Study: Agricultural Irrigation Helps Shield the Tropics from Global Warming

As Joe Bastardi says: “When you’re dry, you fry”.

All this person who wrote this “paper” had to do was interview any one of a thousand meteorologists to figure out when the ground is wet, it takes longer to heat up than when it is dry. Something about evaporating water.

What expectation is there that there will be more papers published explaining why warming is less than predicted around the world?

Ha. A bloke called Bradfield came up with similar idea for Australia years ago. Divert the eastern coastal rivers inland, irrigate vast areas of desert and modify the climate. Of course his plan was dismissed then. Every so often someone brings it up again and it dismissed by experts again. Now we have some scientific backing for his ideas

This is nothing new. We have always know that water cools.

Once again it seems that water is much more ubiquitous in its’ ability to influence the environment than CO2 .
Carbon Dioxide keeps getting burdened with blame by those who are bent on only seeing “hell-on-earth” scenarios in earths future while insisting that only people can be the sole cause behind the claimed “inevitability” that all are headed to a future climate furnace.

How fortunate WUWT is to have free thinkers combing through and contributing to it such as Willis Eschenbach . It is clear to me that I much prefer the built-in wonder and curiosity that he often provides, (along with many others). The reported new research in the above article seems to be synergistic with Willis’ report, posted about two weeks back. Thanks again Willis. (Here’s the link to it for your convenience: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/07/drying-the-sky/ )

Water is truly a wonder to behold.

From Willis’ article last week, whenever sea surface temperatures exceed about 26 C, evaporating sea water causes thunderstorms to form, which brings cooler air and water from above down to the surface. As long as most of the tropics are covered by water (as they are now), they have a built-in thermostat that keeps them from heating up very much. The Sahara Desert is an example of what can happen to a large land mass in the tropics far from any ocean.

Man-made irrigation has been going on for over two millenia, from the Roman aqueducts transferring water from the Alps and Appenine mountains to the fertile but dry plains near the Mediterranean, and continuing wherever there is a natural hot, dry season and a wet season. It is not clear whether irrigation affected climate change, because there was the Roman Warm Period between about 100 BC and AD 400, and the climate cooled shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire, when their aqueducts fell into disuse. The climate re-warmed around AD 900 (Medieval Warm Period), but it is not clear whether irrigation increased at that time.

Man-made irrigation can also change the vegetation in a localized area, which may affect the climate. A good example of this is the valley between the Great Salt Lake to the north and the freshwater Utah Lake to the south, squeezed between the Wasatch Mountains to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. Fresh water from Utah Lake naturally drains northward via the Jordan River into the Great Salt Lake, which has no outlet. When the Mormon settlers arrived in 1847, they found a dry and barren valley, with only grass and sagebrush growing, and the summers were extremely dry (they still are).

The settlers built many canals leading from Utah Lake northeastward and northwestward across the valley, which tended to slow down the spring runoff from the mountains, and used the water for summer irrigation, which also tended to lower the water level in the Great Salt Lake, since evaporated water (which tended to accumulate as snow on mountains to the east) was not replenished. Many of the farms in the Salt Lake Valley have been replaced with suburbs over the past 30 years, but the developed land has many mature trees, which probably could not survive without irrigation, as well as green lawns which could not grow without being sprinkled in summer (any lawn where the sprinkler system is off quickly turns brown about mid-July).

Growing trees and grass naturally transpire water vapor to the atmosphere. Is it possible that using spring runoff from the mountains to irrigate vegetation in the valley in the summer has increased summer humidity in the valley, and possibly increased summer rainfall?

It seems the climate charlatans are realizing that we are entering a cooling period and since they can’t back off with the CO2 fraud, they invent new fairy tails to circumvent the inconvenient truth that CO2 has rather nothing to do with climate.

I expect more and more sharticles explaining that through magical actions, like the fake fight against the ozone depletion, or in this case, the irrigation cooling effect on the tropics, and so on, we reversed the climate trend despite the evil CO2 growing emissions.

One thing is certain, the climate clown show is not about to stop.

“In this case, irrigation has the same effect for a hotter planet as pumping up the evaporative cooler in your house.”

Evaporative coolers work very poorly in high humidity regions.
Which tropics lack high humidity?

Just how do they reach this absurd conclusion?

“Here we provide observational and model evidence that expanding irrigation”

Simple, they programmed it into their models.
It’s called confirmation bias.

If it cools the tropics, then it cools the polar regions because that’s where their heat comes from!!! Come on Swiss guys, your better 5han this.