Relative Humidity has been Falling
Posted by jennifer, May 28th, 2009 - under News, Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
Correlation is not causation. But it is always exciting to see a good correlation between two variables that one assumes will correlate because of some theory or other.
According to the ‘Saturated Greenhouse Effect’, a controversial theory developed by Hungarian physicist Ferenc M. Miskolczi, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will result in a reduction in relative specific humidity.
According to data from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, relative humidity has been generally trending down, especially at higher elevations, since 1948.
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Notes and Links
The graph is from ‘The Saturated Greenhouse Effect’ by Ken Gregory, a June 2008 article published by The Friends of Science Society, http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/The_Saturated_Greenhouse_Effect.htm
Click on the above graph for a better/larger view.
Update, Thanks to Nick Stokes for his comment in the thread explaining that the Miskolcki theory only says there can be a reponse of decreased specific humidity in response to warming. A fall in relative humidity is nevertheless consistent with the Miskolczi’s law, but not with the current IPCC-sponsored paradigm.
Update, Following is the graph of specific humidity via Ken Gregory, also please read his comment in the thread that follows.
Larry I’m impressed. Of course you are right.
Why don’t you hang out at the reference frame anymore? If that’s too personal a question feel free to disregard.
Nick “And Jan, I don’t know where the sinusoid comes from.”
It’s not part of M’s theory but part of NS method of cherry picking the data to get desired but wrong results.
What happens to the average of a sinusoid if you calculate the average only over part of the cycle?
Bill Illis: But Specific Humidity is FLAT (except for the surface where it seems there is a small increase not really predicted in the models and for which Ken shows has no impact).
Bill, I can’t agree with that. The plot you showed here showed about a 0.4 g/kg increase at sea level (mine did too), That’s about 4%. And this plot from GISS ModelE (generated from here) shows about 400 ppmv there, which is the same.
Nick Stokes wrote: “I don’t like the Larry theory. If you look up solubility of CO2 in air, it’s about 0.5 kg/m3, or 500 ppm by mass. And you’re talking about a fractional increase in that.”
CO2 is INFINITELY soluble in air. I followed your link, and that section in the Wikipedia article does not apply here.
Nick also wrote: “Wouldn’t expand a raindrop by much.”
I was talking about a SMALL increase in the rate of droplet growth, in order to explain the SMALL decrease in absolute humidity in the mid to upper troposphere since 1948, in the face of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration. I was not talking about bigger raindrops.
Having a senior moment, are we?
Larry,
If you actually click the link to the table I pointed to, it is solubility of CO2 (or strictly, the equilibrium of CO2 related species) in water, at various partial pressures. And they have in bold the numbers corresponding to CO2 in air. Sorry if my shorthand caused confusion, but you only had to click.
And SMALL is the word, less than 0.05%. The variation (decrease and increase) in specific humidity is much larger.
Nick wrote:
“Sorry if my shorthand caused confusion, but you only had to click.
And SMALL is the word, less than 0.05%. The variation (decrease and increase) in specific humidity is much larger.”
Compare the two expressions: “solubility in air” and “solubility in water”. The former has 2 fewer characters than the former. That hardly qualifies as shorthand. The usage of the former expression appeared to reflect scientific illiteracy on your part.
I said that I clicked, and I actually did. Are you impugning my integrity?
Now I’ll put the monkey on your back. You’ve indicated that you don’t care for the Larry Theory. Fine. You obviously have a good reason. Please enlighten me. I request that you do one of two things:
1. Use the quantities in the table, together with reasonable explicitly-stated assumptions, and generally accepted physical chemistry principles, to calculate the small magnitude of the effect predicted by the Larry Theory. (Sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings, but a naked number in a table neither proves nor disproves the theory.)
2. Better still, get your hands dirty, do the bloody experiment, and publish the results in a reputable scientific journal.
Oh, that Larry; I enjoyed your dissection of Spencer’s “A Saturated Gassy Argument” all that time ago.
Nick, old chum, your links don’t work; but regardless, I think we all agree SH near the surface is increasing; from which 2 issues flow; firstly, by how much; and secondly that high SH is definitely not increasing, is at least flat and most likely decreasing; the point is that water has a different feedback depending on the level it is at; I still like Steve for under the [low] clouds along with Spencer and Braswell; and M and Lindzen above the [low] clouds.
Nick Stokes
I Googled it trictly and got the result ” No results found for “solubility of CO2 in air”".
This is because the phrase “solubility of CO2 in air” is a nonsense.
No wonder you AGW promoters get the science so screwed up.
Didn’t Nick just argue that trace amounts of atmospheric co2 are too tiny and inconsequential to affect climatalogical processes?
I’m pretty sure he debunked the ocean acidification theory also.
This is the thing about Larry’s Theory.
It’s insidious.
I’m going to pop some popcorn and hang out for a while.
cohenite wrote:
“Oh, that Larry; I enjoyed your dissection of Spencer’s “A Saturated Gassy Argument” all that time ago.”
I’d like to take credit, but I don’t remember that. Maybe you’re thinking of a different Larry. Someone else has scooped up the Larry franchise at WUWT. I’ve done one posting there, but as LarryF.
Here is the link LarryF; the guy here is LarryR; how many of you Larrys’ are there?
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lumidek/6529479513990054138/
Larry,
No, the phrase “solubility of CO2 in air” was shorthand for “solubility in water of CO2 at its concentration in air”.
And I did the arithmetic, and you have the result. Total those CO2 species and you have about 1.4E-5 moles/L. Multiply by 44 gm (MW of CO2) and you get, well, about 0.6 mg/L. 600 ppm (OK, I got 500 last time – mental arithmetic has an error range).
And that’s not saying CO2 can’t block IR, just that it doesn’t do much to bulk up raindrops (or make them grow faster).
And Louis, I googled trictly also without success.
The big story of the moment is the falsification of Steig et al by Ryan’O at WUWT and CA etc..
Interesting read today Jen.
Slowly the climate facts are being untangled from within the tangled mess that AGW politics has made of science.
One day they will look back on this period with great embarrassment.
“Slowly the climate facts are being untangled from within the tangled mess that AGW politics has made of science.
One day they will look back on this period with great embarrassment.”
JH, Ya can’t embarrass these people with facts!
When they can say that 315,000 people are currently dying yearly from AGW when there ain’t no AGW, facts are not a problem.
http://www.ghf-geneva.org/
Nick Stokes
“trictly” was a typing error – yours remains nonsense despite the specious retreat calling it “short hand”.
I keep forgetting that Post-modernists belive everything is relative and that “solubility of CO2 in air” is not what it explicitly means.
The fishing industry of north Queensland has been guttered….?
Gutted ???
Last post is supposed to be on another thread – and which explains the odd click-click the browser made just then. Sigh.
Nick Stokes,
I see that you mentioned Bolyai a few days ago. LIke Marcus, I wonder which one. Assuming Janos Bolyai, I would have thought that anyone familiar with his work, and that of Nicolai Lobachevsky, would be a convinced sceptic.
If Euclid did not have the last word on geometry, then ‘foundationalism’ is done for. I prefer Otto Neurath’s boat metaphor. We should all accept that repairs to our knowledge are always necessary, and a squall can quickly make our boat turn turtle.
Do you see ‘climate science’ as an eternal pyramid, built on rock steady foundations, or more like a cockleshell with a line squall approaching? In other words, are you a ‘true believer’, or a ‘sceptic’? Perhaps somewhere in between?
Hey, wait a minute, that sounds a bit PoMo…
No, GD, this analogy doesn’t work. Euclid’s boat didn’t turn turtle. People use his geometry all the time. It works. Non-U is still exotic.
Climate science is just people working out stuff. They’ve found out a lot – some of that will turn out to be only part of the story. What’s pretty solid is that 2 W/m2 extra heat retained from our GHG. That will have consequences. Sceptics don’t usually grapple with that.
“What’s pretty solid is that 2 W/m2 extra heat retained from our GHG. That will have consequences. Sceptics don’t usually grapple with that.”
Nick, that is so right but if GHGs were increasing where it really matters would not that extra energy have shown up as undeniable, measurable evidence by now?
Nick,
I didn’t say Euclid turned turtle – you concocted that rather obvious strawman. Euclid is afloat and highly useable. He was, however, only partly right, in that there is far more to geometry than he, or his disciples, realised. It ain’t what we know that we don’t know, but what we don’t know that we don’t know. Geometry was not ‘settled’ by Euclid, and may not have been settled by Bolyai, Lobachevsky, Riemann etc. So I beware when I hear, in climate debate, that the ‘science is settled’. That seems philosophically immature to me.
I still suspect that current ‘climate science’ is a cockleshell, with a line squall approaching, but that is only my opinion, based on seaweed and a wet finger in the air. We must all be careful about predicting the future. As I’ve pointed out before, fortune telling is illegal in some jurisdictions.
SD,
The climate has warmed, which is what you’d expect. Folks here argue about whether the temperature record proves the AGW case. I contend that the radiative case has always been primary. It could be undermined by a prolonged failure of warming, but that hasn’t happened. The temperature record may or may not be sufficient on its own to establish the case, but it reinforces it.
Nick Stokes,
What compelling nonsense your write – “the climate has warmed” can only be quantified by measuring temperature, which you then assert may, or may not, be sufficient on it’s own. How else could you possibly know the climate has warmed apart from noting the temperature.
What, from the belief that increased CO2 will cause increased radiation to the Earth’s surface, if I interpret it correctly?
That’s the theory but the measurements show otherwise, which you then counter by suggesting it could be “undermined by a prolonged failure of warming”, and that puts your argument fairly into the camp of pseudoscience as defined by Irving Langmuire.
The problem is that AGW proponents treat the climate system as an isolated gas/water one coating an inert sphere in a vacuum. This model might have been appropriate in the days of Newton and steam engines, but these days we have discovered that the Earth isn’t an inert sphere but a highly active one, especially in the EM domain where at last 10,000 different solar modes have been documented affecting almost everything on the surface of the Earth.
Furthermore there is an increasing body of scientific data linking internal Earth processes to the solar factor, and others not fully understood.
Increased CO2 in the atmosphere is an effect, not a cause of warming.
Louis,
I find your mention of ‘internal Earth processes’ intriguing. I have a vague memory of reading about currents within the Earth’s molten core. Would these be partly laminar, partly turbulent? Does the moon’s gravity affect them? (This could be directly, or by pressure created by piling up tidal water on one side of the Earth.)
As I understand it, our Australian climate is strongly influenced by both El Nino, and the Indian Ocean Dipole. Both of these are warm plumes of water originating somewhere around Indonesia, which is, of course, highly volcanic.
Do you have any views on this? Might it be outside the field of vision of those concentrating on the atmosphere?
2 w/m2 is ~ 1.5C; if the increase in GHGs has produced this where is it? This is before you exclude solar and ENSO contributions to temperature trends; I frankly can’t understand Nick’s comment about the primacy of radiative effects when there is no consequence to them.
Nick Stokes,
you are big on radiative physics. Maybe you can explain it to me.
CO2 absorbs IR which apparently raises the excitation of the electrons. The emission does not happen except at particular quantum levels so the molecule may end up with extra energy for a period of time due to missing the level for emission. During this period the molecule colliding with another molecule can transfer some of this energy heating the other molecule.
(please clarify if I garbled this too much)
What I wonder about is why a molecule colliding with the CO2 does not transfer some of its energy to the CO2 molecule???? That is, why is this a one way street?? Why can not CO2 receive energy in collisions which it then emits???
Why is this process, depending on specific local conditions, not a simple transfer mechanism that averages out temps???
Of course, I have been doing a little looking for empirical data on this process. I haven’t turned up much yet. There is some old research that states that CO2 does NOT thermalise IR, so would not go the other way. The stuff I have read on CO2 Lasers does not make it clear that the heating comes from the IR or from the pumping process itself. Maybe you can point me to experiments showing the thermalisation of IR by CO2???
Kuhnkat,
I think your query is about gas physics. There there is nothing special about GHG molecules. All energies etc conform to a statistical Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. It is distributed by collisional transfer, and this is not one-way.
The statement of local thermodynamic equilibrium just says that this happens very fast – faster than anything else you will be considering. In particular, faster molecules re-emit received radiation. So when a GHG molecule absorbs a photon, the energy is quickly redistributed. But the same goes the other way. When GHG molecules emit IR, it’s because their chance collisions with other molecules have put them into an energetic state (within the M-B distribution). It’s not because the individual emitting GHG have previously absorbed a photon.
An important consequence is that air containing GHG emits only because of its temperature, not because of IR absorbed. Of course, absorption of IR is usually the heat source that allows it to emit while maintaining its temperature, but it isn’t part of the emission mechanism.
The original experiments on the thermalisation of IR by CO2 were done by Tyndall in the 1860′s. I don’t know if he actually measured the temp rise, but he showed the IR was absorbed, so the gas must heat by conservation of energy.
Nick,
Thank you. So, CO2 cools AND heats surrounding gas.
I notice I DID garble it earlier. I keep confusing electron energy levels with molecular bond flex in CO2.
Yes. And by “faster molecules…” I meant to say “faster than molecules…”