Our Watery Earth Responds to Warming with Increased Water Cooling -- Water is the Enemy of AGW

The claim that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to catastrophic warming is based on the UN IPCC claim that back-radiation from carbon dioxide absorption of infra-red radiation warms the Earth's surface.  This results in increased water vapor in the atmosphere and that causes an even greater increase in the temperature than did the increased carbon dioxide.  Even the gigantically exaggerated warming by the carbon dioxide back-radiation effect (see here and here) requires the proponents of this alarmist hypothesis to conjure up a much stronger positive feedback warming due to increased water vapor in order to create anything even remotely "catastrophic."

It has very long been known that higher humidity causes a reduction in the atmospheric lapse rate (the temperature gradient) and therefore a reduction in the surface temperature.  There is also a strong cooling of surfaces when water evaporates due to the very high latent heat of evaporation of water.  These are facts that have long been well-known, but which are greatly played down by the proponents of the wild and woolly scare story of catastrophic man-made global warming or AGW.  These are certainly very strong negative feedbacks to any warming of the Earth's surface due to any cause, whether increased solar radiation or a hypothetical increase in back-radiation due to increased carbon dioxide.

But what is the effect of clouds formed by increased water vapor due to a hypothetical warming of the surface due to increased carbon dioxide or due to any actual warming?  Magnus Cederlof examined the CERES satellite cloud cover data to see how it correlates with the yearly variation in global irradiance.  He also examined the separate data sets for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.  The data he presents is very informative, though he presents it in an article with a number of serious errors in it.  One of the more serious errors is his claim that his data provides strong evidence that the Svensmark theory of solar effects on the cosmic ray nucleation of clouds is correct.  These errors aside, his plots of cloud cover versus solar radiation are extremely useful.

The data generally shown on cloud cover for the entire globe seems to provide a difficult to interpret effect, but one that implies there is no simple correlation between solar radiation and cloud cover.

The data for the entire globe, with the solar insolation given in blue [the units are W/m2, not kWh/m2] and the percentage of cloud cover averaged from 2000 to 2014 given in red, is:

Note that solar irradiance is actually greatest in the winter, with January being the month of maximum irradiance.  This is because the Earth's orbit is elliptical and the Earth is closest to the sun on about 3 January (orbital perihelion) and furthest on about 4 July (orbital aphelion).  If the Earth's axis of daily rotation were parallel to the axis of its orbit about the sun, January would be summer for the entire Earth.  But in January, the axis of the daily rotation of the Earth in the Northern Hemisphere is tilted to point away from the sun.  This reduces the fraction of the total Earth-incident solar radiation which is incident on the Northern Hemisphere.  Because the tilt of the Earth's axis of daily rotation has such a large effect, it should be interesting to plot the cloud cover versus solar insolation data for each hemisphere separately.  This is just what Magnus Cederlof did.  The data for the Northern Hemisphere [correcting the radiation units to W/m2] is:

The greater the solar irradiance of the Northern Hemisphere in the plot above, the greater the cloud cover.

The data plotted by Magnus Cederlof for the Southern Hemisphere correcting the irradiance units to W/m2]:

It is now clear that as the Earth warms in either hemisphere, there is a reaction by water to that warming to cause an increase in hemispherical cloud cover.

Magnus Cederlof then correctly makes the critical point that one feedback response of water to an increase in Earth temperature is an increase in cloud cover, which cools the surface.  Thus, increased temperature is counteracted by a negative feedback by clouds and not the positive feedback proclaimed with great certainty by the falsely claimed "settled science of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming."

So there we have it.  When the Earth's surface temperature rises, water causes three powerful negative feedbacks to reduce that temperature rise.  These are:

• Cooling by the evaporation of water, which increases water vapor in the atmosphere.
• Increased water vapor reduces the lapse rate in the troposphere, dropping temperatures in the lower atmosphere.
• Cloud cover increases, preventing solar radiation from reaching the Earth's surface and warming it.

In conclusion, as I have shown over and over, the warming effects of carbon dioxide were always exaggerated hugely.  The cooling effects of carbon dioxide have been ignored, though those are now the dominant effects.  Even if one bought the argument made by the UN IPCC, the greatly exaggerated warming effect of carbon dioxide had to be supplemented by a much larger claimed warming feedback by water vapor to be even remotely scary.  Much of that claim has been well-known to be false for a long time and now we see very clearly that each of the principal effects of water in response to any surface temperature increase is a cooling effect.  Water is a powerful stabilizer for the surface temperature of the Earth.  It moderates night to day variations, seasonal variations, solar irradiance variations, and would moderate any hypothetical temperature increase caused by atmospheric CO2.

It is mind-boggling that the U.S. government has spent about $100 billion on climate and climate effect research and development in the name of such incredibly wrongheaded science.  The United Nations and most of the European nations have also acted on this "science" house of cards in a similar manner.  The cost of doing business and the cost of living for hundreds of millions have been sadly boosted in the name of this nonsense.  Millions of people have either lost their jobs or were prevented from getting the jobs that might have been created.  Terrible wrongs and harms have been perpetrated on billions of human beings both by preventing them from enjoying their individual freedoms and by decreasing their material living conditions.  The benefits to humans throughout the world that would have accrued had millions of people used their time more productively and had capital been more rationally invested have been trashed.  Instead, governments enjoyed exercising more power over individuals.  Dishonest politicians, some dishonest businessmen, and some dishonest scientists enriched themselves by taking advantage of this baseless scare.  The vast majority of mankind has nothing to show for it but losses.

Earth Surface Cooled from 1982 to 2006 According to Satellite Data

As is now generally known, there has been no warming of the Earth's surface since 1998 at least.  Prior to that time, we were informed that there had been a rapid warming of the Earth's surface and that it was caused by increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere due to man using fossil fuels.  The 2007 IPCC 4th Report still insisted that for 25 years the Earth had been warming.  A newly published study using satellite temperature sensing specifically for detecting the Earth's surface temperature and minimizing that of the atmosphere above the surface, shows that the Earth's surface, contrary to reports, actually cooled from 1982 to 2006!

The paper is entitled Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend 1982-2006 by Andries Rosema, Steven Foppes, and Joost van der Woerd and was published in Energy & Environment, Vol. 24, No. 3 & 4 2013.  They were very surprised to find the cooling trend they reported.

Earlier satellite data analyses, originated by investigators at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, used microwave sensors to infer the temperature from microwave emissions from oxygen molecules.  Microwaves of different energies originated from various layers of the atmosphere.  One set of data originated from an altitude of about 17 km.  Another at an altitude of about 3 - 4 km.  Then by looking at data taken at oblique angles of incidence, they inferred a temperature from an altitude of about 0.8 km.  However, none of this data actually the Earth's surface temperature.  Initially, this data on the lower atmosphere had shown a small cooling effect, but after many corrections were applied, the data yielded an increase of temperature of about 0.1 C/decade in the troposphere.  The troposphere is the bottom about 10 to 11 km of the atmosphere and its temperature is not at all necessarily in direct proportion to the surface temperature.  Indeed, increased cloud cover, water vapor, and CO2 in the atmosphere may cause an increase in the troposphere temperature even as it cools the surface temperature.

The Rosema, Foppes, and van der Woerd study used the infra-red radiation at 10.5 to 12.5 micrometers wavelength to directly measure the surface temperature of the Earth.  The copy of the paper incorrectly says mm instead of micrometers.  This infra-red radiation is in the mid-infra-red part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but close to the beginning of the far infra-red.  The atmosphere is highly transparent at these wavelengths, provided there are no clouds.  There is a minor effect due to water, but none due to CO2.  The minor water absorption does add a small temperature component from the lower atmosphere to the larger component directly from the Earth's surface.  This is nonetheless a huge improvement over the oxygen emission microwave emissions which have no surface component at all.  The effects of clouds were filtered out of the data.  The daily planetary temperature was approximated as the average of noon and midnight temperatures.

Such satellite measurements are critically important.  The land surface temperature record is highly contaminated by urban heat island effects and by the bad sites chosen for weather station measurements.  Very mysterious and undocumented changes to the raw data have been made to various time period sets of data.  See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for instance.  The authors of this study note that 10% of their own country, the Netherlands, is now hardened surface.  Changes to ground cover, vegetation, or water surface coverage do have local effects on the surface temperature.

Indeed, they point to data for the area of the confluence of the Euphrat and Tigris Rivers in SE Iraq which showed a sudden warming when Saddam Hussein drained the extensive marshes there.  With less water in this warm area, less evaporative cooling occurred and water vapor absorbed less incoming solar insolation up in the atmosphere, so the average temperature increased.  They found another small area with warming in NW Tanzania.  There, they believe that major mining increases led to a decrease in vegetation and then a reduction in evapotranspiration.  The loss of that cooling caused surface temperatures to increase.  They also noted a cooling effect near Lake Chad and Lake Nasser in their data which they attribute to the growing size of those lakes.

From 1982 to 2006, an ocean location west of France showed a temperature decrease of 0.78 C/decade.  A location west of Senegal in the Atlantic showed a temperature decrease of 0.48 C/decade, which is less a decrease because of ocean upwelling in this area.  More generally, they report that the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and Europe show a negative surface temperature trend from zero to 2 C/decade.  They observed that the greatest temperature decreases were in regions with greater cloud cover.  In particular, the temperature decrease over desert areas was smaller.

Increased cloud cover is correlated with increased humidity of the air.  More water vapor and more clouds both result in a lower surface temperature.  While it is harder to separate out the effect of CO2 from the overwhelming effects of water vapor, increased atmospheric CO2 probably will also increase the cooling of the surface, as I have argued.  In any case, the IPCC claim that a small surface temperature increase due to added CO2 will cause a much larger temperature increase due to more water vapor, is absolutely and clearly nonsense.

Water, Not CO2, Controls Earth IR Emissions

The catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have produced the temperature record shown below and claimed that the reason for the temperature increase since the mid-1970s is an increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere due to man's use of fossil fuels. 

Of course, we also know that the short-wave solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface over the period of 1983 to 2001 was increasing due to an active sunspot period.  This solar radiation plot is given below:

Despite the increase in solar irradiance during these years of increased global temperatures, it is commonly claimed by the CO2 greenhouse gas advocates to be too small an effect to account for the claimed observed temperature rise. They claim the major contributor to the warming is increased CO2, which decreases the cooling of the Earth by decreasing the amount of energy radiated out into space as outgoing long-wave IR radiation.  Here is a plot of the outgoing IR long-wave radiation from 1948 to 2009:

Ordinarily, one expects the outgoing long-wave IR radiation to be proportional to the incoming solar short-wave radiation.  From about 1979 to 2009, the outgoing long-wave radiation was increasing, as was the incoming solar radiation.  But from 1948 to 1975, the average temperature was flat according to the first graph above.  This suggests that the incoming solar short-wave radiation was not greatly increasing in that time-frame.  Contrary to that, the period from 1948 to the mid-1970s shows a big increase in the outgoing long-wave IR radiation, especially between 1950 and 1966.  No big increase in incoming solar radiation and increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere should preclude such a large increase in outgoing long-wave radiation if the standard CO2-induced catastrophic warming hypothesis were correct.  The increasing CO2 concentrations should be causing the outgoing long-wave radiation to decrease as CO2 molecules re-emit half of the long-wave radiation they absorbed back toward the Earth's surface.  Increased concentrations of CO2 in the upper atmosphere, where radiative cooling dominates over convective processes, should allow the very energetically excited CO2 molecule which has absorbed incoming short wave radiation from the sun to efficiently re-emit that short-wave energy back into space.  Still more mysterious in terms of this CO2 hypothesis is the sudden jump in outgoing long-wave radiation from 1976 to 1981!  Basically, the overall strong increase in outgoing long-wave IR radiation from 1950 to 2009 should correspond to a major decrease in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.  There was no such decrease, but was instead a steady increase in CO2 concentrations, at least according to the data popularly presented by the advocates of catastrophic CO2-induced warming.

So, the low concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere do not account for the temperature record constructed by the advocates of a strong CO2 warming effect.  What phenomena are then causing both the increased outgoing long-wave IR radiation and the broadly rising temperature?  For one thing, during the same period from 1983 to 2009 that the incoming solar radiation was increasing as shown above, the global cloud cover was decreasing.  This is consistent with the theory of Henrik Svensmark that when the Sun has an increase in solar activity, the sun projects its electromagnetic field further and that protects the Earth more from cosmic rays.  The decreased flux of cosmic rays is said to allow for the nucleation of fewer clouds, consistent with the decreased cloud cover in the plot below as the Earth warmed in its last warming cycle.

But, it turns out that this is not the only effect affecting global temperatures.  The following graphs show the atmospheric humidity at various pressures, which drop as the altitude increases.  I will also give an altitude, which is that of the U.S. Standard Atmosphere of 1976, for which the sea level temperature was 288.15 K or 15 C.  The time history of the humidity at 1000 mbar (1 bar) pressure or sea level is:

As the temperature has increased since the mid-1970s, the sea level humidity has increased.  This is expected.  Increased temperature causes increased water evaporation from the oceans and land.  This also causes a counterbalancing cooling effect since it takes a huge amount of energy to cause water to warm up and still more to cause the phase change into a gas as water vapor.

At the atmospheric pressure of 925 mbar, or about 750 meters altitude, the history of water vapor is shown in the following graph:

The humidity at this altitude may be said to have fallen from the 1950s a bit, then held steady from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.  After the mid-1990s, the concentration of water vapor increased.  The increase at this altitude lagged that at sea level by about two decades.  At this altitude, cooling of the Earth's near surface is dominated by convection processes and molecular collisions.  The historical trend is very different when we examine the humidity record at 600 mbar (4170 meters) as shown below:

Basically, the humidity fell from 1948 to the mid-1960s at this higher altitude and then has remained pretty steady ever since.  Energy transfer at this altitude is dominated by IR radiation.  The story at the pressure of 400 mbar or about 7200 meters altitude shows a steady decline from 1948 to 2009:

Thus, we see that at the higher altitudes, where radiative cooling dominates, water vapor has become rather less common in the upper atmosphere.  As I have previously discussed, the effect of either CO2 or water vapor on temperatures at the Earth's surface depends both on their absorption of incoming short-wave radiation and on outgoing long-wave radiation.  Increased IR-absorbing gases, often called greenhouse gases, cause the absorption of more of the sun's incoming radiation well above sea level.  This has a cooling effect upon the Earth's surface.  An increase in water vapor, the primary IR-absorbing gas, in the higher altitudes of the last two graphs would have a considerable cooling effect on the Earth at sea level.  The IR radiation absorbed by water vapor molecules would be very quickly and effectively radiated back into space. Conversely, the observed decrease in water vapor in these higher altitudes means more solar radiation reaches the ground or that part of the atmosphere where convection dominates as the mechanism for transferring energy.  Because convection moves energy into the upper atmosphere where it can be effectively radiated out into space rather slowly, increased solar energy absorbed in the lower atmosphere or at the ground level lingers longer. 

We see that the history of lower water vapor in the upper atmosphere is consistent with global warming, while increased CO2 is not.  This lowered humidity of the upper altitudes combines with the increased incoming solar radiation and the decreased cloud cover to cause an increase in the amount of solar energy reaching the ground and sea level.  The result is warming of the Earth's surface.  Furthermore, the absorption of more solar radiation at sea level results in more long-wave IR radiation into space since the added energy delivered to the surface is partitioned among many molecules very quickly due to the very short mean free path length in the dense atmosphere near the ground and the many molecular collisions to divide that energy among many gas molecules, especially the most prevalent nitrogen and oxygen molecules. The smaller energy per molecule means they emit at longer wavelength, so outgoing long-wave IR radiation increases.  Back in 1950, with higher humidity at higher altitudes, water molecules absorbed large amounts of energy and simply re-emitted that shorter wavelength radiation since at those altitudes the time between collisions is greater.  The so-called greenhouse effect of CO2 is clearly not a major factor, being inconsistent with the data discussed above.  This is consistent with many other arguments made on this blog that the catastrophic man-made CO2 emissions hypothesis is a failed hypothesis.

Given that socialists and Progressives have strongly advocated this hypothesis for many years and seen to it that climate change research was focused on the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 for many years with tens of billions of dollars of funding, it is incredible that so many fatal problems with this hypothesis have been documented.  It is a wonder to behold that so much contradictory data has not long since caused this hypothesis to be abandoned in failure.  It has become impossible to believe that the explanation for the continued backing for this hypothesis and the many claims that it is accepted science has any basis but a religious adherence to its usefulness to socialist elitists, radical environmentalists, and some crony businesses.

The data used was borrowed from a talk by Dr. Ir. Noor van Andel, the former head of research at Akzo Nobel, to the Dutch Meteorological Institute KNMI.  The arguments I have used differ somewhat from his and they are simpler.  Compared to his talk, this presentation is nearly free of climate jargon.