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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (187818)	5/31/2006 5:25:51 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

This has been known for a very long time, and was one of the major objections to the early proposal that CO2 might influence global temps. Well, having to admit that I'm rather new to the global warming discussion (only having started looking at it in the past couple of years), I have to admit that in ALL OF THE UPROAR, NO ONE I'VE READ HAS PROPOSED EFFORTS TO REDUCE WATER VAPOR EMISSIONS. Have you?? So yeah.. I'm a bit surprised by those stats. I also came across an article by one of the scientists mentioned in the Washington Post article, Dr. Lindzen This is what he has to say about the impact of water vapor versus CO2 on global warming. The entire article bears studied reading, IMO (even if you might disagree with his premise): The crude idea in the common popular presentation of the greenhouse effect is that the atmosphere is transparent to sunlight (apart from the very significant reflectivity of both clouds and the surface), which heats the Earth's surface. The surface offsets that heating by radiating in the infrared. The infrared radiation increases with increasing surface temperature, and the temperature adjusts until balance is achieved. If the atmosphere were also transparent to infrared radiation, the infrared radiation produced by an average surface temperature of minus eighteen degrees centigrade would balance the incoming solar radiation (less that amount reflected back to space by clouds). The atmosphere is not transparent in the infrared, however. So the Earth must heat up somewhat more to deliver the same flux of infrared radiation to space. That is what is called the greenhouse effect. The fact that the Earth's average surface temperature is fifteen degrees centigrade rather than minus eighteen degrees centigrade is attributed to that effect. The main absorbers of infrared in the atmosphere are water vapor and clouds. Even if all other greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) were to disappear, we would still be left with over 98 percent of the current greenhouse effect. Nevertheless, it is presumed that increases in carbon dioxide and other minor greenhouse gases will lead to significant increases in temperature. As we have seen, carbon dioxide is increasing. So are other minor greenhouse gases. A widely held but questionable contention is that those increases will continue along the path they have followed for the past century. cato.org I find that rather disturbing. Even if all the CO2 and Methane were removed from the atmosphere, 98% of the current greenhouse effect would continue. And another article that was published last year dealing with discussion over water vapor levels. news.bbc.co.uk Hawk