"Climate change" rumblings. I'm doing this once, but it makes a strong point.
The movie from NASA of CO2 going up 20 ppm over 8 years.
vox.com
It's so fancy and colorful. It must be dramatic! What is the radiative impact of 20 ppm CO2 over 8 years? Well, let's compare a fuji apple to a honeycrisp apple.
Water, or H2O, is a bent triatomic molecule and traps infrared radiation better than CO2. I live in Florida, so I'm picking the last 2 METAR codes of the day yesterday (Nov-19-2014) at the airport...middle of the night, 1 hour apart. If one was honest, you wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference between the 2 observations.
METAR KMCO 200353Z 35008KT 10SM FEW250 09/08 A3029 RMK AO2 SLP257 T00940078
METAR KMCO 200453Z 35008KT 10SM FEW250 09/07 A3028 RMK AO2 SLP253 T00940072 401610050
At 10:53 pm EST, it was 48.9F with dewpoint of 46F and raw pressure of 30.29 inHg = 1025.7 hPa.
At 11:53 pm EST, it was 48.9F with dewpoint of 45F and raw pressure of 30.28 inHg = 1025.4 hPa.
Brrr, that's cold for Florida. Not much change, eh? Let's compute water vapor as a percentage of the air for these 2 times.
I use this website to compute specific humidity.
ringbell.co.uk
Basic chemistry conversions: mole conversions, where air = 28.96 g/mole and H2O = 18 g/mole + conversion of units, where 1e+6 is to parts per million, and 1e+3 is to balance specific humidity.
10:53 pm EST: 6.5 g H20/kg air * 28.96/18 * 1e+6/1e+3 = 10,457 ppm H2O.
11:53 pm EST: 6.2 g H20/kg air * 28.96/18 * 1e+6/1e+3 = 9,975 ppm H2O.
So in one hour, the concentration of water vapor decreased 482 ppm. That's 24 times the amount in one hour than in 8 years shown in the movie above! Geez. During summer in Florida, we see H2O concentrations of 35,000 - 40,000 ppm of H2O. |
