate, if the water vapour response to the primary warming produced a warming close to or greater than the primary forcing…but it doesn’t.

OT: Something odd going on with the Oulo Neutron Monitor ? malfunction?
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startdate=1964/01/01&starttime=00:00&enddate=2010/01/01&endtime=00:01&resolution=Automatic%20choice&picture=on

Allan M (13:07:22) :

Positive feedback – schpositive feedback. Where’s the amplifier?

It’s not clear what your point is, but it’s pretty straightfoward that water vapour partitions into the atmosphere according to the atmospheric temperature (and pressure)…a warmer atmosphere contains higher levels of water vapour on average. This can be measured in the real world.
So as the atmospheric temperature rises as a result of enhanced radiative forcing (solar, greenhouse, albedo or whatever), so the atmospheric water vapour concentration rises. Since water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas, the effect of the primary forcing (solar, greenhouse, albedo or whatever) is amplified.

ReadMe file for gridding a la Mark New 2000
Tim Mitchell, 30.3.04
The main program for gridding is quick_interp_tdm2.pro
This program is based on one of Mark New’s called quick_interp.pro
This program takes as inputs the outputs from anomdtb.f90 option 3 –
see ~/code/linux/cruts and the readme file there. The location of
these files is identifed as pts_prefix. There may be an additional input
required of synthetic data, to augment sparse grids for secondary
variables – see the published literature for the reasoning here. The
synthetic files are in binary format and are identified to the program
through synth_prefix. Both identifiers are only prefixes, not full names,
because the program itself supplies the year-specific file endings.i Use
anomfac and synthfac as appropriate.
Use year1 and year2 to specify the range of years to process.
Use out_prefix to specify the location of the output files.
Use dist to specify the correlation decay distance for the climate
variable being interpolated – necessary information to determine where
to add dummy or synthetic data.
Use gs to specify the grid size – 0.5 for half-degree
Use dumpbin to dump, Mark New style, to unreadable IDL binary files
Use dumpglo to dump, Tim Mitchell style, to .glo files (suite of processing
software for .glo files under ~/code/linux/goglo)
Don’t bother with dumpmon
Use binfac and actfac as appropriate
If creating primary variables, don’t bother with synthetics.
If creating secondary variables, create (or find) primary variables, grid
at 2.5deg resolution, and store as IDL binary files. Then use
frs_gts_tdm.pro
rd0_gts_tdm.pro
vap_gts_anom.pro
to create synthetic grids for the correct variables. Then use quick_interp_tdm2.pro
on the secondary variable, with synth_prefix supplied, to create the new grids.
Bear in mind that there is no working synthetic method for cloud, because Mark New
lost the coefficients file and never found it again (despite searching on tape
archives at UEA) and never recreated it. This hasn’t mattered too much, because
the synthetic cloud grids had not been discarded for 1901-95, and after 1995
sunshine data is used instead of cloud data anyway.
To convert the output .glo files into the grim formatted files supplied to users:
1. convert these land+ocean files to land-only files using globulk.f90 option 1
(globulk.f90 is under ~/code/linux/goglo)
2. convert the land-only files to grim using rawtogrim.f90 (~/code/linux/grim)

Somebody help me. As I read this they are saying that warmer air holds more water. Who does not know that? The satellite gives them the ability to measure in more detail which I am sure is a good thing.
Where is the cause and effect of CO2 to temperature? They have 7 years of data during which time the temperature has not risen while CO2 has. It seems to me that this indicates there may be negative feedbacks.
Are they saying that water vapor rises with CO2 regardless of temperature??
What gives?

This looks to me like “proof by smiling, waving of hands, and analogy” – in other words, nothing.

Is this the satellite that crashed on takeoff recently? I was thinking maybe they reconstructed the data that it would have measured had it survived.

Foinavon: 13:44:37:
“So as the atmospheric temperature rises as a result of enhanced radiative forcing (solar, greenhouse, albedo or whatever), so the atmospheric water vapour concentration rises. Since water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas, the effect of the primary forcing (solar, greenhouse, albedo or whatever) is amplified.”
What in the world do you mean “as” temperature rises. It’s IF temperature rises, THEN water vapor rises and that still does address other feedbacks.
Your problem is obvious.

AK
Even the faked and flawed temperature data shows far less warming than the models. Please don’t “correct” things with deliberately mendacious statements.

How did NASA come up with that?
This NASA page on AIRS findings shows 3 papers finding that the models disagree with AIRS observations w.r.t. water-vapor, and 2 papers (including Dessler’s) finding that the models agree well with observations:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/science/major_findings/climate/
It also has another paper finding that “the apparent good agreement of a climate model’s broadband longwave flux with observations may be due to a fortuitous cancellation of spectral errors.”
The most comprehensive seems to be Pierce et al. 2006, which finds that the models significantly overestimate upper-tropospheric water vapor, and underestimate it for the lower troposphere.

My 14:01:09
“does NOT address….”

Smokey (14:02:14) :
Not really Smokey. As atmospheric temperatures rise the absolute humidity should rise. The relative humidity may or may not rise. Direct measurement and theory indicate that the relative humidy might stay roughly constant in a warming (or cooling atmosphere). However there is very clear evidence that the water vapour content of the atmosphere is rising as the earth’s temperature rises.
The earth may not have warmed during the last few years (2005 was the post 2008 max in all the surface data sets), but that doesn’t negate the rather well established increase in atmospheric water vapour during the last couple of decades:
Santer BD et al. (2007) Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104, 15248-15253
Soden BJ, et al (2005) The radiative signature of upper tropospheric moistening Science 310, 841-844.
Buehler SA (2008) An upper tropospheric humidity data set from operational satellite microwave data. J. Geophys. Res. 113, art #D14110
Brogniez H and Pierrehumbert RT (2007) Intercomparison of tropical tropospheric humidity in GCMs with AMSU-B water vapor data. Geophys. Res. Lett. 34, art #L17912
Gettelman A and Fu, Q. (2008) Observed and simulated upper-tropospheric water vapor feedback . J. Climate 21, 3282-3289
and so on…

lowercasefred,
“It’s IF temperature rises, THEN water vapor rises and that still does address other feedbacks.”
I think we are becoming fixated on half the story. We all know that as temperature rises, water vapour increases (Clausius-Clapeyeron). You hinted at other feedbacks, and that is entirely the point that is being missed.
Lindzen, Spencer and others have explained that there are convection and cloud formation processes that occur which are entirely missing from GCM’s. It is perfectly consistent with that view to have water vapour increasing without having a net positive feedback, if the water vapour feedback (positive) is cancelled by cloud and convection feedbacks (negative).
This tells us nothing that we don’t already know.

Some of you loons should read the scale on the NASA map/activation before rabbiting on stupidly about “no CO₂” over this part or that part of the world.
The variation is only ∓ 1% from the median. That means, for most purposes, CO₂ is very evenly spread around the earth.
Ranting how this shows there can be no AGW because bits of the earth are missing CO₂ coverage just makes you look like an idiot.

Water vapor as feed back? It was but a few months ago warmists were claiming water vapor was responsible for that devilish cold that seem to be attributable to AGW.

Ryan (12:13:44):
The Earth glows in mid-Infrared because it’s a few hundred Kelvin. How did it get a few hundred Kelvin to glow in mid-Infrared in the first place? Sunlight. Almost all of sunlight’s energy is visible light (~1/2), UV and near-Infrared (the rest). CO2 AND water vapor just happen to be /transparent/ in light and much near-Infrared (just like all the other atmosphere gasses) while blocking much mid-Infrared. I see that you are in control of my dial. I like /my/ greenhouse effect firmly between ‘Ice Age’ and ‘The Ocean Is In My Pantry’ thank you.
Read about blackbodies and greenhouse gases.
And some food for thought: Metros/subways and trains make 10 times less emissions per person than cars. And by 2020 China will be kicking our ass. You will be able to go on thousands of miles of 220mph high speed rail – the first thousand kilometer line opening next week. I don’t want China kicking our ass while they’re still a not developed-yet country!

@richard (14:41:13) :
Here is a paper that Dr. Spencer presented to the same AGU panel that shows that you can see Higher temps make more clouds and that reduces temp from Satellite Data. Here is the link to his paper:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/satellite-and-climate-model-evidence/
And here is the PP presentation from the Fall 2009 AGU meeting:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Spencer-Forcing-Feedback-AGU-09-San-Francisco-final.pdf

As someone who lives in a tropical area a few hundred metres from the sea, I have always been puzzled by the theory that more water vapor causes higher temperatures. Is it a coincidence that the major centres of science don’t appear to be by the sea, but inland? Do these scientists have no practical knowledge of what actually happens?
This is my experience, but it can be validated simply by comparing the daily temperatures of seaside areas with corresponding latitude temperatures of inland areas.
The seaside areas usually have quite even temperatures within a smaller range between cold and high. In our area, summer and winter, there is not much difference. Lowest temperature is about 14 deg, highest about 30 deg celcius.
Yes it can be knee bendingly humid at times. However, after a week of cloudy skies, and high humidity, the temperature does not get hotter, it actually gets cooler! When the cloud goes and the sun shines directly, there is a day or so of even higher humidity, as the sun dries out the land, and then it settles back into normal tropical just hot n humid.
But take a look at the inland temps of towns at the same latitude. They get much hotter during the day, and much colder during the night.
Absence of water vapour means higher temperatures, and higher extremes.
That’s just my take on the whole science of the amplification feedback theory … and I am not on the payroll of anyone, just retired.

Steve (14:57:55) :
A doubling of the primary warming by the water vapour feedback is perfectly consistent with empirical and theoretical understanding and observation.
If the water vapour response to 1 oC of atmospheric warming is 0.5 oC, then the total feedback (amplification) is 1/(1-0.5) = 2 oC. In other words a doubling as Dessler indicates. If it is 0.6 oC then the net warming from a 1 oC pimary rise with feedbacks is (1/(1-0.6) = 2.5 oC.
This doesn’t lead to a “runaway” effect, obviously.
I suspect that the RAOB data (which I’m not familiar with; can you clarify a source for this please) concerns relative humidity and not absolute humidity. There’s pretty incontrovertible evidence that absolute atmospheric humidity is risen dring the last several decades. In fact it rises and falls as the atmospheric temperature rises and falls (e.g. it’s decrease is measured following major volcanic eruptions); see references in my post [foinavon (14:17:30) ]

OT but Sir David King was just on BBC Newsnight in front of a small audience to try to convince them of the science, given that polls show 50% of UK people are unconvinced.
Someone asked him about CRU emails, and his reply was words to the effect, “you have to ask yourself their motives, as these emails go back 10 years so someone was gathering them all this time, only to release them now… and also bear in mind this was a highly sophisticated hack, so who did it, a highly skilled foreign service.. ?”
I don’t know what I found most insulting to the audience’s intelligence, his cock and bull story that CRU was hacked 10 years ago and their communications have been monitored ever since, or the scientist who came on to prove global warming using two plastic bottles with water, one with and one without CO2, being heated by a couple of lamps.
Anyway, the way Sir David King avoided the question and spun a yarn about highly sophisticated hacking by foreign secret services…. my wife said he came across as sinister.

@foinavon: 13:04:08 ” positive feedback is essentially a positive amplification”
No, positive amplification means that the input is made greater by some factor to produce a greater output, but is not fed back to the input again. Positive feedback means that the output is returned to the input in such a way as to aid the original input to make a larger output which then feeds bacxk again to the input to make a yet larger output thus becoming unstable. That is exactly what is being suggested with the water vapour. Warming causes the oceans to evaporate which releases more water vapour, water vapour is a greenhouse gas so more warming occurs (that isn’t actually what a greenhouse gas does but nevermind), this causes more evaporation which then causes yet more water vapour causing more warming causing yet more evaportation until the whole thing becomes unstable.
It doesn’t actually matter in a positive feedback system how big the positive feedback is – because the effect will simply rotate around the feedback system getting bigger and bigger until it was first noticeable and ultimately disastrous.
However, since the logic of this would hold equally true without CO2 involved, then the earth’s climate would already have hit an unstable point which would have wiped out life on earth. Since this has not happened we can clearly see the presence of a positive feedback mechanism involving water vapour can be dismissed, and since this has held true over a long time and with a variety of different climatic conditions since the over millions of years we can futher suggest that water vapour impact on climate must be inherently stable and thus must introduce a negative feedback mechanism – i.e. any increase in water vapour is likely to produce an effect that opposes the effect that originally caused the increase in water vapour.
The fact that neither you nor the subject of this thread can appreciate the lack of logic in the concept of water vapour having a positive feedback effect says a lot about the knowledge of both of you. Biologists understand positive feedback, so to physicists, mathemeticians and evolutionists. So why do climate scientists sturglle with this simple concept?

On the conjunction of NASA and Andrew ‘Positive Feedback’ Dessler. A year ago Dessler was calling for the removal of NASA chief administrator Michael Griffin for some incautiously skeptical remarks about climate change:
http://www.grist.org/article/What-to-do-on-day-one/
Shortly afterwards Griffin was gone, replaced by Obama’s appointee.

@ Jason: “The Earth glows in mid-Infrared because it’s a few hundred Kelvin.”
Sure is. Which is roughly were it stays. About 293Kelvin, day or night. Whereas the moon varies between 3Kelvin and 400Kelvin depending on whether the sun is shining on it or not.
Thank goodness for those greenhouse gases! Now tell me why I should be so concerned about getting precisely the RIGHT sort of greenhouse gases? Oh – you believe in the great celestial thermostat where exactly the right types of gases in exactly the right proportions have been carefully mixed t make life on earth possible for eons. Get down on your knees and pray my son – you’ve just seen God’s signature written in the stratosphere. Funny, he’s not usually so obvious….
By the way trains don’t really emit less CO2 than cars unless….
you are comapring diesel trains to petrol cars.
the train is full both going and on return
you really want to go from C to D and not from A to B.
You forget that the first carriage of a train needs to be built to take the strain of the following carriages which is why….
… they are really very heavy and the ticket is strangely expensive compared to taking the car.
You know, you really ought to write down some of these myths you believe in Jason. I reckon they’d make a good yarn if you joined them all together.

This data seems to raise more questions which deserve analysis rather than an early conclusion that it supports the AGW models.
I don’t see how this shows anything “significant” at all. Surely no one believes that the atmosphere immediately mixes CO2 uniformly as soon as it is emitted. Didn’t the AGW models take account of wind. I think it’s been around for a few decades, at least since records began… at least long enough to build it into the models.
If the AGW models assumed it was uniform then surely that is a major weakness, especially given that latitude is a very significant factor in radiated heat impacting the earths temperature. But seriously if I half filled my bathtub with cold water and then turned on the hot tap and swished the water around while the tap was running would I expect to get the same temperature across the whole bathtub? No, I get hotter temps near the hot tap (which is why I move my ass to the other end of the tub!) but the general temp will be pretty close i.e. it’s not icy at one end and scorching at the other – there will be a temperature gradient. So surely the question is “what is the CO2 concentration gradient that we would expect to see around the earth?”. Then this could be used to see if that CO2 gradient per the model was correct.
They state “the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere, but is rather “lumpy.”
The CO2 ppm range shown is 382 to 389 “with a sensitivity of 1 or 2 ppm” – a difference of less than 2% a relative;y low gradient I would have thought. The use of red and blue suggests a much steeper gradient. Is a 2% variance between the high and the low concentration really all that dramatic given that the industrial nations that are emitting most CO2 underpin the higher concentration areas, so one would expect to find a higher concentration there? Is it “lumpy” or is it not? What is the benchmark. Uniformity is not a very scientific benchmark .
Seems to me the “scientists” don’t really know what this shows or what causes CO2 dispersal let alone where the ‘sinks’ are.

“”” Ryan Stephenson (15:32:05) :
@foinavon: 13:04:08 ” positive feedback is essentially a positive amplification”
No, positive amplification means that the input is made greater by some factor to produce a greater output, but is not fed back to the input again. Positive feedback means that the output is returned to the input in such a way as to aid the original input to make a larger output which then feeds bacxk again to the input to make a yet larger output thus becoming unstable. That is exactly what is being suggested with the water vapour. Warming causes the oceans to evaporate which releases more water vapour, water vapour is a greenhouse gas so more warming occurs (that isn’t actually what a greenhouse gas does but nevermind), this causes more evaporation which then causes yet more water vapour causing more warming causing yet more evaportation until the whole thing becomes unstable.
It doesn’t actually matter in a positive feedback system how big the positive feedback is – because the effect will simply rotate around the feedback system getting bigger and bigger until it was first noticeable and ultimately disastrous. “””
I have no idea where @foinavon ends, and Ryan Stephenson begins in the above, but positive feedback does not just keep growing and growing without limit regardless of the amount of feedback but it can.
If I have a positive feedback amplifier with a loop gain of 0.1, and I input a +1 Volt step, after a propagation delay, the feedback will return a +0.1 Volt step which will add to the input Volt; so after a further propagation delay, that will return an additional 10mVolt step to the input, which will subsequently give a 1 mVolt addition. Eventually after an infinite time, the total effective input will be 10/9 Volts, and the amplified output will be 10/9 times what it would be without the feedback, and the whole thing will be perfectly stable.
And water vapor does that to keep the earth at around 288Kelvins, instead of 255 or whatever the presumed black body equilibroium temperature is at the earth’s orbital distance from the sun. and moreover it would do that even in the complete absence of CO2 from earth’s atmosphere. The average amount of global cloud cover would likely be different without the CO2 but the average temperature won’t be much differnt from what it is now.
Water vapor is a green house gas; all greenhouse gases can cause warming, and global warming can produce increased amounts of water vapor, and also CO2 due to ocean outgassing.
So CO2 is also a feedback component just like water vapor is claimed to be; but both are permanent components of the earth’s atmosphere, with H2O always in excess of CO2 by a long way, and doing much more LWIR absorption by a long way,a nd much more atmospheric heating by a long way.

Tom Fuller (10:33:53) :
“But I missed something here. Exactly how does AIRS validate assumptions about water vapour acting as a positive forcing?
Are they measuring quantity? Distribution? Temperature of water vapor? The press release doesn’t say…”
Good questions. I haven’t had time to review the commentary, but I’d sure be interested in Roy Spencer’s comments on this study.
I wonder if this is another “science by press release” story. If so, has it been peer reviewed?

Just had a thought:
If the CO2 is distributed unevenly about the globe as per the graphic above what does this say about the levels of CO2 in the Antarctic and Greenland Ice cores? (sorry if someone has mentioned this as I have not read all 192 comments!)

If $50 billion is offered to prove Man Made Global Warming, you gotta go for it.
If global cap and trade is introduced it will only be Other People who suffer.
The choice seems simple!

Couple of questions:
1) I assume “blue” is lower concentrations of CO2. The blue region seems to be coincident with the extents of the tropical vegetation belt around the earth. Can one assume that this region depletes the atmosphere of CO2?
2) Assuming “red” is high concentrations of CO2, the northern and southern hemisphere yellow and red belts seem to be above 30 degrees latitude. Prevailing mid-troposphere winds are westerlies at these latitudes so how does one account for the highest CO2 concentrations being over the Atlantic, east of the US Atlantic seaboard and particularly, west of the Mexican Pacific coast? The troposphere has strong vertical mixinig to the surface so I would assume CO2 concentrations should be just east of their origin.
The biggest red blob is over the US desert southwest, stretching from Arizona to Oklahoma, a region that isn’t exactly a nexus of heavy industry. The map outline is a bit tough to read. Is there an animated sequence of these pictures? Maybe Mexico’s red blob is due to northeast trade-winds?

foinavon,
Help me with understanding this: If water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and given it’s far more plentiful than CO2, why does one need to concern themselves with CO2’s minuscule contribution to positive feedback? Why can’t the system be entirely described using only water vapor as a first order approximation?
It just doesn’t sit well with me that CO2, a minor constituent gas of relatively mediocre greenhouse properties, can influence the behavior of the dominant greenhouse gas.
Please excuse my perspective. I’m an EE so I’m used to using positive and negative feedback as terms in understanding things in my world instead of “forcing”.

Also, is the whole of the greenhouse effect logarithmic? Or just CO2?

Steve Hempell (16:26:06) :
Just found the scale on the graphic.
“If the CO2 is distributed unevenly about the globe as per the graphic above what does this say about the levels of CO2 in the Antarctic and Greenland Ice cores?”
Not an issue.