by Bruce Peachey and Nobuo Maeda
Contemporary climate models only include the impact of water vapor as positive feedback on warming; the impact of direct anthropogenic emissions of water vapor has not been seriously considered.
Background
Recent climate change and increasingly scarce fresh water resources are two major environmental issues facing humanity. Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas. Contemporary climate models only include the impact of water vapor as positive feedback on warming; the impact of direct anthropogenic emissions of water vapor has not been seriously considered.
Our recent publication used the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data set to examine whether the Clausius−Clapeyron equation can form a basis for such positive feedback commonly assumed in the contemporary climate models [1]. We found that: (1) qualitatively, the log-linear nature of the Clausius−Clapeyron equation [(ln Pv) vs (1/T)] demonstrates a significant level of consistency when averaged over expansive regions like specific latitude zones around the globe; (2) this consistency does not extend to individual locations where a plot of (ln Pv) vs (1/T) becomes nonlinear, indicating substantial undersaturation that varies with time; (3) quantitatively, the discrepancies between the locally observed and the expected values of the slopes of (ln Pv) vs (1/T) are wide-ranging; and (4) the absolute amount of water vapor has increased substantially above the population centers and the agricultural areas in the Northern Hemisphere between 1960 and 2020, but not in the Southern Hemisphere where the surface area of the oceans is much greater. These findings suggest that direct anthropogenic emissions of water vapor are an important driver that influences the local water vapor content.
Our paper concluded that the use of the Clausius–Clapeyron equation as a basis for calculating the positive water vapor feedback appears to be on shaky ground [1]. Since the discrepancies between the observed and the expected values of the slopes of (ln Pv) vs (1/T) were wide-ranging [1], it remains unclear if the amount of atmospheric water vapor will truly increase by as much as 6 to 7% in response to every 1 °C of warming, as commonly assumed.
In the present contribution, we highlight: (1) the role of humans in the global water cycle and impacts on climate change, (2) the regional nature of many aspects of “global” warming, (3) propose that future research effort should be directed toward obtaining the relevant data as a matter of urgency.
Water cycle
Human activities indeed have been impacting climate but most of the key factors are related to water, as opposed to CO2 [2-6]. Atmospheric water vapor increase in the Northern Hemisphere has been by several percent per decade. In contrast, there has been little change in the Southern Hemisphere. Unlike water, CO2 is in a single phase and largely uniformly distributed in the atmosphere. Thus, if CO2 were the cause of the current climate change, and if the ocean is the source of the water vapor that is supposed to increase by about 6 to 7% in response to every 1 °C of warming caused by the non-aqueous greenhouse gases, then the Southern Hemisphere should have observed more of the consequences than the Northern Hemisphere due to its much larger surface area of the oceans. To the contrary, a 2% average increase in precipitation, that amounts to an average of about 2 Tt/year over the last century, has been observed in the Northern Hemisphere land precipitation, while no such increase was observed in the Southern Hemisphere land precipitation [7]. This increase in the Northern Hemisphere land precipitation has been accompanied by an estimated 2 to 4% increase in the frequency of heavy precipitation events in the last 50 years, again in the Northern Hemisphere but not in the Southern Hemisphere.
Water is being consumed by humans at an increasing rate, predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere, at least by 3 to 4 Tt/year (excluding some sources such as reservoir evaporation). This increasing water consumption has been accompanied by reductions in the return flows of the fresh water to the oceans from the rivers in regions with intensive irrigation & industry, again predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere. Other major contributors identified by the IPCC are water emissions and land use. Calls for the comprehensive integration of substantial changes in the hydrological cycle into global climate models are not new [8, 9], but have received limited support, and consequently these causes have generally been ignored and not incorporated into the contemporary climate models to date.
Natural land water flux is based on water vapour coming on to land areas from the ocean, water falling as precipitation with some being re-evaporated from the landscape with the remaining flow, of about 40 Tt/yr, flowing back into the ocean to balance the flow of water vapour from the ocean. Ocean water vapor flux is 6 times larger than the land water vapor flux, even though the global water surface area is only about 3 times larger than the land area [2]. This is because: (1) the ocean surface is darker and hence absorbs more solar energy and (2) the ocean surface is always wet, which enhances mass transfer compared to the land surface, which sometimes is wet and sometimes is dry. At any one time, the atmosphere contains about 13 Tt of water, which contributes most of the greenhouse effect, and a given water molecule on average only spends about 10 days in the atmosphere each time it goes through the cycle [10].
Global water budgets are found in many publications on water availability and show some variations in numbers used, but are within a reasonable range, and generally agree with each other. For this analysis, we show schematically a global water budget in Figure 1, which uses the numbers from “Global Warming – The Complete Briefing” by Houghton [11]. Here we assume that the total amount of water in the atmosphere does not change materially in a short time span of a year (after all seasons in a year), notwithstanding the fact that warming leads to increased water vapor content.
More recent literature (https://www2.whoi.edu/site/globalwatercycle/) provides slightly different numbers of (after converting the unit of m3/s to Tt/yr) 41 instead of 40 for the horizontal land to the ocean water flux, 69 instead of 71 for the upward land to land atmospheric water flux in Figure 1, 110 instead of 111 for the downward land atmosphere to land water flux, 426 instead of 425 for the upward ocean to oceanic atmosphere water flux and the same 385 for the downward oceanic atmosphere to ocean water flux, which provides the readers with an idea of the amount of variations involved. Our conclusions will remain unaltered regardless of which version of numbers we use.
Figure 1 Global conservation of water masses adapted from [2]. The numbers show the movement of water masses in tera tons per year. This is the base case before the recent warming became an issue.
The numbers in Figure 1 show the movements of water in tera tons (1 Tt = 1012 t = 1015 kg) per year before the recent warming. The inflows and the outflows of water must be balanced at each reservoir of “land”, “ocean”, “sky above land” and “sky above ocean”, to satisfy the conservation of mass. These four entities can, but do not need to, be geometrically continuous.
Water withdrawal and water use data is available from a number of sources and studies. Most estimates put human water withdrawals in the range of 4 to 5 Tt/yr worldwide, with over 60% of that going to irrigation, 20 to 30% to industrial cooling and the remainder for domestic use. For example, the IPCC’s estimate of anthropogenic water withdrawals that are reducing ocean discharge flows in rivers such as the Nile, Colorado, Yellow, Rio Grande, and other rivers that are heavily used for irrigation places the reduction in the return flows to the ocean (the 40 Tt from “land” to “ocean”) is around 10%, or 4 Tt/yr [7, 12]. Houghton reports “in the United States, for the Missouri river basin it is 30%, for the Rio Grande it is 64%, and for the lower Colorado 96%. Almost none of the water in the Colorado river reaches the sea” [11]. In short, the water consumption on such river systems as a percentage of the total discharge can be substantial. More recently, the latest 2021 IPCC Climate Change report reported the magnitude of the impacts humans have had on water cycle on land in that: “Direct redistribution of water by human activities for domestic, agricultural and industrial use of about 24,000 km3/year is equivalent to half the global river discharge or double the global groundwater recharge each year” [13]. Therefore this 24 Tt/yr is ~60% of the total estimated return flow of 40 Tt/yr to the oceans.
Unfortunately, these reports do not provide an explanation as to where the water goes after it has been withdrawn or redistributed. Consequently, what is less clear is the actual amount of evaporation of water to the atmosphere. For irrigation withdrawals, most of the water is evaporated during irrigation or from the field after irrigation, whereas for most domestic water withdrawals the water may be returned to the source or another water body as sewage. The main industrial water use is for cooling thermal plants, however, the relationship between withdrawals and evaporation loss of water varies greatly, depending on the cooling process used (i.e. evaporative cooling on-site or return of hot water to a large body of water). Some data sources breakdown water volumes by use, by water basin, or by country with accuracy varying depending on what is being reported, consistency in the reporting, measuring methodologies, and the rigour applied to the data collection process [11, 14-21]. Often these estimates do not include other water losses, where the water transfer is unintentional or unmeasured, such as losses to groundwater reservoirs, or evaporation from hydroelectric or irrigation reservoirs, they may also not contain withdrawals of groundwater from aquifers which have greatly increased in recent years [22].
A major challenge for a contemporary climate model is: How to generate a 5% increase in land precipitation in Northern hemispheric land areas, which has been reported to occur in the IPCC reports [7, 12], but not in Southern hemispheric land areas?
Since the Northern Hemisphere contains 67.3% of the Earth’s land, if we neglect the Southern hemispheric land precipitation increases for simplicity, the increased Northern hemispheric land precipitation by 5% would result in about 3.4% increase in global land precipitation. Such 3.4% increase of the 111 Tt downward water flux over the entire landmass equates to about 4 Tt extra downward water flux. Under the contemporary non-aqueous greenhouse gas-driven global warming paradigm, this extra 4 Tt would have to come from the oceans through a 10% (of the 40 Tt) increase in the water vapor content of air crossing onto land masses from the oceans. Now, one cannot realistically assume that 100 % of this extra water vapor generated from the ocean surface will exclusively flow to the land: the majority should precipitate back onto the ocean.
For simplicity, here we assume that the same proportion of the water vapor generated as that shown in Figure 1 would partition into the land and to the ocean downward fluxes. Then, to generate the 4 Tt increase in the water vapor content on the landmass, both the upward and the downward water fluxes over the entire ocean surface must also increase by 10% over historic levels. Then, the resulting global water balance (without considering the Northern vs Southern hemispheric water partitions) would look something like what we schematically draw in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Global conservation of water masses that corresponds to the settings assumed by the contemporary climate models. The numbers show the movement of water masses in tera tons per year. Non-aqueous greenhouse gases initiate a positive feedback in which the initial warming leads to increased evaporation from the oceans of 42 tera tons per year. 38 of the incremental 42 tera tons would directly precipitate back onto the ocean and 4 out of the 42 tera tons would transport to over a land area before precipitating. The 4 tera tons of the excess water that has precipitated on the land would need to flow back to the ocean to close the water cycle, which is contrary to the observations.
The purported change of water from the oceans to the land areas to account for increased land precipitation would generate a significant (+10%) increase in total water outflow off continental land masses (the return flow of about 4 tera tons to compensate for the excess water evaporated from the ocean as a part of the purported positive feedback mechanism in the contemporary climate models), as shown in Figure 2, which is incidentally contrary to the observations that show dwindling outflows of major rivers around the globe [7, 12]. Nor does it explain how the only area showing incremental precipitation is the latitude band from 30 to 60 degrees North, with no significant change in the Southern Hemisphere.
The water mass balance (budget) above also has significant energy balance implications. To achieve the required 42 Tt/yr of incremental water evaporation off oceans would require a large amount of incremental solar energy being absorbed. We estimate that this would require on the order of 10 Zeta Joules/year being absorbed by the oceans (42 Tt/yr × 2260 kJ/kg) or a 10% increase in solar energy absorbed. Given that the average estimated incremental radiative forcing is ~ 2 W/m2 of the earth’s surface, it is much more realistic to assume that the incremental radiative forcing would proportionately partition so that the ocean to the oceanic atmosphere water flux would increase by ~ 2 [W/m2] / 300 [W/m2] × 425 [Tt/yr] = 2.8 Tt/yr, assuming the 300 W/m2 is the net average radiation absorbed by the earth and 425 Tt/yr being the upward water flux over the oceans (note our conclusion remains unaltered even if the correct number were 200 W/m2 or 400 W/m2 as the net average radiation absorbed by the earth). Then, about 10% (the same proportion as in Figure 2) of the 2.8 Tt/yr incremental water vapor, or 0.28 Tt/yr, would transfer to land areas while the rest would precipitate back to the ocean, which would be considerably less than the 4 Tt/yr incremental precipitation observed over land areas. In short, the scenario envisioned in Figure 2 is highly unrealistic.
Figure 2 is for the global water mass balance and hence does not account for any regional-scale details. From a regional water mass and energy conservation perspective, an intensified non-aqueous greenhouse gas effect resulting in global warming should have a much greater impact on climate in the Southern Hemisphere because its fraction of the ocean is far greater. Yet the IPCC climate data shows a definite bias towards precipitation from climate change being a predominantly Northern Hemisphere phenomenon, and the total precipitation over the Southern Hemispheric land masses has not increased [7, 12]. The contemporary climate model simulations show that most of the extra evaporation to originate in the Southern Hemisphere, so it leaves the question open as to how the water vapour purportedly generated in the Southern Hemispheric oceans preferentially crosses into the Northern Hemispheric land masses.
To the contrary, the areas of increased precipitation tend to be in cool wet Northern areas, fed by air masses from hot, dry or highly populated areas, with high anthropogenic water emissions, which are unassociated with “global” warming. The main region in the Southern Hemisphere, which shows a similar response to the Northern Hemisphere, is Patagonia in South America, which has an irrigation and energy intensive economy. Patagonia, through ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns, feeds water and energy to the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the only part of Antarctica to show any impact of “global” warming [23]. Since the latent heat of vaporization of water is large, one tonne of water vapour contains enough energy to melt 6.7 tonnes of ice or snow. An analysis should be undertaken as to the relationship between the water use in Patagonia and deterioration of ice masses on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Other regions in the Southern Hemisphere, such as New Zealand, the western coasts of Australia and Southern Africa, show little change in precipitation that they should have experienced with increased water evaporation from the oceans that is purported to occur under the non-aqueous greenhouse gas-driven, water vapor positive feedback amplified, paradigm. To the contrary, the South Island of New Zealand, with its high mountains and the Tasman Sea to the west and should have experienced substantially more precipitation, has not. In Australia, the coasts of Western Australia remain dry, and increased precipitation and extreme heavy rainfalls instead occur in Eastern Australia which is downwind of the water withdrawn from the Murray–Darling Basin for irrigation.
Since there is sufficient evidence / observations that support the idea that anthropogenic emissions are an important driver of recent warming [1], we now consider how the conservation of water masses might look like if anthropogenic emissions of water vapor were indeed the primary driver of the recent trend of climate warming. As noted above, wetter land surfaces and new vegetative cover after irrigation are darker than the dry surfaces before irrigation, and consequently absorb more sunlight. The concomitant incremental radiation energy absorbed through increasing the area of absorption by spreading water from lakes, rivers and underground aquifers over fields and rice paddies is still an incremental energy input, and must be released by the water during condensation (cloud formation) and precipitation in the Northern areas. Anthropogenic emissions of water vapor, which is predominantly emitted in the low to mid latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (between 0 and 60°N), would move water and energy poleward to the Arctic through atmospheric circulation patterns.
The condensation of water vapor would release latent heat, cause melting of Northern and inland ice sheets, increase Northern cloud cover, and increase precipitation and severe weather events, wherever the water comes out. Such movements of water masses also explain the reported freshening trend in water flowing to the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific, and the increasing salinity and temperature increases in tropical water masses, which are no longer receiving those cool fresh water returns from rivers. Figure 3 shows how the water balance might look like in this scenario. As was the case in Figures 1 and 2, Figure 3 is for the global scale description that does not include any granularity or geographical spread of each of land and ocean components.
Figure 3 Global conservation of water masses when the Anthropogenic Emissions of Water Vapor is assumed to drive the recent trend of climate warming and climate change. The numbers show the movement of water masses in tera tons per year. Here, extra 4 tera tons per year of water vapor would be generated from the land and virtually all of them precipitate back on the (colder parts of) the land.
As we did during the calculation of the water mass balance in Figure 2, since the Northern Hemisphere contains 67.3% of the Earth’s land, if we neglect the Southern Hemispheric land precipitation increases for simplicity, the increased Northern Hemispheric land precipitation by 5% would result in about 3.4% increase in global land precipitation. Such 3.4% increase in the 111 Tt downward water flux over the entire landmass equates to about 4 Tt extra downward water flux, which has been observed to be concentrated in the cold Northern Hemispheric landmass. Unlike in Figure 2, however, the extra 4 Tt does not come from the sky above ocean, but instead comes from the warm, dry and/or populated regions of the landmass.
On a regional basis, anthropogenic emissions of water vapor also better match the observations of reduced flows in highly utilized rivers and lakes in dry, heavily populated regions such as China, India, Pakistan and the southwestern United States, and the corresponding increases in rainfall in Northern temperate regions. Examples of regional–scale “unusual patterns” include: (1) weekly patterns of rainfall on the east coast of the United States showed that rainfall was 22% higher on Saturdays than any other day of the week, with Sunday to Tuesday being the lowest days [24]; (2) workweek diurnal temperature variations, where some water emitting areas showed night time cooling on weekends, while other non-water emitting regions showed cooler nights on weekdays [25]. Neither natural planetary orbital cycles nor global warming should be able to generate weekly or workweek patterns, but water emissions from power generation, and irrigation, tend to drop on weekends.
Another notable regional-scale issue is that the mass balance and the energy balance around the Gulf of Mexico should show the impacts of reduced water inflow into the Gulf from the Rio Grande, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers. The reduced flows of fresh, cool water into the Gulf should result in a warming of surface waters which in turn could potentially (1) impact the strengths and paths of hurricanes, (2) generate warmer climate downstream of the Gulf stream (e.g., Western Europe due to a warmer yet lower rate of flow). These are regional, as opposed to the global, “unusual patterns”, but the point is that anthropogenic emissions of water vapor have major, observable impacts in regional scales.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Anthropogenic water emissions are large enough to result in a ~5 to 7% incremental increase (4 to 5 Tt/yr) in land-to-atmosphere water flux and a similar increase in water vapor in the atmosphere over land areas impacted by human water uses such as irrigation, evaporative cooling and evaporation from water reservoirs. These water emissions are about 1000× the net increase in carbon mass emitted to the atmosphere and contribute significant amounts of latent energy to the atmosphere in cold northern areas, which GHG emissions do not. We recommend that such direct anthropogenic emissions of water vapor should be coherently incorporated into the contemporary climate models before forcing extreme actions related to the carbon balance alone.
About the authors: Nobua Maeda is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada. Bruce Peachey is President of New Paradigm Engineering in Alberta, Canada.
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I think a water tax is going to be necessary soon. It’s either that or institute steam recapture facilities. To save the planet of course.
Since the UN’s nannies are going to spearhead legislation, my best guess is eventual legislation declaring that all men must pee while sitting down.
No more free streaming. For the planet, of course.
I WANT THE FREEDOM TO ‘STREAM’ IN ANY POSITION I CHOOSE! March with me! (carefully)
My enlarged prostate disagrees with that proposed solution.
“direct anthropogenic emissions of water vapor’
That statement is claptrap. Water vapor emission are rejected from the atmosphere as rain or snow in an average of nine days. So what?
Except there are ALWAYS large amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Human CO2 is only about 4% of total CO2 flux..
… but you have no problems making gormless statements about CO2… So What !
This statement is claptrap. Water vapor emission are rejected from the atmosphere as rain or snow in an average of nine days.
Nobody, not a single climate scientist or physicist, can tell us how nature sets, in an open system not in thermodynamic equilibrium which is the atmosphere, the relative and absolute humidity. Nobody can tell you why the relative humidity on average is, say, 70% and not 60% or 80%. And as long as that is the case all is mostly speculation.
We know that the atmosphere has been resilient against disturbances compared to which humanity is piffle. And yet it is still here. This means that on geological timescale stabilising mechanisms operate and that such a mechanism is most likely based on the properties of water. What it is precisely and how it works in detail is unknown. Now that would be a rich field for fresh ideas and fundamental research. Alas those who might be in a position to do that are staring themselves blind on some glorified ‘model’ simulations which they confuse with the real world.
Just measuring humidity raises a question that few think about. If you send a weather balloon aloft to measure the temperature and humidity, what are you actually measuring? Are you detecting atmospheric water in all its phases or just atmospheric water vapour?
You can observe daily radiosondes that exhibit huge differences between morning and afternoon humidity at a given altitude. Was there actual water flux or was it just a phase change from ice to water or the reverse. Microscopic ice particles are not going to have very high terminal velocity.
One of the things I have noticed with convective instability is that an ocean surface has to be sitting above 30C for maybe 25 days before cyclic instability sets in. It takes that long for the atmosphere to have sufficient high altitude moiture to start the cycle. Once cycling, water vapour is subjected to high velocity updraft so gets carried up to about 14km before running out of potential energy.
I was about to say “I hold my beer” but had to drink it fast enough so it did not completely evaporate and destroy the planet.
We’ve had lots of rain. Would anyone like some?
By the looks of things in the East Midlands summer is over before it began. This year we haven’t had the traditional 3 Hot Days or the thunderstorm.
Send the water to the new Site C dam in northern BC. For the last few years in north BC, there has been reduced rainfall, resulting in a deficit of hydro power. Last year, BC Hydro spent about 500 million dollars for import electricity.
Please! NE WA. State.
The big issue in the water cycle that nobody seems to want to touch is sea surface area and sea level atmospheric pressure. Coming out of the last glacial minimum sea level. Area has increased by 35% with slp also dropping appropriately.
The increased water cycle cools the earth until the next glacial cycle with increasing ice at high elevations starts synced to the correct orbit configuration.
There is no other common sense explanation…
One needs to be careful when talking about “common sense”.
At one time, not all that long ago, it was common sense that the Earth was flat and that the Sun and stars orbited the Earth.
Common sense tell climate science that all things except CO2 remain equal. That the climate system has just 1 degree of freedom, in perfectly circular orbit around the CO2 attractor.
As the mass of the attractor increases, the climate will at some point very, very soon be flung out of orbit, in the mother of all tipping points.
Rice paddies in Asia need to phased out by 2035.
And the CCP will make all sorts of promises for later, and report astounding progress right now, and tell the West to reform thyself first.
Well, if so, there’s the nwo plan to reduce us peasants.
Very interesting. Could the south-north discrepancy be because southern oceans haven’t warmed as much as northern oceans? NB. I’m not saying they haven’t, just asking. I do know the Southern Ocean (60+S) has been cooling while places north have been warming. Also that the surface THC runs predominantly S to N in both hemispheres, so there is asymmetry. The NH region referenced is 30-60N. Is the equivalent SH region 30-60S, or is it further S for some reason?
Well duh, it’s winter down south! 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 I hope that’s enoough, but just to be sure 🙂 🙂 🙂
I suggest that when weather/climate differences between Earth’s northern hemisphere and its southern hemisphere arise, the first causative factor to be examined is the wide difference in land:ocean ratio between them.
Earth’s NH has much more land surface area compared to water surface area (a ratio of 0.39:0.61) compared to the SH ratio of 0.19:0.81. This fact—via effects those ratios have on the surface absorptivity, the surface albedo, and the atmospheric water vapor concentration/cloud formation for each hemisphere—accounts for the SH receiving and retaining significantly more solar energy than the NH over the course of a year.
The ratio differences also mean the SH has a significantly higher thermal heat capacity (i.e., takes longer to respond to changes in “forcing” parameters as measured by temperature). It likely goes a long way toward explaining why the Arctic region (“North Pole”) is currently losing ice mass while at the same time the Antarctic region (“South Pole”) is gaining ice mass.
I agree about the land ratios being crucially important but your statement I have quoted ia only half right. The SH oceans get more sunlight but also reflect more – they stay close to constant temperature. The net radiation uptake of the oceans in the SH is only half of the NH oceans:
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The oceans in the NH act as solar panels for the land in the NH. Much of the heat going into the oceans gets transported to the land – about half as latent heat as the article points out.
Actual ocean heat content this century is maximum at 45S but that does not involve much increase in temperature because there is so much water surface.
This chart shows how much more the land responds to solar forcing than the oceans:
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Now I wonder what would happen to global temperature if the peak solar intensity started rising in the NH while declining in the SH.
First, your Chart 4 does not indicate that, assuming that ocean heat content is reflected by measured temperature. OHC is meaningless if it is not normalized to mass (i.e., Joules/kg) given the large differences in the mass of oceans between NH and SH.
Second, you left out two major forcing factors: the differences in atmospheric water vapor content AND cloud areal coverage between the NH and SH. These factors will directly influence the amount of surface reflection and radiation that is transmitted directly to space versus that which is re-radiated back to Earth from atmosphere and clouds as a result of LWIR warming of the atmosphere.
I haven’t seen a good scientific paper that quantifies the NH vs SH differences in these two parameters on an annual basis and how such is accounted for in determining the NET heat balance in both hemispheres. Perhaps you can suggest one?
Also, there are a sufficient number of scientific papers that discuss the wide range of problems and uncertainties with determining ocean heat content (in zetajoules) to a meaningful accuracy that I need not comment further on that.
As to your Chart 5, temperature is meaningless as a measure of heat content (or even energy absorbed minus energy lost) without knowing the effective mass and average specific heat (Cp) of the object involved . . . good luck with doing that for “x” average depth of “land” and “y” average depth of “ocean”. Finally, Chart 5 indicates that at the South Pole (from about -80 to -90 latitude) and at the North Pole (from about +85 to +90 latitude) there is ZERO annual temperature range . . . and that is clearly falsifiable. What are we to make of this chart . . . GIGO.
One only needs to look at the Jet lanes of the world and come to the realization that 100 billion gallons of water are being injected into the Stratosphere annually, at current levels. You will not find enough to melt back the Antarctic Sea ice, only until the HT eruption enlightened us. The Arctic Sea Ice however has been under the direct influence since the late 70’s.
Each water vapor molecule created via combustion utilizing hydrogen from hydrocarbons from the depths and oxygen from the atmosphere essentially creating a brand-new molecule that will stay around for quite some time.
If it can’t be used to blame fossil fuels or eating meat for an (imaginary) impending doom, nobody is interested.
lets not forget that everytime you drive your car and emit the CO2 <sarc> “poison” </sarc> you also emit a bunch of H2O …
At present, the average annual increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration is near 2.4 parts per million (ppm) per year. This produces an increase of approximately 34 milliwatts per square meter per year in the downward long wave IR (LWIR) flux emitted by the lower troposphere to the surface. Any change in surface temperature or water vapor evaporation produced by this increase in LWIR flux is ‘too small to measure’.
The climate modeling fraud can be traced back to Table 5 of the 1967 paper by Manabe and Wetherald “Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity” (MW67). Here they claimed that a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 300 to 600 parts per million (ppm) would produce an increase in equilibrium surface temperature of 2.9 °C for clear sky conditions. MW67 contained three fundamental errors. First, it used a modified version of the Arrhenius steady state model with radiative transfer algorithms added. When the CO2 concentration was increased, an increase in temperature was created as a mathematical artifact of the calculation. Second, the model used a fixed relative humidity distribution. This created a spurious ‘water vapor feedback’ that amplified the initial Arrhenius type warming artifact. Third, they used a time step integration algorithm that incorrectly allowed very small temperature increases to accumulate over time [Clark, 2024].
M&W chose to ignore the errors that they introduced in the MW67 model and went on to incorporate the 1967 mathematical warming artifacts into every unit of a ‘highly simplified’ global circulation model [M&W, 1975]. In 1979, Manabe’s group added a ‘slab’ ocean to their model. The surface energy transfer processes, including the wind driven evaporation were ignored and the increase in CO2 concentration was, incorrectly, allowed to heat the ocean [Manabe and Stouffer, 1979; 1980].
The ocean surface is almost transparent to the short wave (SW) solar flux. The diurnal surface temperature rise is small. The downward LWIR flux from the lower troposphere to the surface ‘blocks’ most of upward LWIR flux emitted by the surface. This establishes a partial exchange energy that limits the net LWIR cooling at the surface to the LWIR emission into the LWIR atmospheric transmission window. In order to dissipate the excess solar heat, the bulk ocean temperature increases until the water vapor pressure is sufficient for this heat to be removed by wind driven evaporation. There is no requirement for an exact flux balance at the ocean surface between the solar heating and the surface cooling. This leads to natural quasi-periodic oscillations in the ocean surface temperature – the ENSO, IOD, AMO PDO etc [Clark and Rörsch, 2023].
The penetration depth of the LWIR flux into the oceans is less than 100 micron. Here it is fully coupled to the wind driven latent heat flux. The magnitude and variation in the latent heat flux is much larger than the 34 milliwatts per square meter per year produced by a 2.4 ppm per year increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The observed increase in CO2 concentration has had no measurable effect on ocean evaporation.
Any climate model that claims a measurable increase in surface temperature, a water vapor feedback or a climate sensitivity to CO2 is fraudulent. This fraud started with the oversimplified climate model assumptions used by Manabe and Wetherald in 1967. The climate models are fraudulent by definition based on the underlying assumptions used – before the first line of code is even written.
“Any climate model that claims a measurable increase in surface temperature, a water vapor feedback or a climate sensitivity to CO2 is fraudulent.”
Write a book
It will be filed in the science fiction section of the library.
Except everything Roy said is actually correct and backed by science.
Something you have never been able to manage.
There is a link to the his new book. You should go check it out. I did. It most certainly is not “science fiction”.
ATTN: Roy Clark
RE: The Greenhouse Effect
I visited your website and learned that you an optical engineer who designs and builds precision optical instruments.
Do you think you could design and construct a laboratory instrument that can measure the greenhouse effect of gasses such as water, C02, methane and butane ?
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 is 427 ppm for dry air at STP. This is only
0.839 grams of CO2 per cubic meter of air. One cubic meter of air at STP has a mass of
1.29 kilograms. If this air is under under illumination of sunlight, how much heating of the air does this small amount of CO2 actually cause?
The claim by IPCC that CO2 is the cause of the recent global warming is a fabrication and lie, in my opinion. We need to put an end to the IPCC and their fraud and lies.
New Study: CO2 Effects On Ocean Temps ‘Impossible’ To Measure…Must Be ‘Schemed’ With Models (notrickszone.com)
I briefly checked out the paper. There was no measurement of air temperature. Only the skin temperature of the water was measured.
Manabe admitted some years ago that no one understood or could model cloud physics. And yet he accepted his Nobel Prize. This is when the Nobel Prize for physics lost all credibility. It is now in the same basket as economics and peace.
Just an opinion. The well known problems with CMIP climate models are so large that adding ‘minor’ anthropogenic water vapor complexities won’t matter much.
Three examples:
That’s a lot to digest but my take away is that the water cycle overshadows the CO2 cycle by a long shot. All the crying about CO2 and CAGW is for nothing.
There is a fundamental problem with Figure 1 (and subsequent figures that are based on it) in the above article: it does not recognized the large reservoir of water in underground caverns and aquifers. That water in bulk should be considered as part of the hydrological cycle on Earth since water is naturally flowing both into and out of it.
There has been much talk about the rapid rate of depletion of underground reserves of fresh water due to using it primarily for agricultural irrigation but also for supplying cities in arid areas of the world with drinking water.
Based on data from the GRACE satellite system, designed specifically to measure changes in underground water mass using gravitational changes seen along orbital paths, “In the most recent IPCC report (AR5), groundwater pumping is estimated to contribute about 15-25% of the current rate of global sea level rise.“
—source: https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/applications/groundwater
(my bold emphasis added)
Water is not “consumed” by humans. Water is beneficially used by humans, but no reduction in the mass of water on Earth is occurring. Just as humans do not create carbon. All water ends up collecting either in the oceans or on land where it is stored and gets recycled.
But what is confusing double speak is this paper claiming that H20 vapor is what causes most warming … yet the warmunists and their handmaidens in the media keep claiming that global warming causes drought (which of course makes no sense at all). Speaking out of both sides of their mouths, as usual, as in “heads I win, tails you lose.”
These authors are attributing causality to what is a result of any warming of the world’s oceans that may or may not occur due to changes in solar input, which is that warmer oceans cause more evaporation of liquid water to the atmosphere, and also that as the atmosphere warms due to warming oceans, it holds more water vapor at any given temperature, which then leads to more rainfall when condensation eventually occurs, which condensation of course cools the atmosphere.
They are tying themselves in knots, completely confused over the basic physical and biological and chemical processes that result in equilibrium atmospheric conditions.
<<But what is confusing double speak is this paper claiming that H20 vapor is what causes most warming … yet the warmunists and their handmaidens in the media keep claiming that global warming causes drought (which of course makes no sense at all). Speaking out of both sides of their mouths, as usual, as in “heads I win, tails you lose.”>>
Media claims that warming causes both more severe droughts and floods. Even IPCC does not seem claim this.
<<which then leads to more rainfall when condensation eventually occurs, which condensation of course cools the atmosphere.>>
Latent heat is released during condensation. Condensation warms, evaporation cools.
Not really. Humans consume (i.e., sequester) water in a variety of ways such that it is not typically recycled. The most obvious case is where water is required to make cement or concrete. The water-to-cement ratio for a typical concrete formulation varies from 0.35 to 0.40 (0.35–0.40 ton of water per ton of cement). Water is chemically bound in concrete, and that bound up water is typically never recycled subsequently although the concrete aggregate may be.
There are an awful lot of man-made concrete structures existing right now that will probably last for 500 or more years. And more are being manufactured every day, using water. How much? . . . currently the world produces somewhere around 4.5 billion tons of cement annually (https://time.com/6175734/reliance-on-fossil-fuels/ ).
Reference the article “There Will Soon Be More Concrete Than Biomass on Earth” at
https://heatmap.news/economy/the-planet-s-jaw-dropping-astonishing-downright-shocking-amount-of-concrete
The mass of concrete is literally unmeasurable compared to the mass of water on Earth. The mass of the oceans, not including the mass of water sequestered in the Earth’s crust and the mass of water in the atmosphere, is 1.4 times 10 to the 19th tons. 4.5 billion tons times 0.2 (the mass of water sequestered in concrete is approx. 15-20% of the mass of the concrete) is less than 1 times 10 to the 9th tons of water.
Meaning water sequestered per year in concrete is less than 1 hundred billion trillionths of the mass of liquid water in the oceans alone.
Unmeasurable.
Look up the definition of “no”.
The hydrological cycle, or water cycle, circulates about 577,000 cubic kilometers (km3) of water every year. When that is compared to the estimated total volume of water on Earth of 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (including ice and snow), that is only 0.042%.
Not unmeasurable, but nevertheless insignificant by extension of your argument . . . so why are we even interested in the above article about the hydrological cycle, based purely on comparing volumes (masses) involved?
“ keep claiming that global warming causes drought”, too much rain, more hurricanes and tornadoes, more snow, no snow, purples tomatoes, TDS, kamala….
Fo a bit of perspective (and a laugh) add a third category to the diagrams and split land into Greenland/Antartica vs the remaining land vs the oceans.
From an engineering point of view something must limit or offset a water vapor positive feedback or this would be a dead planet.
We have avoided runaway warming so far. But we have runaway leftist climate scaremongering.
Measurements to determine an annual average of global absolute humidity are of poor quality. Worse than surface measurements of the global average temperature.
The CC Relation can not be verified with these data.
Unfortunately, no scientists are willing to say “we don’t know”.
So far AH measurements show rising AH from 1980 to 2000 followed by a flat trend from 2000 to 2020, That adds up to confusion, with no conclusion possible.
As a result of inadequate measurements, the guesses of a water vapor positive feedback range from zero to 5.5x amplification of the small warming effect of CO2 alone. Which is the same as saying “we don’t know”.
There are at least two or three climate related feedbacks in addition to the claimed water vapor positive feedback caused by a warming atmosphere:
(1) More evaporation cooling Earth’s surface
(2) More upwelling radiation cooling our planet, per the Stefan–Boltzmann law,
(3) Global average changes in clouds … that have even less accurate data than global average absolute humidity.
When you add up all these unanswered climate change questions, blaming manmade CO2 emissions is the easy answer. I call that silly science.
Climate change (warmer winters) had been very pleasant until the leftists started lecturing us about global warming.
Correct. It is called convective instability and limits ocean temperature to a sustainable 30C with the present atmospheric mass. This is what regulates the energy uptake. The whole greenhouse fairy tale is for the true climate zealots.
Same process ensures the atmosphere can never achieve 100% humidity thereby creating permanent cloud that would descend into snowball conditions. As long as there is enough sunlight to get water surface to 15C, convective instability will kick in.
Snowball conditions throughout Earth’s history were the results of life over-consuming the atmosphere so the mass fell below the level required to cause convective instability.
Use of temperature as the measuring stick is flawed. The earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land, etc., are an energy system that is constantly trying and failing to achieve equilibrium.
What is confounding is water vapor as a positive feedback. For this to be true, water vapor needs to magically create energy, which is does not.
I have argued occasionally here that water vapor does not just occur as a consequence of the Clausius-Clapeyron eq. place to place, but rather has to be transported from the surface to the near-surface atmosphere where it is available; thence transported by atmospheric flows; and finally precipitated in various places by various means (orographic, storms, etc). Thus, it must be very dependent on transport mechanisms. Clausius-Clapeyron is an equilibrium thermodynamic relation, not a transport equation describing a specific process. Thus, what the authors say here seems very reasonable:
Yet this statement is not fleshed out fully enough for me to understand what they are saying:
How does consistency not observed in individual locations become significantly consistent when accumulated over larger regions? Perhaps I’ll go fetch some of the references. At any rate I think, based on what I have said about transport versus equilibrium relations, that the water vapor feedback is likely not as strong as people suppose and as they may have parameterized into modeling codes.
This is as silly as the notion of a “greenhouse effect” somehow altering Earth’s energy balance.
Most ocean heat is being retained at latitude 45S. It is a high precipitation region over water and a region of net radiation loss:
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So this is the region where precipitation has increased the most. But hard to measure because there is not much land at this latitude.
Earth’s energy balance is currently increasing because there is less cloud. The only places where cloud has increased is a small region of Antarctica and a narrow band just north of the equator:
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The net effect globally of cloud reduction is increased net radiation flux of 1.1W/m^2 globally.
The reason for less cloud is two fold – the precession cycle has been shifting peak solar intensity northward for 500 years now so the northern land masses are losing ice and reaching higher temperature, which means adjacent oceans are not transferring as much heat to land in summer so are also warming; incidentally causing an increase in atmospheric water. And the solar output has increased by 2W/m^2 since the quiet sun of 1600s with global impact for solar energy uptake.
Forget the “greenhouse” claptrap and start with real physics and real changes. Unless you have a theory that explains why there is less cloud apart from the two regions noted, you have nothing. And try explaining why increasing “greenhouse” gasses cause reduced cloud everywhere except the small region in Antarctica and all longitudes for just a few degrees north of the Equator.
Finally, May runoff in mid to high northern latitudes is increasing due to increase in winter snowfall and corresponding increase in melt. Autumn and winter sunlight in northern latitudes is declining thereby accelerating early season snowfall.
The graphs are very revealing. I recommend a north-south addition.
Never fear, researchers will soon be able to identify how much greenhouse games are emitted just from crop irrigation.
Soon, it won’t be safe to be a vegan either!
https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/05/colorado-researchers-new-data-greenhouse-gases-irrigation/
Deleted – unexpected result
After reading this, I am compelled to conclude that we must outlaw fuel cells. Won’t somebody think of the planet???
LOL. I said that over a decade ago.
What are the units Tt/yr?
‘The oceon is darker so absorbs more of the sun’s light’. Is this true? It looks darker unless you are in line with the sun when it is much brighter. The sea cannot be treated in same way as a uniform scattering medium Ike sand. Is this correct?
No. The ocean is darker due to optical depth, i.e., the depth light can penetrate before it is totally absorbed. Optical depth is akin to skin effect calculations used in radar.
The surface reflects light based, again on calculations similar to radar, and angle of incidence is a big factor in the amount of light reflected.
Simple experiment. A wall mirror and a flashlight on a tripod or other stand. Put the flashlight directly in front of the mirror. Bright reflection. Now put it at a 45 degree angle and move back in front of the mirror. While the bounce of the light is bright on the other side of the room, the glare when facing the mirror is much diminished.
The difference between the mirror and the ocean is the ocean allows light to penetrate to depth without being reflected when shining directly at the surface, but the light reflected off the surface is close to what the mirror does when the light source is at an angle.