From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Some Background
I will admit that the legal profession mystifies me. Every time I say anything related to environmental law, one or more lawyers will correct me. But I suppose “turnabout is fair play”, since I will usually correct any lawyers about their details describing climate change science.
Lawyers aren’t like us normal people. Their brains work differently. I first suspected this when one of my daughters took the LSAT and gave me examples of questions, most of which my brain was not wired to answer correctly. I became further convinced of this when she went to law school, and told me about the questions they deal with, how lawyers can impress judges just by being novel in their arguments, etc.
I know I could never be a lawyer (even after staying at a Holiday Inn Express), and I never even played one on TV. But I did co-author a paper in Energy Law Journal (relating to the Daubert Standard) on my view that science cannot demonstrate causation in any rigorous way in the theory of human-caused climate change.
Regulating CO2: Is the EPA Really Trying to Help Us?
The regulation of CO2 emissions (and some other chemicals) by the EPA has also mystified me. However many of the EPA’s ~185 lawyers worked on the 2009 Endangerment Finding, they must have known that regulating CO2 emissions from U.S. cars and light-duty trucks would have no measurable impact on global climate, including sea level rise (which was a major argument in Massachusetts v. EPA).
None.
But apparently actually trying to “fix” the climate “problem” is not the EPA’s concern.
Their reason for existence is to regulate pollutants (and it doesn’t matter if Nature produces far more of a “pollutant” than people produce). And once they start regulating it, they won’t stop with certain thresholds. They will keep lowering the threshold. This keeps everyone in jobs.
I know this is the case. I once attended a meeting of the Carolinas Air Pollution Control Association (CAPCA), and the keynote speaker (from the EPA) stated, “we can’t stop making things cleaner and cleaner”. There was a collective look of astonishment in the audience, which was primarily industry representatives who try to keep their companies in compliance with state and federal environmental regulations. I assumed their real-world experience told them it is impossible to make everything 100% clean (what would it cost to keep your home 100% clean?).
And we wouldn’t want to anyway because (as Ed Calabrese has explained in many published papers), it is necessary for resilience in biological systems to be exposed to stressors. I almost never get sick, which I attribute to a pretty filthy childhood of playing in heavily bacteria-contaminated waters, not washing my hands, etc. I was sick a lot then. But not later in life. This is why the EPA’s reliance on the “linear no threshold” assumption (simply put, if a gallon of something can kill you, then one molecule is also dangerous) has little to do with our real-world experience and common sense. Kind of like the legal profession.
So, is the EPA really trying to help us? I increasingly believe they are not. They are trying to keep their jobs (and grow even more jobs; coming from NASA, I know how that works). The law (and regulations) are tools to accomplish that. Yes, the EPA has accomplished needed pollution controls through the Clean Air Act. I’m old enough to remember driving through Gary, Indiana in the 1960s, trash lining the highways everywhere, waterways choked with pollution and even catching fire.
But at what point does the Government say, “OK, we fixed the problem. Good enough. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater with damaging over-regulation.” No, that doesn’t happen. Because of the perverse way in which environmental regulations are written.
So, EPA, What About Regulating Water Vapor Emissions?
The EPA regulating CO2 emissions has a few problems, which seem to have not stopped the legal profession from doing what they do best. As I mentioned above, U.S. CO2 emissions from cars and light-duty trucks will have no measurable impact on global temperatures or sea level rise.. You could get rid of them completely. No measurable effect, Yet, here we are… regulating.
Since these are “global” problems, it has long been known that the EPA (and maybe even the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision) could be on shaky ground, and maybe these are matters better left to legislation by the U.S. Congress.
But what about water vapor emissions from such vehicles? Now, there is a real possibility! Burning of any fuel (especially if we have hydrogen-powered vehicles) produces water vapor. And on a local basis (in your town or city) this extra water vapor will increase the heat index in the summer. And, and as everyone knows, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”.
That’s a local problem caused by local sources of pollution, and seems to be much better suited for regulation by the EPA, which is a U.S. agency, dealing with U.S. pollution concerns.
The climate scientists who publish papers about the supposed dangers of greenhouse gas emissions make sure to exclude water vapor from their concerns, claiming CO2 is the thermostat that controls climate. I have commented extensively on the sleight of hand before. The vast majority of climate scientists believe CO2 controls temperature, and then temperature controls water vapor. CO2 is the forcing, water vapor is the feedback. But this argument (as I have addressed for many years) is just circular reasoning. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (did I forget to mention it’s our main greenhouse gas?) is partially controlled by precipitation processes we don’t even understand yet. The climate modelers simply tune their models to remove water vapor (through precipitation processes) in an arbitrary and controlled way that has no basis in the underlying physics, which are not yet well understood. Often, these simplifying assumptions translate into assuming relative humidity always remains constant.
But I digress. What I’m talking about here isn’t regulating water vapor emissions for global climate concerns… it’s to reduce their impact on summertime heat, especially in cities.
But why stop at vehicle emissions? Humans exhale lots of water vapor (joggers even more!). Maybe we should limit jogging and the sale of bottled water? Not a big enough problem, you say? Or maybe that’s an FDA thing? I don’t know… I’m just a simple country climate scientist.
As attorney Jonathan Adler commented in response to my recent blog post on the Endangerment Finding,
The problem is, the concerns you raise are not relevant in making an endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act. The textual standard is precautionary and does not allow for any cost-benefit balancing or consideration of other trade offs. All that is required is that the EPA administrator can reasonably anticipate some threats from warming to health or welfare, the latter of which is defined quite broadly.
So, we are back to the regulatory fact that if a “pollutant” (whatever that means) causes any level of threat, discomfort, worry, anxiety, then the EPA is compelled to regulate it. How convenient. Well, I would argue water vapor emissions, especially in the summer in cities, are better suited to regulation under the Clean Air Act than CO2 emissions are.
So Why Hasn’t Water Vapor Been Regulated?
Clearly it’s not because water vapor is “necessary” to the functioning of the Earth system, since CO2 is necessary for life on Earth to exist. Which brings me back to my question, is the EPA really trying to help us when it comes to climate-related regulation?
I’m increasingly convinced that science has been hijacked in an effort to (among other motives) shake down the energy industry. This has been planned since the 1980s. It makes no difference that human flourishing depends upon energy sources which are abundant and affordable. It doesn’t matter how many people are killed in the process of Saving the Earth. The law demands regulation, and that’s all that matters.
I have evidence. In the early 1990s I was at the White House visiting Al Gore’s environmental advisor, Bob Watson, a ex-NASA stratospheric chemist who was just coming off the successful establishment of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. He told me (as close as I can recall), “We succeeded in regulating ozone-depleting chemicals, and carbon dioxide is next“.
Keep in mind this was in the early days of the IPCC, which was tasked to determine whether humans were changing the climate with greenhouse gas emissions. Their work was just getting started, including the scientists who would assist the process. But the regulatory goal had (wink, wink, nod, nod) already been established.
So, I don’t believe the EPA is actually trying to help Americans when it comes to climate regulation. I’m sure many of their programs (waste cleanup, helping with the Flint, MI water problem, and some others) are laudable and defensible.
But when it comes to regulation related to global climate (or even local climate, as the government tries to pack even more people into small spaces, e.g. with “15 minute cities“), my experience increasingly tells me no one in the political, policy, regulatory, legal, or environmental advocacy, side of this business really cares about the global climate. Otherwise, they would admit their regulation (unlike, say, regulating the precursors to ground-level ozone pollution in cities) will have no measurable impact. They wouldn’t be trying to pack people into urban environments which we know are 5-10 deg. F hotter than their rural surroundings.
It’s all just an excuse for more power and vested interests.
They don’t need any bright ideas.
Is the photo at the top a group of faux scientists registering new democrat voters?
“The vast majority of climate scientists believe….”
They are not scientists .
They are Suckologists !
Gotta keep a vacuum on that money tit .
This is an excellent point by Dr. Spencer. In the 2009 Endangerment Finding in the Federal Register, the matter of water vapor was specifically discussed and set aside as “negligible.”
“Water produced as a byproduct of combustion at low altitudes has a negligible contribution to climate change. The residence time of water vapor is very short (days) and the water content of the air in the long term is a function of temperature and partial pressure, with emissions playing no role.”
And in respect to water vapor more generally,
“A number of public comments question the exclusion of water vapor from the definition of air pollution because it is the most important greenhouse gas responsible for the natural, background greenhouse effect. The Administrator’s reasoning for excluding water vapor, was described in the Proposed Findings and is summarized here with additional information in Volume 10 of the Response to Comments document. First, climate change is being driven by the buildup in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases. The direct emissions primarily responsible for this are the six well-mixed greenhouse gases. Direct anthropogenic emissions of water vapor, in general, have a negligible effect and are thus not considered a primary driver of human-induced climate change. EPA plans to further evaluate the issues of emissions of water that are implicated in the formation of contrails and also changes in water vapor due to local irrigation. At this time, however, the findings of the IPCC state that the total forcing from these sources is small and that the level of understanding is low.”
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2009-12-15/pdf/E9-29537.pdf
Dear EPA, if you accept that the massive direct emissions of water vapor (e.g. from evaporative cooling systems) have a negligible effect in respect to warming, then you must also eventually realize that for the same reason – the heat engine operation of the atmosphere as its own working fluid – that emissions of the non-condensing gases such as CO2, CH4, N2O, etc. are also not capable of a harmful influence on “warming” or on any other trend of climate relevance. The “residence time” of sensible heat itself from the minor radiative effect of incremental CO2, CH4, N2O etc. cannot be longer than that of water vapor.
This is a good time again to post a link to this time-lapse video about energy conversion in the atmosphere to make the point.
https://youtu.be/hDurP-4gVrY
Surely you recognize that Dr. Spencer is being facetious and sarcastic and in the process he makes some very good points. All of which have been made here at WUWT many times over. Hmmm, well OK, maybe beating up on lawyers is a bit novel.
“Surely you recognize that Dr. Spencer is being facetious and sarcastic and in the process he makes some very good points.”
Yes, and in doing so he reminded me how self-contradictory the EPA “finding” was to begin with.
But “don’t call me Shirley.” 🙂
Oh, and I really liked his very good point (about regulating CO2, etc.) that “…science cannot demonstrate causation in any rigorous way in the theory of human-caused climate change.”
That got my attention, too. 🙂
Yes, me too. Although I think it probably could with real scientists, massive instrumentation arrays, and we already have big data.
For those familiar with Feldman et al. (2015), I would think something like 100,000 Feldmann et als, combined with thermometers, might get the data, but it most likely wouldn’t be the data that the alarmists were looking for.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14240
But not unreasonable.
David – “Direct anthropogenic emissions of water vapor, in general, have a negligible effect”
Maybe, maybe not. There is no minimum change to the inputs of a chaotic system which may result in absolutely unpredictable outcomes – for better or for worse.
Now some claim that CO2 produced by burning hydrocarbons affects the weather. Maybe they refuse to accept that the minimum products of burning hydrocarbons are CO2, H2O, and of course heat! So the proposition is that the “most important” GHG is less influential than its less important brother.
All three are necessary to sustain life.
The point is is that some people seem to believe that adding either CO2 or H2O to air makes the air hotter, where simple observation of places like Death Valley and the Lut desert show that supposition to be questionable, at the very least.
Nobody has ever managed to heat air by adding H2O, nor reduce its temperature by removing H2O.
In essence, the EPA gave water vapor a free pass because it condenses and precipitates out. However, basically, the water is replenished according to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, maintaining humidity through evaporation and transpiration as air masses move eastward.
What was overlooked is that dams for flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectric power have provided new sources of water vapor that didn’t previously exist in arid regions. Every new acre of corn and soy beans adds additional water vapor. New golf courses provide water vapor. Green spaces with grass and ponds that double as parks provide yet more water. Lastly, as the population grows and more cars are put into service, the available water vapor increases from the tail pipe emissions. Thus, just as CO2 increases as the population grows, so does water vapor. Water vapor has an effective infinite life span.
When my parents moved from Illinois to Phoenix in 1952, we were comfortable using an evaporative cooler for the house. When I lived in Phoenix in 1996, nobody used evaporative coolers because, with increased humidity, they were not as effective as formerly. People used to do their shopping at night, when it cooled down. Now it doesn’t really cool down like it used to. In August, my pool (another major contributor of water vapor along with ubiquitous misters in Phoenix) was about 104 degrees F because it was 85 deg F when the sun came up.
I formerly had an aunt and uncle who lived in Nebraska. They moved there in the late-1940s, before the expansion of pivotal irrigation. Anecdotally, they told me that when they first moved to Nebraska, if they made a glass of lemonade with ice, the glass did not sweat and develop beads of water on the outside like it does today. They attributed that to the pivotal irrigation.
EPA turned a blind eye to something that is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, yet is directly related to a growing population, just like CO2. Temperature is probably of less importance than population because humidity is limited by potentially available evapo-transpiration more than temperature.
Good points. I consider such local and regional effects to be plausible.
The UNFCCC and the IPCC are the effective equivalent of Nixon’s War on Cancer, which also relied on the Linear-No Threshold dogma, except with The Satanic Gasses, rather than “cancer causing chemicals”.
Any warming is a Bad Thing, as were any risk from those scary compound words that were never covered in the education requirements for a liberal arts degree. (I think most Greens find nothing funny about Penn and Teller’s mock petition to ban DiHydrogenMonOxide).
P&T’s petition was a classic jab at the vapid “Do something!” mentality of the activist herd. The signers never even asked a question. They just scribbled their assent proving once again that Pavlov was right.
In the climate cult, there is no real interest in putting numbers to things. It is simply the act of acting that satisfies the urge at the ringing of the bell. No amount of reason can overcome that instinct, I fear. Dr. Spencer might as well be speaking Klingon as far as they are concerned.
The lawyers, like bookies, get paid no matter what the outcome is.
klaatu nikto barada
They are rather robot-like.
It has been for decades like this: to have a proposal funded, research must save humanity from a major threat. The major threats added sequentially are 1) cancer in the 60s, 2) global warming in the 80s 3) terrorism in 2000s.
4) “misinformation / disinformation” in the 2020s
(trouble is – who gets to decide what is “misinformation / disinformation”}
Who guards the guards?
You left out ‘acid rain’ in the ’70s and ozone depletion in the ’90s.
Acid rain was and is a real problem to which engineering solutions are known. It requires enforcement or environmental regulations, not research.
Ozone depletion was a test case of global anthropogenic environmental scare that had all of the ingredients of the later duplicated in CO2 scare. However, it was short-lived and as a cash cow only benefited small group of scientists and one company – Dupont. It was an important precedent that showed academia and banking industry how a bogus hypothesis can be used to generate cash flows ending in their pockets.
Scare everybody and make everybody pay for saving from the scare.
Anyway, the difference between 1,2 and 3 is that
cancer is a real problem to which no permanent solution is possible but incremental improvements can be made
CAGW is a total scam
Terrorism threat is real, but the biggest terrorists are the most powerful states that pretend to fight it. And IMO, this topic kind of fizzled out, or perhaps partially replaced by AI mania.
Thank you, Dr. Spencer. May the truth set us free.
Have you noticed they are now calling CO2 “climate pollution?”
This could be self defeating and the EPA is the Environmental Protection Agency, not the Climate Protection Agency. CO2 is not classified as an environmental pollutant, just as a potential risk to health and welfare based on highly questionable claims it causes global warming and highly questionable conclusions that a slightly warmer planet is a risk to health and welfare.
It is a principle of government agencies to, once the stated mission is accomplished, find or make work so the agency’s existence is not threatened. The original charter of the EPA was to regulate environmental pollutions (such as smog). It accomplished that.
Having worked in government offices it was well understood that a person’s status and promotability was determined by the number of direct reports and the funding spend. It was also clear that all that mattered was spending the allocated funds. One did not have to get anything as a result so long as the funds were spent.
The EPA has transformed into a zombie organization with the goal (not unlike Return of the Living Dead’s ‘Need more brains’) need more funding.
I use highly questionable only to be politically correct. The miniscule amount of temperature increase by CO2 is in the low decimal places obscured by noise. The risks are shown to be contrary to the claims. Warmer saves lives. Warmer adds food. CO2 greens the planet.
Also greening the planet helps cool it. Ever sit under a tree in the summer to cool off in the shade?
the rejection of nuclear absolutely proves this. abundant nuclear would hurt the fossil fuel industry.
and the don’t want to seriously injure what they want to eventually own
Not really. Nuclear can address electricity needs which are only a fraction of total energy consumption. Hydrocarbons would still be the only viable option for transportable fuels for cars, heavy machinery, ships, planes, space rockets etc. Burning natural gas for direct heating of buildings is more efficient than electrical heating. Hydrocarbons are also indispensable source for chemical industry – fertilizers, polymers, etc.
“Hydrocarbons would still be the only viable option for transportable fuels for cars“
But if one built enough nuclear capacity, wouldn’t the price of electricity come down so far that electric space heating would be cheaper than natural gas?
It is not only the cost of electricity per se, but also the cost of its delivery. We would need to significantly increase the capacity of transmission lines, add a lot more transformers etc. Similar problems arise in converting all ICE car fleet to EV.
Resistive electrical heating converts 100 percent of the electrical energy into heat; heat pumps (if it’s not too cold outside) convert more than 100 percent of the electrical energy into heat. Efficiency of gas heating maxes out at about 95 percent. There’s always a bit of heat lost in the exhaust, which has to be vented to the outside
Perhaps you meant that gas heating is cheaper (which it is at today’s prices) but that’s a different argument. OK, it’s a more efficient use of money (sort of lets you off the hook)
That is not quite true. There can be substantial transmission loses that are proportional to the distance between the source and consumer. There are also issues of heating things that don’t need to be heated, such as the structure of the home, or parasitic loses such as running a humidifier to put water back into the heated air. What is of greatest concern is for the occupants of a building to be comfortable. That might be accomplished more effectively with radiant heating.
When calculating efficiency, the entire system has to be looked at, not just the end-use.
Money is the equivalent of the amount of human labor. The fact is cheaper is the proof it is more efficient.
i didn’t say kill, i said seriously hurt. And I see plenty of teslas all over the roads, even in WI. (and standing in line to charge after the solar eclipse, lol)
Excellent!
According to the IPCC AR6 WGI, p179, it is water vapor that is the most important greenhouse gas, responsible for 75% of the greenhouse effect: “Water vapour is the most abundant radiatively active gas, accounting for about 75% of the terrestrial greenhouse effect, but because its residence time in the atmosphere averages just 8–10 days, its atmospheric concentration is largely governed by temperature (van der Ent and Tuinenburg, 2017; Nieto and Gimeno, 2019).”
Source: https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6/wg1/IPCC_AR6_WGI_FullReport.pdf
Yearly emissions of water vapor: 544,000 Gt/year. More than half a million Gigaton. Same source: fig. 8.1, p. 1061 (Land + Ocean).
It’s time for the EPA to take action!
If that were true, the Summer relative humidity in the Basin and Range Province, in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, would be the most humid area in the country. Instead, the most humid areas are under the influence of the Gulf of America.
The Clausius-Clapeyron relationship establishes an upper-bound on how much water the atmosphere can hold. It doesn’t matter how hot it gets if there isn’t water vapor potentially available. Indeed the hottest places usually have the lowest humidity! It is usually evapotranspiration supplying the water vapor. But the lack of wind can suppress evaporation.
One of my more interesting life experiences was a July 4th (1968?) weekend spent camping on the North Fork of the American River near Auburn. It was probably about 120 deg F and myself, my wife, and my younger brother spent the entire day in the river trying to keep cool. Occasionally, a gust of wind would blow up the canyon and all three of us would start coughing. Apparently the wind would cause a flash evaporation of the water, increasing the relative humidity instantly, creating an environment not unlike a steam sauna.
Climatology is more complex than “What else can it be other than CO2” or “largely governed by temperature.”
Clyde, you are absolutely right, the availability of water and wind but also ‘convection’, all play a large role. But I think that because of this sentence “because its residence time in the atmosphere averages just 8–10 days, its atmospheric concentration is largely governed by temperature” the fact that water vapor is the main greenhouse gas slipped through IPCC’s “corrections”. Until AR6 the IPCC succeeded in NOT telling that water vapor is the main greenhouse gas and therefore (in case the greenhouse effect determines surface temperatures) ALL attention (or nearly all) should have gone to water vapor. On the contrary, up to now the IPCC knew how to avoid to tell politicians and media (through the especially for them written ‘Summary’s for Policymakers) about the main role of water vapor. Up to now, after some 36 years of IPCC reports and worldwide publicity, hardly any politician nor journalist and ‘no man in the street’ knows that water vapor is the main greenhouse gas and that all attention therefore should have gone to water vapor.
In this way they also avoided broader discussions about the immense roles of the water molecule: as oceans, as clouds and as water vapor, but also in the form of snow and sea-ice. A very smart strategy.
And why do I say ‘strategy’? Because, given the immense role of the water molecule in weather and climate, it is this molecule that should have been the first one to be discussed. And we find the water vapor molecule not where it should have been in the reports, at least not in the Summary’s for Policymakers that were specially written for policymakers! Because all the climate scare would have disappeared rapidly.
Water vapor is also the main cooler of the surface of the Earth. If the surface’s cooling system were included in the climate discussion, people should have discovered how Earth’s climate really works: by oceans, by clouds, by water vapor and by the temperature dependent phase changes of this most abundant molecule of the Earth’s surface, H2O. Phase changes of the molecule (from solid to fluid to gas and back) change functions, from local warming to local cooling and that is why no other molecule than the water molecule is able to regulate Earth’s surface temperatures the way it does.
Therefore any discussion about water had to be avoided.
Dr. Spencer, I’ve thought this exact point for years. Water vapor is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than life-giving Carbon Dioxide and both, of course, are necessary for life on this planet. I’ve always wondered about the emissions from Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in urban settings and their contribution to local weather effects if they ever challenged the predominance of gasoline and diesel fuels vehicles. Great minds think alike!
There would be no difference. ICE vehicles also emit water vapor.
How much per passenger mile?
Probably a little less, as ICE cars also emit CO2, but it should be the same order of magnitude.
A rough comparison for H2 and CH4 cars
2H2 +O2=> 2H2O enthalpy -286 kJ/mol, 0.00015 moles per mile
CH4 +2O2=> CO2+ 2H2O enthalpy -890 kJ/mol 0.001 mole per mile
Hydrogen 0.429 kJ/mile
CH4 0.89 kJ /mile
So, about twice less water emitted from a methane car.
We need cars that run on coal because they would have no emissions of that powerful H20 GHG !!
Sorry to disappoint you, but burning coal does release water vapor.
Coal is not pure carbon, a lot of hydrocarbons in it.
ok ok
build those cars to run in graphite and diamonds then
Something like two generations ago a long deceased good attorney friend told me that when the profession started advertising it would corrupt them. A little over a decade ago one told me if you work for one to get your money first. I heard another claim that one had to advertise to stay in business. Every profession seems now to be some degree ‘advertising’ which raises the questions of cause and effect and what can we do about it. It also seems new that some scientific papers have such but some maybe just bragging. My impact factor is better than your impact factor!
It is a good point that the EPA, among others, has to do important work and I more than suspect that the corruption is well understood by employees where it occurs. Old saying of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” like most is exaggerated but instructive. Some just like power but find it difficult to handle.
hdhoese,
In big picture thinking, the more advanced economies like US and Australia would suffer insignificant detriment if the EPA was completely dismantled.
Citizens and corporations have more than adequate desire for good environmental stewardship.
It might even benefit national economies to dissolve EPA, releasing employees for productive work that adds to national incomes. EPA does not enhance national income.
Geoff S
Ah … DiHydrogen Monoxide … the most dangerous substance on earth, implicated in many, many deaths annually through drownings, fall injuries, car accidents, plane crashes, ship sinkings and many more as well as being thee most prolific and powerful greenhouse gas by far. BAN IT NOW!
I made this very point a few days ago, noting that humans exhale water vapor and carbon dioxide. You, by merely existing, are a double offender. But the houseplants are gonna love it.😉
Recommended: Exclusive — Zeldin: EPA Working with DOJ, FBI on NGO Corruption After Eight Groups Tied to ‘Gold Bars’ Scheme *
… as directly relevant to “It’s all just an excuse for more power and vested interests.” — Dr Roy Spencer
How it works: Zeldin revealed that these agreements between the EPA and the NGOs prevent more oversight of these climate change groups’ spending. He said he if were to send the banks handling the climate spending a “notice of control,” it would allow the NGOs to then send their money to another bank, preventing oversight.
Link: *https://http://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/03/04/exclusive-zeldin-epa-working-with-doj-fbi-on-ngo-corruption-after-eight-groups-tied-to-gold-bars-scheme/
It would be great if Dr. Spencer would take on the Global Warming Potential numbers and the regulation of Methane and Nitrous Oxide. The insanity isn’t limited to just CO2.
What is the Global Warming Potential for water vapor? And why does it matter that is only lasts in the atmosphere for ~8 days, when more is being producedry second? Wouldn’t the concentration matter?
considering water vapor as a ghg, the concentration is the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.
I’m curious about the relative lack of attention paid to dealing with Urban Heat Islands. During the first year of the Governator administration in California, there was talk about using lighter color sealant for asphalt, lighter color roofing and more trees.
For me, t most impressive example of UHI was driving I-15 throgh Las Vegas, where air temperatures by “The Strip” are maybe 5ºF warmer than a few miles either side. This also shows up on the NWS gridded forecasts (at least some at NWS pay attention to reality).
At a guess, I would say additional sources of heat might be found on the Strip, as opposed to few miles away.
Maybe waste heat from massive air conditioning plants, continuously present motor vehicles, all energy consumption – lighting, gaming machines, etc. etc., plus the presence of humans (only about 100 W each, I know), could be involved?
The sunlight on both areas I’d presumably the same, and all the heat of the day is lost each night. Good absorbers are good emitters – both heating and cooling faster – so shouldn’t affect anything for more than 12 hours or so.
What’s your view?
Combination of A/C from buildings and more pavement.
Point for bring this up is that warming experienced urban dwellers is as muc from local warming as global warming.
Eric, I agree. It surprises me that some people (particularly those who believe that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter) pretend that increased local temperatures don’t affect national averages.
Of course they do. Unless there is equivalent cooling somewhere else, even the global average itself, must increase. Even a reasonably competent 12 year old can work that out.
“Climate scientists” are a strange lot.
If you pay people to find heresy they will find heresy even if they have to keep widening the definition of heresy in order to keep being paid.
Or just make up accusations. This is how a totalitarian repression system works. The investigators get paid for fulfilling a plan for catching enemies and also have career incentives to overfulfill the plan.
The best action is to REMOVE their funding.
They have spent hundreds of $billions to undercut every useful practice.
The FORMER administration was fully on-board.
Because water vapour precipitates out of the atmosphere in less than 2 weeks; whereas CO2 has an atmospheric residence time estimated at decades to centuries.
You’d think an atmospheric scientist would know that.
I have long been wondering who pays these trolls? Is it tax $$ shunted through NGO’s, or direct funding by globalist billionaire foundations, or is there really any difference between the two?
It can’t be that trolls are people so stupid as to waste their own time and money embarrassing themselves online. Can it?
Decades to centuries is not supported by science.
Mauna Loa seasonal variation measurements are proof of that.
So, when WV precipitates out, we shouldt have dry air? 😀
The residence time of CO2 being decades or centuries isn’t more than a wet dream of a certain class of “climate scientists”
And yet a crop can draw down the amount of CO2 above it from 500+ppm in morning, to 250ppm in just a few hours… (proven by a measurement study)
And there is also the fact that rain takes some of the CO2 with it, as carbonic acid.
Rain is slightly acidic.
That is true, but it also demonstrates a mechanism for removal of CO2 that brings into question the alarmist dogma about the longevity of CO2. Some studies have suggested 10-15 years for CO2.
True.
I have seen studies that have shorter residency times.
Can’t put an electronic tag on a molecule, so it will be difficult to test for this.
The atmosphere is never void of water vapor. WV is so potent that it gives us the “heat index”. WV has its own section in thermodynamics books. There is more WV in atmosphere by a factor of 10 or more than CO2.
‘Round-up’ breaks down in less than two weeks as well. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to go away. What matters is what it does when it is there.
If you are concerned (and believe it is happening) about catastrophic climate induced weather events, a water vapor concentration (that could be argued as short term) is just as scary as long term. Your CO2 hurricane is just as damaging as your water vapor hurricane (not that I think either are a reality, I simply point this out in reference to your hypocrisy/ignorance).
“Because water vapour precipitates out of the atmosphere in less than 2 weeks”
Does it then quickly return to the atmosphere if ambient temperature is above freezing? What is your experience?
I point out that CO2 is continuously removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis.
But hey, you might be one of those people who thinks that removing H2O from the atmosphere makes the air colder! Are you?
So you are claiming that 2 weeks after the primordial Earth became cool enough for rain to form, all the water vapor left the atmosphere and never returned. Right!
Why is it that people who defend the alarmist belief system demonstrate that they are incapable of thinking outside the confines of their personal paradigm? If you haven’t seen them, do a search for my other comments and learn why you are totally out to lunch with your remark.
Again, the EPA should have been disbanded after it achieved it’s initial goal of cleaning up the air. It has been nothing but expanding goals and bureaucracy since then. It is the epitome of “moving the goalposts.”
The war on fossil fuels started in the 1970s with the acid rain arguments, maybe before. Interestingly, with the removal of most acidic precursors in fossil fuel emissions, the acidity of rainfall has changed little. Maybe that was never the cause. Once that became obvious, climate change and global warming came into play.
Is true?: “the acidity of rainfall has changed little“
Last time I looked at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest records, that is what I saw. Hubbard Brook is the longest continuous record of rainfall chemistry in the US. Not that it is very long, only about 50 years at this point. Before that rainfall chemistry and acidity specifically were only sporadically measured.
The problem of ‘acid rain’ wasn’t the (weak) carbonic acid, but (strong) sulfuric acid from burning coal with iron sulfide (pyrite) and nitric/nitrous acids from very high temperature boilers and internal combustion engines.
As usul, Dr. Spencer is totally on target. As I have noted here before, the trend of total column water vapor over my Texas site was perfectly flat from 1990 to 2020. See my peer-reviewed BAMS paper here: A 30-Year Climatology (1990–2020) of Aerosol Optical Depth and Total Column Water Vapor and Ozone over Texas in: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Volume 103 Issue 1 (2022) As of 4 Feb 2025, I have 35 years of total column water vapor–and the trend remains flat. The Smithsonian APO measurements of total column water vapor at Table Mountain from 1926 to 1957 also yielded a flat trend. It is possible water vapor will increase somewhat for a decade or more due to the injection of substantial water vapor into the stratosphere by the historic underwater eruption of Hunga Tonga. The NASA AERONET robotic photometer in my field showed a slight increase the past two summers that is likely Hunga Tonga related. Full detail about my atmospheric measurements are in my recent memoir (“Maverick Scientist”).
Average global water vapor has been measured and reported by NASA/RSS since before Jan 1988. Their reports show that average global water vapor has been increasing about 1.4 % per decade.
I don’t doubt your measurements. However, I believe that if similar measurements were made in Phoenix from 1950 to today they would not be flat. Besides almost every middle-class home and above having a pool, when I last lived in Phoenix, there were something like 20 golf courses, and misters could be found at all the bus stops, gas stations, entrances to many stores, and many back-yard patios. The last time I drove across country I was surprised to see that the corn industry had expanded and they were terracing the hilly country so to expand acreage. It is difficult to believe that those areas haven’t seen an increase in total column water vapor. Because water vapor is capable of precipitating out, it is not a well-mixed gas like CO2. It has a lot of regional and temporal variation. Such is the nature of rain shadows and orographic precipitation.
Forrest is referring to Global Warming and you are referring to Local Warming. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the water vapor content a bit higher due to increased water usage – I would add that Palo Verde NGS is another source of water vapor.
OTOH, I do remember being in Phoenix in summer of ’74 the day after a summer thunderstorm and was impressed by the humidity
Ah, perhaps we can return to the good old days when water vapor was identified as responsible for 95% of the global temperature rather then the current 80% of the global temperature.
Remember, there is absolutely no aspect of your existence, from the moment you are conceived until long after you are dead that does not involve emitting carbon. Once the state exercises a right to control carbon as a pollutant, there is absolutely no aspect of your life that will be beyond their regulatory reach. That is why it’s all about CO2; to get the majority to acquiesce to being controlled and fascism to control the rest.
You will have nothing and you will be happy — because we told you to be happy.
The Clean Air Act defines particles in the air as pollutants. I anxiously await regulation of frisbees.
The world is cooling, and has been for some time. Snow totals for Northern Europe are off the scale, into record territory.
I put damn little stock in what lawyers have to say. Our justice system is a mess. Lawyers rarely speak to what is right or wrong rather what is legal or illegal. There are plenty of questionable laws on the books. The justice system doesn’t concern itself with whether we should have or keep a bad law they are only concerned with whether you broke it. My town is loaded with marijuana shops for both medical and recreational use. A decade or two ago you would be thrown in the pokey for possession. One day you’re okay the day before you would be a criminal. What lawyers or judges think of CO2 doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.