Posted on 10/10/2015 3:26:57 AM PDT by Patriot777
This was a fun thread; thanks for posting!
LOL!
The times when Twinkie has burritos for dinner; she is accused (understandably) of being a “methane based life form”. :o)
Pound for pound, Methane is the most powerful greenhouse gas, then CO2. However, water vapor, because there is so much more of it in the atmosphere, has an overwhelmingly more powerful effect.
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Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many 'facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110308203927/http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
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So, greenhouse [effect] is all about carbon dioxide, right?
Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds [clouds of course aren't gas, but high level ones do act to trap heat from escaping, while low-lying cumulus clouds tend to reflect sunlight and thereby help cool the planet -etl]. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere.
In simple terms the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total tropospheric greenhouse effect (e.g., Freidenreich and Ramaswamy, 'Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models,' Journal of Geophysical Research 98 (1993):7255-7264).
The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other 'minor greenhouse gases.' As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100317023946/http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse
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Water Vapor Confirmed As Major Player In Climate Change
ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2008) — Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.
Di-Hydrogen Oxide.
“Oh, my God! Ban it!”
I like a splash of it with bourbon.
And you know the sort of things fish do in the water?
And you know the sort of things fish do in the water?
The fact that the hydrogen atoms have a fairly strong positive charge and the oxygen is a strong negative. If the molecule were linear, the hydrogens would create a double-positive (positive on both ends) and there would be no clear negative. But with the "bend" in the arrangement, the oxygen serves as the negative pole and the hydrogens as the positive, giving the molecule its polarity and its power as a solvent, its freezing characteristics, and its relatively high boiling point. It also ionizes completely, which is critical to the transport of nutrients into and out of living cells.
Three simple atoms, and the most elegant of substances.
Random chance? I don't think so.
The next question would be, what gives the atoms their particular charges?
He did not specifically say "element", either.
Syntax is not the important issue; content is!
“He did not specifically say “element”, either. Syntax is not the important issue; content is!”
As I indicated he SPECIFICALLY said substance. Unless you think Helium isn’t a substance your argument is gratuitous.
Sorry, I read neither your ScreenName nor the comment on your About page before starting this discussion.
Have a nice evening.
That 104 degree angle is just right, suspiciously so. Nobody really understands why it is that value. It gets explained as due to something called the van der Waals force, an emergent phenomenon of QM due to, well, nobody knows. The force gets handwaved as ‘correlations in the fluctuating polarizations of nearby particles’ (Wikipedia).
We can model the van der Waals force and measure it, but nobody really understands how it emerges from QM (in the sense of being able to derive it from first principles). Basically it just exists. And so we have the womderful magic molecule that is called H2O.
No water, no water-based life.
That we can’t imagine a non-water based life form has nothing to do with whether or not they could exist.
Nothing that I haven't done, in the water.
LOL! (Well sort of.)
I got sidetracked one night watching videos of the Ganges River. Used as both a holy burial site AND for taking a bath. Pretty disgusting watching kids playing in the water with rotten corpses floating past or half up on shore.
I was helping my daughter with her Biology. I never knew all the stuff about water - pretty amazing with the Hydrogen bond, but then it had some other stuff going on that made it special.
IIRC water is the only thing where the solid is less dense than the liquid form. I imagine life on earth would be a lot different if every time a freshwater pond/lake froze the ice would sink to the bottom.
Oceans too, at least at higher latitudes. Water is such a great heat sink that is not only buffers temperature swings between winter and summer, it also serves to move heat from the tropics to higher latitudes. England is about the same latitude as Jame's Bay, an extension of Hudson's Bay in far northern Canada. Without the Gulf Steam bringing heat from the Caribbean, England's climate would be similar.
Also, the Earth is closer to the Sun during the Northern Hemisphere's Winter. This points the Southern Hemisphere, which is mostly ocean, toward the Sun. The greater solar gain at this time is stored in the oceans, further moderating Earth's climate.
"Someone" did a magnificent job of designing both Water and the Earth!
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