NOAA, NASA: Water Vapor Largely Answerable For Global Warming

An increase in atmospheric water vapor is answerable for at least a 3rd of the average temperature increase since in the early hours 1990s, say scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Susan Soloman, the valued climate scientist who led the research, says that this finding doesn’t destabilize man-made global warming theories. "Not to my mind it doesn't," she added. Susan Soloman did point at that the research does allude to human emissions having a much smaller role in climate change than earlier thought, and serves as a caveat to climate modelers who "over-interpret the results from a few years one way or another." In spite of Soloman's personally held belief, the NOAA study is expected to give further ammunition to climate skeptics working to draw public attentiveness to perceived flaws in man-made global warming theories.

Susan Soloman, in interviews with both the Associated Press (AP) and The Guardian, refused to comment on the negative publicity climate science has received lately due to the IPCC Himalaya error and Climategate, and to what the NOAA water vapor report might mean to skeptics and climate scientists alike. Susan Soloman did mention that lots of scientists are now accepting, testing, and sometimes embracing skeptic research and that the NOAA report is evidence of that. "What I’ll say is that this shows there are climate scientists around the world who are trying very hard to understand and to explain to people openly and honestly what has happened in the last decade." Susan Soloman co-chaired the last climate change assessment report prepared by the United Nations IPCC, but did not personally supervise the controversial Himalayan section.

Susan Soloman said it was not clear if the drier atmosphere, which the NOAA report says is the reason global warming fell flat over the last decade, is a natural process or came to be owed to human emissions. If the latter is true, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would really be responsible for a negative feedback that cancels at least a few of the warming it causes by pushing water vapor towards the surface of the earth and out of the stratosphere, where it acts as a potent greenhouse gas. According to the report, a 10 percent decrease in atmospheric water vapor and no-one else was responsible for a 25 percent drop in predicted temperature increase.

NASA Confirms Water Vapor Study

NASA researchers as well as climate scientists all over the world have reviewed the NOAA water vapor research beforehand to its recent publication in the journal Science, one of the most respected in the world. Describing the consequence of water vapor on atmospheric temperature as "enormous," researcher Mr. Andrew Dessler said that "everyone agrees that if you add carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, then warming will result. The real question is how much warming?" A Texas A&M researcher functioning in conjunction with NASA, Andrew Dessler pointed out that warmer air can contain higher amounts of water vapor, which might create a runaway optimistic feedback cycle.

The research, facilitated by a state-of-the-art NASA satellite codenamed AIRS, put forward that water vapor is responsible for twice the global warming effect of carbon dioxide (CO2), both man-made and naturally occurring. Whilst this theory was has been carried by climate change skeptics for a short time, global warming advocates dismissed them, saying that water vapor in the atmosphere was just a feedback effect caused by human emissions. NASA scientist Mr. Eric Fetzer says that the new study created models much more accurate to past events than those previously used by climate change advocates, also proves that "water vapor is the big player in the atmosphere as far as climate is concerned."