Via press release from the AGU:
Stratospheric water vapor increase at Colorado site
Water vapor in the atmosphere is responsible for a significant portion of the greenhouse effect, and even small changes in the upper troposphere or lower stratosphere can have a large effect on climate. A new analysis of balloon-borne water vapor measurements using frost point hygrometers over Boulder, Colorado, shows that stratospheric water vapor has increased over the past 30 years. Hurst et al. break the long measurement record into four discrete time periods and determined the water vapor trends in each period for five 2-kilometer-thick stratospheric layers 16 km to 26 km above the ground.
They find that, on average, stratospheric water vapor increased by about 1 part per million by volume (27 percent) over the past 30 years, though there were many shorter-term variations in the record. Water vapor levels increased during 1980 to 1989 and 1990 to 2000, decreased from 2001 to 2005, and then increased again after 2005. The authors find that, at most, 30 percent of the observed water vapor increases can be attributed to greater amounts of methane oxidation in the stratosphere. The 2001 to 2005 decrease in midlatitude water vapor has been linked to observations of anomalously low tropopause temperatures in the tropics, but, to date, no connection between the observed water vapor increases and tropical tropopause temperatures has been found despite ongoing efforts.
Source:
Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, doi:10.1029/2010JD015065, 2011
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2010JD015065
Title: Stratospheric water vapor trends over Boulder, Colorado: Analysis of the 30 year Boulder record
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A few points:
1. Boulder is not the entire world (though some there think it is), this is a single point of measurment.
2. The amount of increase is tiny, in the range of 0.04 to 0.09 parts per million per year
3. I have located a slide show from NOAA ESRL, outlining the findings in a graphically rich presentation, which you can view here (PDF)
“greater amounts of methane oxidation in the stratosphere”
Yet another chemical process high up. I’m finding references to them all the time but no one anywhere has any idea how they all interact in response to variability in the mix of wavelengths and particles coming in from the sun.
Chemical reactions especially those involving ozone and water vapour are well capable of altering the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere and thereby changing the surface pressure distribution to alter cloudiness, global albedo and the amount of sunlight getting into the oceans.
I don’t think climate change has much to do with radiative physics at all. It is more likely to be atmospheric chemistry working with the hydrological cycle.
As energy is shifted faster or slower from seas to air and from air to space the global energy budget changes for net warming or net cooling and the atmospheric heights vary accordingly for little or no surface change apart from localised warming of the ocean skin. That ocean skin provides the engine for the whole hydrological cycle with the gearing supplied from a variable mix of bottom up oceanic and top down solar influences and the fuel being solar even if some of it is from downward infra red from the atmosphere.
So, abandon all this inconclusive chatter about radiative physics and let’s look into the much more complex and unknown issue of atmospheric chemistry.
Joel and Eadler,
Put some numbers behind your strong effects beliefs. Use the reannalysis data which contains SST, precipitation rate, precipitable water, and OLR at the TOA. Calculate the temperature at the top of the atmosphere using S-B equation at a location in the Arctic and another near the equator where the amount of water in the atmosphere is an order of magnitude different. Estimate the optical thickness of the atmosphere for the two sites using the differance between SST and temperature at TOA and wet lapse rate for tropics and dry laps rate for Arctic. Regress these values on precipitation rate and precipitable water. Click on my name for another approach.
For those of us who deny the greenhouse effect of CO2 this is a somewhat academic argument. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that far from being a ‘greenhouse gas’ water vapour is in fact a moderator of temperature. As it has a high specific heat it has a cooling effect as temperatures rise. (It has nearly twice the specific heat of dry air at constant pressure.) And as temperatures fall it condenses giving up heat thus reducing cooling.
Richard E Smith says:
March 19, 2011 at 2:14 pm
For those of us who deny the greenhouse effect of CO2 this is a somewhat academic argument. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that far from being a ‘greenhouse gas’ water vapour is in fact a moderator of temperature. As it has a high specific heat it has a cooling effect as temperatures rise. (It has nearly twice the specific heat of dry air at constant pressure.) And as temperatures fall it condenses giving up heat thus reducing cooling.
The amount of water vapor in the air at its maximum is 4%. This has a small effect on the specific heat of the air.
Water vapors effect on radiation flow is much larger. Measurements show that the greenhouse radiation on average, is over 300W/M2, almost twice the solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth. Without it the earth would be 32C cooler. The condensation of water vapor does supply energy to the atmosphere, but it is far less than the greenhouse effect.
It is all summarized in this diagram:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/images/earth_rad_budget_kiehl_trenberth_1997_big.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/warming_clouds_albedo_feedback.html&h=456&w=664&sz=40&tbnid=khMQlXF5TEG-vM:&tbnh=95&tbnw=138&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dtrenberth%2Bearths%2Benergy%2Bbudget%2Bdiagram&zoom=1&q=trenberth+earths+energy+budget+diagram&hl=en&usg=__kGlmg9zxolVkeFxVufPvfrtBHf8=&sa=X&ei=CTSFTZGsNNDqgQeu7LifAg&ved=0CBsQ9QEwAA
With these numbers, why anyone would deny there is a greenhouse effect defies my imagination.
Fred H. Haynie says:
March 19, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Joel and Eadler,
Put some numbers behind your strong effects beliefs. Use the reannalysis data which contains SST, precipitation rate, precipitable water, and OLR at the TOA. Calculate the temperature at the top of the atmosphere using S-B equation at a location in the Arctic and another near the equator where the amount of water in the atmosphere is an order of magnitude different. Estimate the optical thickness of the atmosphere for the two sites using the differance between SST and temperature at TOA and wet lapse rate for tropics and dry laps rate for Arctic. Regress these values on precipitation rate and precipitable water. Click on my name for another approach.
I don’t want or need to spend time doing this.
I rely on scientists who are trained and paid to do this sort of work. They publish peer reviewed papers and other scientists check their work and build on it. They do this way better than you or I could do it. In my mind amateur scientist bloggers have a bigger burden of proof than professional scientists.
Fred H. Haynie says:
March 19, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Joel and Eadler,
Put some numbers behind your strong effects beliefs. Use the reannalysis data which contains SST, precipitation rate, precipitable water, and OLR at the TOA. Calculate the temperature at the top of the atmosphere using S-B equation at a location in the Arctic and another near the equator where the amount of water in the atmosphere is an order of magnitude different. Estimate the optical thickness of the atmosphere for the two sites using the differance between SST and temperature at TOA and wet lapse rate for tropics and dry laps rate for Arctic. Regress these values on precipitation rate and precipitable water. Click on my name for another approach.
The percentage effect of greenhouse gas components has no standard definition. Here is what Wikipedia says on the basis of different papers that have been written on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Naturally occurring greenhouse gases have a mean warming effect of about 33 °C (59 °F).[33][C] The major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36–70 percent of the greenhouse effect; carbon dioxide (CO2), which causes 9–26 percent; methane (CH4), which causes 4–9 percent; and ozone (O3), which causes 3–7 percent.[34][35][36] Clouds also affect the radiation balance, but they are composed of liquid water or ice and so have different effects on radiation from water vapor.
Eadler,
So you are a non-scientist “true believer”, having put your faith in “climate scientist” clergy and the IPCC bible. Yet you feel qualified to preach their gospel in blogs and question the qualifications of those who question you. I consider myself a scientist, having done research in atmospheric science for over twenty years; and authored or coauthored over 60 peer reviewed papers. I evaluate data to get to the truth. Google “Fred H. Haynie” and you will find some of my publications.
Fred: You play some silly statistical games, find a result completely in conflict with the accepted science built up over the last century and conclude that you are right and all that other science (which is based on much better work than simplistic statistical regressions) is wrong. That is not being scientific; it is being arrogant!
Joal,
Ask statisticians who they think has been playing “silly statistical games” before you decide who is being arrogant. The techniques I use to analyze data do not bias the results like subjectively motivated “what if” models.
eadler says:
“Water vapors effect on radiation flow is much larger. Measurements show that the greenhouse radiation on average, is over 300W/M2, almost twice the solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth. Without it the earth would be 32C cooler.”
eadler then provides a link to the absurd Kiehl & Trenberth energy flows diagram (thank you eadler, I am familiar with it as are most, if not all, readers of this blog) and goes on to say:
“With these numbers, why anyone would deny there is a greenhouse effect defies my imagination.”
So eadler, after K&T, says the greenhouse gases take the Sun’s energy and double it. Effectively another couple of Suns. Quite remarkable given that all the energy is derived from the Sun in the first place. Whatever happened to the laws of energy conservation? What is remarkable is not that anyone would deny the greenhouse effect, but that climate science has arrived at the preposterous conclusion that energy can be multiplied in this way.
Fred: Regression is notoriously bad at establishing cause-and-effect and using it in the case of CO2 global variations that are quite small is just silly, particularly when one can do spectral analyzes.
I am sorry but a poorly-executed statistical analysis does not trump a lot of more careful studies that actually take the mechanistically-understood issues into account (like the actual absorption lines of the substances involved).
The question that you should be asking is not “Where did the rest of the scientific community go wrong?” but rather “Where did I go wrong?” and, yes, the fact that you are not doing that is indeed a sign of a certain lack of humility…as well as what I would frankly call “scientific immaturity”. (Heck, it even explaining in detail where you think the scientific community has gone wrong would be an improvement over just showing your analysis and thinking it trumps all the work that they have done without you even addressing it!)
A mature scientist does not operate in a vacuum where the work of others is just ignored and his work is elevated above those of all these others. Even people like Einstein and Galileo, who were really brilliant, didn’t do this (at least to any degree that you are).
Joal,
What are your qualifications with respect to scientific research and the use of statistical techniques that allows you to be so judgemental of mine? I’m well aware of the limitations of using statistical techniques (especially trying to prove cause and effect). An early paper I wrote on the subject can be found by Googling “Fred H. Haynie”+statistics. As to understanding the effects of a couple of vibrational bands in the IR spectra of CO2, in one of my early papers I calculated the thermodynamic functions at elevated temperatures for iron penta-carbonyl and nickel carbonyl using spectral data and the rigid-rotator, harmonic oscilator approximation. As to scientific maturity and who is right and who is wrong, I was doing atmospheric research at EPA before the IPPC was born. Modern climate science has not grown up. They got a bad start by doing subjective research motivated by international politics. The real data will tell us who is right and who is wrong.
Fred: You can google “Joel D. Shore” if you want to see my qualifications. However, it is not my qualifications that are really the issue because I am not the one saying that the rest of the scientific community is wrong and I am right. If you want be taken seriously in the scientific community on this issue, I suggest you submit your study for peer-review. However, my guess is that they may want you to actually address other work in the field and may not be quite convinced that your little regression exercise illustrates how you are the second coming of Galileo and all of the evidence on the other side pales in comparison to your wonderful statistical demolition of a whole field of scientific research! But, hey, I’m just guessing! Maybe they’ll love it.
Joel,
I had done that before I ask the question. I have followed your comments on blogs as well. I’m not saying that the rest of the scientific community has got it wrong, only the small number of “climate scientist” that have been doing research and writing for the IPCC. I am not a lone scientist in this thinking. There are many more with better qualifications that think as I do and have published. You analyze the data the best you know how as I suggested and see what it tells you. If you wish to prove the point that water vapor in the stratosphere is a significant player, the reannalsis data set gives values of absolute humidity as a function of atmospheric pressure. You can determine the relative effects of each level on OLR.
Why?
Probably impossible to say. Expect a whole load of conjecture that CO2-induced warming came first, and that this is positive feedback, but there’s nothing here that shows cause and/or effect, or in what order.
“”””” Joe Dunfee says:
March 19, 2011 at 6:52 am
I have never seen any studies documenting how much H2O man emits. Many industrial processes emit steam. Air conditioners often use water cooling towers. Even our breathing emits H2O.
I wonder how much of the anthropogenic green house gasses emitted by man is H2O, and what percentage of the greenhouse effect is caused by this.
Will the EPA seek regulation powers for H2O soon? Well we know that the emissions of CO2 from the chemical conversion of Hydrocarbons; probably emits even more H2O than CO2, seeing as most hydrocarbons have more H2, than C. Well not with Aromatic hydrocarbons; but those are typically not allowed in for example gasoline, being somewhat carcinogenic.