Thursday, January 19, 2006

Europe has a case of the vapours!

As if we needed anything else to provide further confusion (not clarification) on the issue of global warming, comes this BBC report that concludes much of the warming experienced in Europe is due to increased "water vapour" in the atmosphere. (We just love the way they spell vapor.)

The water vapour absorbs solar heat from Mr. Sun, then radiates it down to earth in longwave fashion, kinda like we wish our shower would work during cold weather (but it doesn't because the drafty bathroom air currents move all the water vapour to the mirror where instead of radiating the heat longwave fashion outward, it gets absorbed by the mirror, which doesn't need it in the least. But we digress.)

It's like much of Europe is a sauna.

Where is the water vapour coming from? Well, there's one heckuva lotta water on this planet, and rising temps mean more evaporation. Sometimes it just gets distributed and doesn't precipitate like it should. (Here in Oklahoma we suspect a Trilateralist plot to use jet-driven aerosols with secret chemical contaminants to send the water vapours over Europe, thus we get no rain, and things are burning up, literally, one grassy acre and the occasional house or barn at a time. Why the Trilateralists hate us is beyond our ability to fathom, but they obviously do. So we're thinking seriously about hating them back. But we digress again.)

We deduce there's not a lot that mere human beings can do to curb the water vapour problem.

Because human activities change its concentrations very little, it is generally not mentioned in discussions of modern-day greenhouse warming.

But climate scientists have been aware for decades that mechanisms involving water vapour could amplify temperature increases, and have attempted to model these effects in computer simulations.

Researchers sceptical about projections of human-induced climate change base their criticism partly on what they see as flawed simulations of water vapour and clouds.

The article says the flawed simulations probably won't be changed because in the big picture temps are going up, and that's what a goodly number of scientists have thought would happen all along. (That's scientific methodology for you.)

Right now science just isn't doing it for those of us with vapours but no rain. So we are going to revert to our primitive flexes and start praying for precipitation.

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