Water vapour could be behind warming slowdown - Mysterious changes in the stratosphere may...

Nature News ^ | 28 January 2010 | Jeff Tollefson

[neverdem]

Mysterious changes in the stratosphere may have offset greenhouse effect.

A loss of water vapour from the Earth's stratosphere may have been behind the last decade being cooler than expected.NASA

A puzzling drop in the amount of water vapour high in the Earth's atmosphere is now on the list of possible culprits causing average global temperatures to flatten out over the past decade, despite ever-increasing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Although the decade spanning 2000 to 2009 ranks as the warmest on record, average temperatures largely levelled off following two decades of rapid increases. Researchers have previously eyed everything from the Sun and oceans to random variability in order to explain the pause, which sceptics have claimed shows that climate models are unreliable.

Now a team led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado, report that a mysterious 10% drop in water vapour in the stratosphere — the atmospheric layer that sits 10-50 kilometres above Earth's surface — since 2000 could have offset the expected warming due to greenhouse gases by roughly 25%. Just as intriguingly, their model suggests that an increase in stratospheric water vapour might have boosted earlier warming by about 30% in the 1980s and 1990s. The team's work is published online by Science today¹.

The effect on temperature is dominated by water vapour in the lower part of the stratosphere, which absorbs and radiates heat in much the same way as water molecules and other greenhouse gases do in the lower atmosphere. The drop in water vapour doesn't explain the entire decrease in the rate of warming, but it could contribute to it, says Susan Solomon, first author of the study and a NOAA scientist who co-chaired the...

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Walkingfeather]

Ha peer review? He had enough of his ideas stolen from him ie marconi. Supreme Court ruled in the 60s that tesla had indeed invented not only radio but remote control vehicles. Marconi still gets the undue credit.
Tesla had personality disorders no doubt, but his genius is unrivaled, maybe Archimedes, Di Vinci.

Read some books about him, you will withdraw your statement.

[melsec]

You have a terrific way of seeing and expressing things - both humorous and enlightening. I really enjoyed trying to work out your post.

Cheers

Mel

[thulldud]

Read some books about him, you will withdraw your statement.

Have read 'em. So what? Which statement am I supposed to be withdrawing? Did I say that he WASN'T a towering genius?

And if you are looking for an example of a stolen idea, forget Marconi, consider the dynamo redesign that Tesla did for Edison. That was definitely a dirty job by the "Wizard of Menlo Park". He quit Edison over that one.

[rwfromkansas]

Maybe mother nature is able to largely protect herself.