From this NASA press release I’ll have more on this later. The timing of this release is interesting.
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WASHINGTON – Researchers studying carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas and a key driver of global climate change, now have a new tool at their disposal: daily global measurements of carbon dioxide in a key part of our atmosphere. The data are courtesy of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft.
Moustafa Chahine, the instrument’s science team leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., unveiled the new product at a briefing on recent breakthroughs in greenhouse gas, weather and climate research from AIRS at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. The new data, which span the seven-plus years of the AIRS mission, measure the concentration and distribution of carbon dioxide in the mid-troposphere–the region of Earth’s atmosphere that is located between 5 to 12 kilometers, or 3 to 7 miles, above Earth’s surface. They also track its global transport. The product represents the first-ever release of global carbon dioxide data that are based solely on observations. The data have been extensively validated against both aircraft and ground-based observations.
“AIRS provides the highest accuracy and yield of any global carbon dioxide data set available to the research community, now and for the immediate future,” said Chahine. “It will help researchers understand how this elusive, long-lived greenhouse gas is distributed and transported, and can be used to develop better models to identify ‘sinks,’ regions of the Earth system that store carbon dioxide. It’s important to study carbon dioxide in all levels of the troposphere.”
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.
Carbon dioxide is transported in the mid-troposphere from its sources to its eventual sinks. More carbon dioxide is emitted in the heavily populated northern hemisphere than in its less populated southern counterpart. As a result, the southern hemisphere is a net recipient, or sink, for carbon dioxide from the north. AIRS data have previously shown the complexity of the southern hemisphere’s carbon dioxide cycle, revealing a never-before-seen belt of carbon dioxide that circles the globe and is not reflected in transport models.
In another major finding, scientists using AIRS data have removed most of the uncertainty about the role of water vapor in atmospheric models. The data are the strongest observational evidence to date for how water vapor responds to a warming climate.
“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.
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. Since water is a greenhouse gas, it serves as a powerful positive feedback to the climate system, amplifying the initial warming. AIRS measurements of water vapor reveal that water greatly amplifies warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide. Comparisons of AIRS data with models and re-analyses are in excellent agreement.
“The implication of these studies is that, should greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current course of increase, we are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century, unless some strong negative feedback mechanism emerges elsewhere in Earth’s climate system,” Dessler said.
Originally designed to observe atmospheric temperature and water vapor, AIRS data are already responsible for the greatest improvement to five to six-day weather forecasts than any other single instrument, said Chahine. JPL scientists have shown a major consequence of global warming will be an increase in the frequency and strength of severe storms. Earlier this year, a team of NASA researchers showed how AIRS can significantly improve tropical cyclone forecasting. The researchers studied deadly Typhoon Nargis in Burma (Myanmar) in May 2008. They found the uncertainty in the cyclone’s landfall position could have been reduced by a factor of six had more sophisticated AIRS temperature data been used in the forecasts.
AIRS observes and records the global daily distribution of temperature, water vapor, clouds and several atmospheric gases including ozone, methane and carbon monoxide. With the addition of the mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide data set this week, a seven-year digital record is now complete for use by the scientific community and the public.
Animation of the 3-D transport and distribution of water vapor as measured by AIRS from June through November 2005. Image credit: NASA › Play animation (Quicktime) | › Play animation (Windows Media Player)
enlarge imageFor more on AIRS, see http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
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“In another major finding, scientists using AIRS data have removed most of the uncertainty about the role of water vapor in atmospheric models. The data are the strongest observational evidence to date for how water vapor responds to a warming climate.
“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.”
Exactly what have they found? This article just states that they have a major finding which removes uncertainty. Am I misreading this? Because I would like to know what that major finding actually consists of. Areas with higher CO2 also have higher water vapour content? Water vapour clouds increased the last five years?
There seems to be no data here.
Dave F:
“Can anyone say why an increase in water vapor will not also cause an increase in water vapor?”
Because water vapor eventually condensates and comes back down as rain or snow. CO2 does not. CO2 is kind of the “platform” that temperature rests on. When CO2 levels change, this platform is “raised” or “lowered”. Without any CO2 in the atmosphere, this planet might well be in the “snowball Earth” state.
“Too much” CO2 on the other hand, and many parts of the world may become uninhabitable – either because they turn into deserts, or that they become submerged by the ocean. I don’t think we are looking at impending doom – but a severe climate crisis sure would cost a lot more to fix than the recent financial crisis.
The less we tamper with the climate system, the better off we are.
Perhaps this guy can now explain why the oceans haven’t been evaporated long ago because if water vapour feedbacks on CO2 it must also do that on itself, producing an ever increasing feedback frenzy until all the water has disappeared and gets boiled off into space.
On another note: the snow is early this year, here in England.
I don’t quite understand this. They have measured water vapor for 7+ years when there has been no global warming and find that water vapor increases when there is global warming? Have I understood it correctly? How did they then get this result? How can they draw conclusions about what global warming will do when they do measurements in a period with no global warming?
foinavon, just for you, I have transcribed word for word what Sir David King said from iPlayer.
Please read this word for word, and if you refuse my transcription, please provide one of your own. I have triple checked this transcription. You will notice the subtlety of the wording. Oh, and whilst making allegations, he doesn’t answer the woman’s question either.
What are we to make of the wording, “Remember that these emails go back to 1998, so they’ve been accumulating them…”, in the context of, “an extraordinarily sophisticated piece of work, to hack into all of these emails, and, and mobile phone conversations”, and, “what agencies [can] manage that?”
They go back to 1998 and they’ve been accumulating them… ?????
There is nothing sophisticated about grabbing an email archive snapshot from a server. But he’s answering a question about emails with an allegation about mobile phone conversations and agencies with extraordinary sophistication accumulating stuff over 10 years, including mobile phone conversations?
If he was just some guy down the pub it would be entertaining. But coming from a Chief Scientific Advisor, I feel he is insulting our intelligence.
Remember, this is the man who was asked to leave South Africa because he felt that the colored man working in the kitchen was just as intelligent an individual as anybody else. It was really disappointing to hear this story about how you should focus on the motivations of the hackers, “agencies”. And he didn’t convince the woman nor the presenter either. She had to ask him again and the presenter had to ask him again and then he was forced to point blank state that the behaviour revealed in the East Anglia emails was “unacceptable”.
Sir David King: “Let me say this as clearly as I can: that sort of behaviour is totally unacceptable”.
Yes, we know. Pity the interviewer and audience had to press you to get that answer, after he’d “left them” to think about sophisticated agencies recording phone conversations.
yonason (11:19:38):
“How does all that correlate with volcanic activity?”
Maybe the following explains why measurements at at CO2 monitoring stations are error prone.
“Greenhouse Gas Observatories Downwind from Erupting Volcanoes”
“If localized volcanic activity is affecting CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa, why would the “global network” be following along? Perhaps it’s because all of the CO2 stations — including the NOAA’s other baseline stations at the South Pole; American Samoa; Trinidad Head, CA; and Pt. Barrow, AK — are subject to localized, and in some cases regional, CO2 influences. ”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/greenhouse_gas_observatories_d.html
foinavon (13:44:37) :
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.
The only sort of amplifiers that drive themselves are the political ones. So perhaps it is fitting that in your thermosocialist paradise, where everything warms everything else – nothing can ever be allowed to cool (and governments can print infinite quantities of money), that this feedback-which-doesn’t-feed-back can be used to artificially inflate the inconveniently small numbers. The rest of the universe is restricted by the First Law of Thermodynamics. But this is seemingly not a problem. When the greenies take power they will immediately repeal this capitalist creation, and everygreen will live happily ever after.
” There’s pretty incontrovertible evidence….’
How can anything be ‘pretty’ incontrovertible? It’s like saying a woman is ‘pretty pregnant’, or that a corpse is ‘pretty dead.’
” toyotawhizguy (20:44:53) :
“I zeroed in on this:
““The implication of these studies is that, should greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current course of increase, we are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century, unless some strong negative feedback mechanism emerges elsewhere in Earth’s climate system,” Dessler said.”
“virtually certain” I detect some hedging here.”
______________
See above comment, although, save in mathematics, there are things that can be ‘virtually’ certain, i.e. a guilty verdict of a jury should be ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’
I’m a language guy, so I may be overly keyed into word usage, but note that there are, in that sentence, two loopholes big enough to drive a fourteen-wheeler through, one being ‘virtually’ and the other the ‘unless’ clause, which concedes the possibility of processes of negative feedback that remain to be discovered.
Is understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere so nearly perfected that a concession of the possibility of as yet undiscovered ‘negative feedbacks’ can be relegated to an ‘unless’ clause?
yonason (11:19:38):
“How does all that correlate with volcanic activity?”
Maybe the following explains why measurements at at CO2 monitoring stations are error prone.
“Greenhouse Gas Observatories Downwind from Erupting Volcanoes”
“If localized volcanic activity is affecting CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa, why would the “global network” be following along? Perhaps it’s because all of the CO2 stations — including the NOAA’s other baseline stations at the South Pole; American Samoa; Trinidad Head, CA; and Pt. Barrow, AK — are subject to localized, and in some cases regional, CO2 influences. ”
@foinavon
“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.”
I think that wouldn’t count for albedo, since higher temperatures and consequential more watervapour do not automatically lead to less clouds. I can even imagine it leading to more clouding, which then would increase albedo of earth, thus resulting in a negative feedback.
Is there a pocket of CO2 around Moana Loa? (sp) May be CO2 data points should be checked.
It is no surprise that the water vapor feedback is positive. What needs to be understood is that water vapor is just one component of the water cycle, and the net feedback of the water cycle may be negative. Wentz’s paper in Science found that precipitation increased significantly during the recent warming, but that all of the AR4 models reproduced less than one third to one half of the increase. This is a correlated under representation of the negative feedback of precipitation. This and other correlated errors found in diagnostic studies of the models are far larger than the less than 1 W/m^2 of energy imbalance Hansen found in the warming of the 90s. The models don’t yet qualify as quantitative evidence for the attribution and projection of the small a phenomenon.
The alarmism requires climate sensitivities to CO2 in the model range, 2 to 4+ degrees C. The null hypothesis should be that climate sensitivities to CO2 are in the range of CO2’s direct effects 0.5 to 1.5 degrees C. I’ve yet to see model independent evidence that the current climate sensitivities to CO2 are in the higher range.
Spencer’s work confirms and supplements what Wentz found. If sensitivities to CO2 are in the null hypothesis range, then the future climate will be warmer than it would otherwise have been, but it may not necessarily be warmer than the 1990s unless solar activity returns to grand maximum levels and the Atlantic and Pacific multidecadal oscillations also “coincidentally” return to their warm phases. In other words, AGW may only be a slight warming shift in climate swamped by natural variation which may well make most of the decades in the next century cooler than the 1990s.
toyotawhizguy (23:48:43) :
“This statement immediately got me thinking that it would be interesting to collect the data and overlay worldwide airline traffic routes over this global mapping of CO2, and look for correlations. ”
Looking at the following map I cannot see any correlation.(http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/411791main_slide5-AIRS-full.jpg)
The North Atlantic route between Europe and the USA cannot be identified, and I would have thought that routes from Atlanta or Chicago would also show as each is busier than say London Heathrow by a factor of 2.
Of course the Troposhere mixes freely and different manmade sources of CO2 cannot be identified and it is unreasonable to think that the small contribution from avaition is just going to sit there while all other sources move about.
Increasing CO2 driving increasing H2O (vapor) is the key hypothesis that the AGW crowd has to prove. I don’t see how they can possibly be right.
We haven’t already been fried since CO2 concentrations were higher in the past
Energy principles (The Miskolczi-principle, http://miskolczi.webs.com/ ) preclude it
Evaporating water carries latent heat to the cloud tops where condensation (cloud formation) releases it; This acts as an efficient global cooling system
to name just a few.
I am very interested in the detailed proof of this assertion. I suspect that it will not hold up under scrutiny.
When I read this piece I had the same question as Lars. If global temps have been neutral to falling for the last 10 years, how can the JPL attribute the increase in water vapor to AGW for the last 7 years? There has been no AGW during thier test period. Either thier water vapor calculations are off, or something else is at play.
“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.”
While that’s a possible theoretical mechanism, it doesnt change the gross level of absorption of Co2 by the oceans, which was recently measured at about 4Gt/yr if I recall correctly.
water surface area on earth =61,132,000 km² or 61 trillion square meters, turns into
=> 0.065 Kg/m^2 /yr.
Unless my math is wrong, a mere 65 grams of Carbon in CO2 is absorbed per square meter of sea per year. So the surface area hardly seems to be the constraint, although the mechanism you postulate might a part of how it happens.
If this is NASA press release it true and the Aqua data really do say what the Aggie climatologist says they do…
… Then some rather large component of the warm up from the Little Ice Age was caused by a combination of CO2 and water vapor… Right?
So… Without all that CO2 and water vapor, Moberg’s climate reconstruction would show that it would be considerably colder now if not for the rising CO2 and water vapor over the last couple of hundred years… Right?
If all that is true… There should be some evidence that the rate of warming increased after man started burning lots of coal, oil and natural gas… Right? But the warm up from the bottom of the Little Ice Age began about 260 years before CO2 levels started to rise and the rate and magnitude of warming from 1850-2009 AD was no different than it was from 740-899 AD… Nor was the rate and magnitude of warming 1975-2009 any different than it was from 1912-1945.
The Earth’s climate is not doing anything differently than it did in the Medieval Warming… So either the Earth should be a lot colder than it was during the Medieval Warm Period or the additional CO2 and water vapor over the last 200 years hasn’t made any difference… Or pre-instrumental atmospheric CO2 levels were actually a lot higher than the ice cores indicate.
Which is it?
Should the Earth not have warmed up after the Little Ice Age? Should this warm phase of the 1,470-yr cycle be colder than the Medieval, Roman and other previous warm phases of this well documented, solar-driven cycle?
Has all of the anthropogenic CO2 and concomitant water vapor simply not made much difference?
Or were CO2 levels of 330-390 ppmv simply the norm in prior warm periods and just not apparent from ice cores (but very apparent from plant stomata data)?
I find it odd and troubling that Mauna Loa and other CO2 monitoring stations don’t have raw data. We also are not in posession of protocols for the creation of their adjusted data sets. Could the CO2 Protocols be the model for GISS and HADCRUT?
Mike
Logic of positive feedback doesn’t hold up to critical thought.
Why isn’t water vapor showing positive feedback on itself. The first drop of water vapor would bring the next drop, and so on. We should be Venus by now but we are not.
Haven’t they ever heard of the water cycle. Also important is how water vapor travels and the amount of time it spends in the atmosphere.
Pluto is 10C cooler than we would expect due to the phase change of N2.
Higher temps means more heat is absorbed in evaporation, transported to high in the atmosphere, then release when it condenses. Unless the water cycle slows, this will offset most of the water vapor GH effect.
I love it. Lumpy CO2. But of course. Okay, they did not mention clouds and the water cycle but something else to think about that would contribute to the lumpiness is the carbon sink never mentioned……rain.
Think about it!
This image tells me that Antarctic CO2 levels should be 20 to 30 ppmv less than Mauna Loa.
All of those charts of “unprecedented” atmospheric CO2 levels were made by tacking Mauna Loa data on to the end of ice core (usually Law Dome) data. This means that about 20% to 30% of the widely assumed CO2 increase from pre-industrial times is simply due to physical geography.
aaron says:
In fact, they have heard of it. And, the feedback that you are talking about even has a name — It is called the “lapse rate feedback” and it is indeed a negative feedback included in the climate models that takes back some (but not “most”) of the positive feedback due to water vapor. In fact, since much of the same physics of the transport of water vapor controls both the water vapor and lapse rate feedbacks, climate models tend to show considerably less spread in their prediction of the sum of these two feedbacks together than they do for each of the feedbacks separately. You can read more about this, for example, in Section 8.6.2.3 of the IPCC AR4 WG-1 report: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm
David Schnare says:
Even Roy Spencer has expressed a lot of skepticism regarding Lindzen’s results…mainly because he makes a comparison of the ERBE data to climate models run in a mode that isn’t really relevant for comparison to real data.
Also, Lindzen’s “iris hypothesis” as originally stated is pretty much the reverse of what you say. What Lindzen argued is that warming would lead to a DECREASE in cirrus (high) clouds in the tropics and, since the effects of high clouds tend to be to cause more warming (by reducing the emission of “longwave” IR radiation from the earth) than cooling (due to reflection of “shortwave” radiation from the sun), this decrease in high clouds would produce a negative feedback. (See, e.g., here for a description of Lindzen’s iris hypothesis: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Iris/ )