From the “this is not the looney chemtrails idea” and the “how much of this can be attributed to climate jet-setter Bill McKibben?” department, comes this data.
Guest essay by Don Spencer
The recent “hiatus” in the global temperature record has thrown a dark cloud on carbon dioxide’s position in explaining climate change. Whereas the temperature record has been relatively constant for the last fifteen or so years the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has increased more-or-less unabated casting doubt over its influence. Climatologists have been scrambling to explain the temperature hiatus as just that, a hiatus or pause, where the greenhouse energy is temporarily stored away in the ocean to [wreak] its vengeance on us at a later time.
But maybe the simpler explanation is that we are backing the wrong gas and water vapor is the really important greenhouse gas, after all it currently accounts for more than 85% of the current greenhouse effect that supports life on this planet. Water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide by virtue of its asymmetric molecular structure that allows more vibration modes hence more opportunities to capture and adsorb radiant energy.
Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
The trouble is that global water vapor concentration is difficult to measure and even harder to pin on humans. However since WWII humans have been conducting a great atmospheric seeding experiment. Thousands of large flying machines have been circling the earth day and night releasing millions of tons of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. The fuel used is typically kerosene (C12H26); when a molecule of kerosene burns in oxygen we ideally get twelve molecules of carbon dioxide and thirteen molecules of water vapor and a bunch of heat.
To estimate the amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide released we can look at the global aviation fuel usage from 1984-2010 which was obtained from
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?product=jet-fuel. Note these statistics include both kerosene and naphtha aviation fuels.
We can see the consumption was less than two million barrels/day in 1984 and has risen to about five million barrels/day in 2010. The growth rate since about 2004 has been modest due to significant improvements in airliner efficiency. In the next figure the GISS global temperature has been plotted against the aviation fuel consumption. The correlation is quite good, better in fact than that for carbon dioxide. So if we all stop flying will we save the earth? Maybe, maybe not, as correlation alone does not necessarily imply causality but we do have a viable hypothesis, water vapor is a significant greenhouse gas and we are injecting vast quantities of it into the atmosphere via air travel. The temperature hiatus (if it is a hiatus) is explained by lower consumption and emissions due to more efficient jet engines. If this mechanism were correct and we did stop emitting water vapor then the atmospheric water vapor would soon reach a lower equilibrium and the temperature should fall back.
It is interesting to speculate what might happen if we do back the wrong gas. We shut down our fossil systems; coal-fired power stations, hydrocarbon based transportation and replace these with say renewable or nuclear energy and develop a “green” hydrogen economy producing nothing but “clean” water vapor. We would stop our CO2 emissions but vastly increase our water vapor output. This could actually make the earth warmer so we must make sure we get it right. The right answer is not known, more real science is needed with all hypotheses on the table.
I’m sure there’s a correlation to the consumption of fairy cakes to global temperature somewhere!
Water vapour is no more plausible for observed surface temperatures than CO2 is.
Such a shame that the writers for this web page are just as clueless as the alarmists when it comes to believing in a fictitious Greenhouse Effect.
You all do a great job in pointing out satellite temperature data and absurd alarmist claims, but until you accept that gravity, atmospheric mass and distance to the sun are the only relevant criteria for mean temperatures, you will keep embarrassing yourselves.
Hmmm…So instead of a “carbon footprint” we would have a “hydrogen footprint”?
More like a “water foot print” . Made by somebody who walks on water. Wait a minute ….that’s a differnt fairy tail.
This is a new hype to stop nuclear technology when it turned out that CO2 is not the real threat.
Anthony, you shouldn’t tease Bill McKibben so. Just know that you have a broader understanding of this issue and reality will prove you correct in time, then you can be the bigger person and forgive/forget.
Skeptic logic.
1. It got warm before without c02 increasing (think MWP) therefore it cant be c02.
hows that logic hold up?
looking at 1900 to 1940 I see it getting warmer, but there are no jets in that period.
Therefore, applying #1, jets today cant be the cause of warming.
You got that from Skepticalscience.com?
..Are you really that stupid or are you just practicing to be a liberal politician ???
2.From 1940 to 1976 it got colder (before data massage) and jet travel increased a LOT.
3. From 1976 to 1997 it warmed a lot and jet travel went crazy.
4. From 1997 to present warming is barely crawling and jet travel went viral.
Skeptic logic: particularly when 1. above is included, ain’t much correlation.
Warmist “logic”.
1. We don’t know what else could have caused the slight warming late last century, therefore it must be CO2.
How’s that logic holding up?
Jets or no jets.
Mr. Mosher,
I’m sure you had some kind of convincing argument buried in that comment, but what was it ?
Other than snark.
Correlation is not causation
Jets fly nearer TOA where most of the energy is being radiated to space rather than to the surface (lots of atmosphere between surface and TOA). Look at the global distribution of those flights. The obvious difference between SH and NH and all the great circle flights that traverse the Arctic circle. Could this help explain NH CO2 concentrations being greater than SH concentrations and Artic CO2 concentrations being the highest?
“The right answer is not known, more real science is needed with all hypotheses on the table.”
The sarcastic and cynical side of me says that “climate scientists” will not be performing any of that real science needed. In other words, “climate scientists” such as M. Mann need not apply.
Global temperature increased and CO2 increased, therefore CO2 causes more warming. Warmist logic?
Recall this post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/16/agu15-accidental-geoengineering-airline-traffic-may-help-create-an-icy-haze-thats-brightening-u-s-skies/
It’s not about more greenhouse effect, it’s about more scattered sunlight reaching the surface, global brightening or whitening of the sky.
Ummmmmmm no…..The contrails would act like clouds and DEFLECT the sunlight back into space, as was seen on the days following 911..it got hotter without the contrails.
[“Reflect” instead? .mod]
Oops….Thanks Mod
One factor that is not quantified yet is the influence of cosmic rays on CCNs and aerosols at the TOA. Might jet engines be mixing existing particulates with water vapor (which enhances nucleation of the ice particles in the turbulence of the contrail) and getting an energy boost to form CCNs from TOA radiation levels?
That’s what I said ( in laymen terms ) …….
Correlation doesn’t imply causality. But air traffic does have some effect on temperatures, although it is very hard to describe in exact values: It helps with high clouds formation, although it is crucial that good conditions for their development already exist: for example, in high pressure air fields, contrails vane in a few minutes time, while on edges of atmospheric fronts, they can last for hours.
“Water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide by virtue of its asymmetric molecular structure that allows more vibration modes”
This is the second time I’ve seen this claim lately. I am sorry to be a pedantic nit-picker here, as it doesn’t really affect the larger point, but this is worth getting right.
CO2 has four vibrational modes, water has three. Two of CO2’s modes occur together, so in practice three modes could be observed for each. Of those three, it’s true that the symmetric stretch of CO2 cannot absorb IR energy, whereas the symmetric stretch of water can, because CO2 is linear and water is not.
But it is not the case that water is a more effective greenhouse gas because it has more vibrational modes. In any case, I don’t believe you can compare one absorber to another by saying, This one has more IR-active modes, so it’s a better absorber. SF6 has only one IR-active mode, and pound for pound it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas. We just don’t worry as much about it because we’re not releasing gigatons of it.
“Of those three, it’s true that the symmetric stretch of CO2 cannot absorb IR energy, whereas the symmetric stretch of water can, because CO2 is linear and water is not.”
JPS, could you please explain about the above sentence, what the result is in regard to the greenhouse effect of respectively CO2 and H2O?
Sorry to be unclear. What I meant is that you just can’t translate these qualitative fundamentals to a quantitative comparison of greenhouse effectiveness. CO2 has four vibrational modes but only two IR-active modes. Water has three, all of them IR-active. What you can’t then conclude is that 3>2, so water is more effective, because this skips over how broad these absorbances are with respect to wavelength, how intensely a given concentration absorbs, etc.
Googling around for images of the IR spectrum of CO2 versus water vapor, I found this earlier WUWT post, which conveys several of the factors at work better than I have.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant-greenhouse-gas/
Thanks for the answer, JPS
Dear JPS
Thank you for the correction. I was paraphrasing (possibly inaccurately) something my father-in-law had told me. He was head of the gas spectrometry lab at the UK Atomic Energy in the 1950/60s and did a lot of work on CO2. Interestingly way back in 2000 he was skeptical about CO2 role because it was such a good blocker of IR that he felt it would fully saturate in about 10m at 300ppm. He has softened his opinion since due to the weaker sidebands.
Sorry. Nit-pick karma caught up to me. SF6 has three IR-active modes, not one, but they are degenerate, and therefore absorb the same energy.
Hmmmm. One airplane engine releasing water vapor at around 500 mph, just by definition will release 10 times the water vapor than a smokestake whose emissions exit the smokestack at 50 mph (assuming the same concentration of course). So if one airplane engine has 10 times the emissions of a smokestack, and most planes have two engines, and water vapor has 5 times (ish) the greenhouse gas potency of carbon dioxide, this could be significant. It should be studied (although we know it hasn’t and won’t).
Bernie, ” (assuming the same concentration of course)”
This is where your calculations fall short. You left out cross sectional area of the exhaust stream, for starters. Even if jet engine exhaust and electricity generation plant smoke stacks had the same concentration of water vapor, a smokestack has much more than ten times the cross sectional area of the tail pipe of a jet engine.
Secondly, because a jet flies at around 500 mph doesn’t mean the engines are exhausting gas at around 500 mph.
Evaluating water vapor emitted into the atmosphere by judging exhaust speed is doing it the hard way. Better to work from fuel consumed.
SR
I think by definition the exhaust gases have to be doing 500mph and probably a little better. That said, totally agree that you have to go to fuel consumption if you want to compare. The engines get throttled back at altitude so you probably spew as much water on the way up as the rest of the trip.
The exhaust leaves the engine much faster than the airplane goes forward. Think in terms of balancing forces (F=M*V^2). Why do you think they call it a Jet? The jet out the rear is also pushing a lot of air that the “jet” is dragging with it. When it is supersonic it drags a sound wave with a good bit of force.
The plane is doing 500mph going east
The motion is caused by the reaction of force (Newton)
In the perfect world reaction = force
So is the exhaust gas going west @ur momisugly 500mph, meaning its coming out the back @ur momisugly1,000mph
Or is the exhaust gas staying where it is & just the plane moving
Or is the exhaust gas going west @ur momisugly ~250mph whilst the plane is doing 500mph going east.
Another teaser
Car at 50mph; How fast are the wheels going ???
Your brain teaser can’t be answered without more info.
== details
For a plane in level flight, there is no acceleration so no net force is needed to keep it moving forward.
That means a satellite in orbit doesn’t need any engine force at all to have constant horizontal speed. (vertical is more complicated).
A plane has drag from the atmosphere. The only force the engines have to overcome in level flight is the drag. Since you didn’t specify the drag, you can’t even start to calculate anything about the thrust needed by throwing air out the back of the engine. I do agree it has to be moving the opposite direction of the plane or it wouldn’t provide any thrust at all. ie. if the plane is going west, the air thrown out the back of the plane is going east.
3 notes:
– In the early days of jets some of them carried water. they injected the water into the engines so there would be more mass being thrown out of the engines and thus more thrust. That was needed because pure jet engines don’t work well at low speeds. There simply isn’t enough air going through the engines during the takeoff roll for a pure jet engine to lift a heavy airliner / freighter.
– Most airliners today are not pure jets (maybe none of them are pure jets). They’re turbofans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbofan). The jet is used primarily to get the power to spin the fan which is enclosed in the outer duct. Most of the thrust comes from the fans pushing air backwards just like a propeller does.
– There is less drag at higher altitudes which is why airplanes tend to have the best fuel economy at high altitude.
“will release 10 times the water vapor than a smokestake whose emissions exit the smokestack at 50 mph”
This is not true. An airplane engine running stationary on the ground emitts the same water as the engine running at the same rate flying through the air. I cannot tell if this comment is meant to be a joke.
The global fuel consumption graph looks to me like doubling from 1984 to 1989 and growing to only a little over 40% of its 1989 rate since then.
When you are on top of a very big hill (i.e. a maximum), it can look very flat (hiatus). We will only be able to tell if it was a pause or a maximum when it will start to deviate from the present level.
…WTF….That makes no sense, Unless you are too delusional to understand that you are on top of a HILL !!!
If you plot the relative increase in human population since 1960 against the pro-rata increase in atmospheric CO2, you get a near perfect straight line. So the answer to the AGW “problem” is simple: apply the ULTIMATE FINAL SOLUTION, starting with major “polluters”, such as Charlie Windsor and Al Gore! I feel sure that these Imams of AGW would be prepered to make the ultimate sacrifice for mankind, thus preserving the lives of ~30,000 poverty stricken Africans.
…Agenda 21 ??
From the correlation causation bucket there is this:
?dl=0
How does atmospheric water vapour correlate with total area of equatorial/global forest cover?
The water cycle from rainfall to river flow to ocean evaporation to rainfall is surely affected by the water absorption capacity of the forests and their ability to delay rainfall’s entry into the river system?
Just wonder if anyone’s dared to plot any data of that kind ever?
I’ll give up my armrest when they pry it out of …
ROTFLMAO
But, but… couldn’t one do exactly the same study with cows? Temperature of planet tracking them to fairly good R² correlation? Or to bananas. Or to dental implants. Or to computer memory per capita?
This one must fall under the “correlation is not necessarily causation” department. Tho’ it is intriguing, especially given the partial world-wide shutdown of commercial aviation following 9/11 for a few days, and the measured increase in ground temperatures over the U.S. in turn. Or was it decrease?
Obviously, we can NOT get away with emitting soots, dusts, water vapor, NO and N₂O₂ into the low-turn-over-rate stratosphere endlessly. It will change ‘things’. But we also have to be on guard for correlation theories that aren’t actually related to causation.
GoatGuy
“Water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide”
Yes, this is true, but you can not consider the GHG effect without considering the end to end effect of evaporation. The end to end effect is evident by Hurricanes which leave a trail of cold water in their wake, indicating net negative feedback. All weather is basically driven by a heat engine using water as the refrigerant where a Hurricane is a localized, more efficient version of this engine. The second law tells us that a heat engine can not warm its source of heat, which in the case of weather, is the surface. None the less, water vapor does contribute to warming, but this effect seems to be saturated and incremental water vapor actually results in cooling!
I’m definitely a skeptic of anything that suggests that correlation is causation. Especially this crap from Bloomberg. But hey the unknowing public will buy it without questioning it. I have seen this link posted in numerous online articles and it seems to be gaining momentum from warmers. The propaganda from the warmers just keeps getting deeper.
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/
Let’s see them try that nonsense with the MWP or the CET record.
Saying that water vapor cannot be modeled because of it’s short half life is a total cop out. Water vapor concentration is what it is at any moment regardless of turnover. Its GHE over any given area changes by the second because it is chaotic and that’s the real reason it cannot be modeled. It causes it’s own changes in concentration and therefore its net GHE varies from one place to another via things like its convective force as a vapor, or its albedo when it condenses or it just disappears when it precipitates. A very high concentration of WV over half a given area plus a very low concentration for the other half provide far less GHE than the average concentration of the two taken together over the whole area but that’s what modelers assume because they cannot model the former condition – and that’s why they are wrong. They need to model this – http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/eaus/wv-animated.gif
If there was an actual model for water vapor used to predict climate we would have accurate weather forecasts 10 years into the future. But the alarmists don’t want accuracy, they only want to keep collecting their pay checks so admitting that water vapor is firmly in control of our climate, (let alone actually trying to model it), is just something they will never dare to do, their taxpayer subsidized careers depend on blaming CO2.
Don Spencer, a little arithmetic would have informed: 5mbbls/yr is insignificant, equivalent to 700,000t. Let’s say persistence in the atmosphere is 10yrs, then ~7million tonnes. The atmosphere according to USGS/NOAA contains 13,000Gt of water vapor on average (13,000 cubic km), so the amount added in 10 yrs represents 7/13,000,000,000,000 ~ 5 x 10^-13 or 0.00000000005% of the total.
Moreover, anywhere the atmosphere has 100% relative humidity (raining, snowing or incipience) added water would be precipitated out making for even less than 7million tonnes. We get a heck of a lot more from the burning of fuels, even if it were all hydrogen and it, too, is of little significance. The sun-earth system dwarfs everything and the raining out effect would similarly reduce this larger mass source of human w.v. addition.
I agree also with other commenters who have pointed out that in burning carbonaceous fuels, water vapour is the larger GHG emission – both in direct burning and the exhaust gas from steam turbines in electricity generation. This also goes for biomass, corn or whatever fuel you like. It is my observation over the decade of looking at the CAGW nonsense that simple arithmetic reveals the insignificance of every worse-than-we-thought fantasy produced by the clime syndicate (thanks to Mark Steyn for the term). There never has been a prediction or, more wishy washy, ‘projection’ of disaster that has ever come anywhere near marginally true over a few centuries of such doomster products.
This truism I’ve distilled into an AXIOM: that mankind can do no lasting harm to the planet. At worst, only localized small areas can be harmed and this is relatively quickly erased by time. Not to minimize the horror of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, radiation fell quickly to background levels within a year. Hiroshima today is a vibrant and thriving city. The Chernobyl ‘disaster’ was supposed to sterilize enormous territory in central Europe and produce a death toll of thousands (25,000 if I recall correctly) ~ some 35 apparently died and yes we had some hundreds sick. The ‘no go’ exclusion zone set up has become a vibrant game park, Europe’s Serengeti. Oh, Google will serve up a menu of horrific mutations and 100s of thousands of years of consequences and the truthbenders have flooded the internet with green slime. There were a certain percentage of deformed animals resulted but guess what? They were quickly eaten by predators and the unbelievable variety of animals and their populations should be considered one of the wonders of the world (but you can be sure it won’t be):
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/nuclear_power/2013/01/chernobyl_wildlife_the_radioactive_fallout_zone_is_a_wildlife_refuge_photos.html
“Actually, according to Mycio and photographer and field biologist Sergey Gaschak, the animals are thriving. …Communal farms turned to wetlands and forests, and the animals came back. The area is now the largest, if unintentional, wildlife sanctuary in Europe.
Gaschak has been photographing animals near Chernobyl since 1995. He uses camera traps with motion detectors to capture some of the animals, but he sees and photographs plenty of them in person: lynx, otters, eagle owls, Przewalski’s horses, several species of bats, and footprints of brown bears….”
Here’s George Carlin’s take on the harm man is doing to the planet:
5 million barrels of jet fuel per day = 28 cubic feet/day
Niagara Falls approximate average flow rate = 4 million cubic feet/min = 5800million ft^3/day or = 1,030 million barrels/day.
Niagara Falls was once water vapour but comprises only a tiny part of the global water cycle
Sorry, 5 million barrels of jet fuel per day = 28 million cubic feet/day