Monday, February 01, 2010

Clarification on that water vapor story

The role of stratospheric water vapor in global warming

Yet again, John Cook does a clear and enlightening post on that "less water vapour in the stratosphere" story I posted about below. Bottom line:

There seem to be two major misconceptions arising from this paper. The first is that this paper demonstrates that water vapor is the major driver of global temperatures. In fact, what this paper shows is the effect from stratospheric water vapor contributes a fraction of the temperature change imposed from man-made greenhouse gases. While the stratospheric water vapor is not insignificant, it's hardly the dominant driver of climate being portrayed by some blogs.

The other misinterpretation is that this paper proves negative feedback that cancels out global warming. As we've just seen, the magnitude of the effect is small compared to the overall global warming trend.

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